Growing up poor can actually damage your brain. That makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, since poverty sucks: Poverty can create a turbulent climate marked by chronic stress. Poverty can mean living in crowded, noisy environments, and worrying about where that next meal will come from. It can mean perpetually feeling somehow less equal than your peers. It can mean living with parents who are always stressed out, too. And all that stress, scientists have discovered, can have a permanent effect on the brain's ability to process and deal with emotions.

Being impoverished, in other words, may actually rewire the brains of those who have the misfortune to be born poor. This is a doubly important finding in our era of unchecked income inequality, where the poverty rate is actually rising in the US despite economic gains for the rich.

Coming of age in poverty may lead to permanent dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala—which, according to the researchers, "has been associated with mood disorders including depression, anxiety, impulsive aggression and substance abuse."

In the study, Phan's team examined forty-nine 24-year-olds, half of which had been surrounded by the "chronic stressors" of poverty since age nine. They mapped the parts of the brain in charge of regulating emotion, and found that those who'd grown up poor showed greater activity in the amygdala, the region in the brain "known for its role in fear and other negative emotions." They showed less activity than their peers in the prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotional behavior.