Your Neighborhood, Your Brain

Here's an interactive map that can predict what is happening in people's brains.

It shows, by Zip code, the distribution of poverty and wealth across the United States.

When people live in wealthier communities, they tend to do better. When people live in poverty, they get trauma. Trauma degrades mental function. People have trouble thinking (they lose executive function); they have trouble managing emotions; their relationships are disrupted; and they tend to operate on missing or outdated information.

In this era of globalization, money (and the lack of it) has a kind of gravity. The poor clump together, the rich clump together, poverty and wealth get concentrated, and there is less movement of people from one extreme to another.

The map is a product of the Economic Innovation Group.