Community Violence Is Toxic to the Growing Brain

Written on 23-10-2018

How does the stress of witnessing community violence—seeing beatings, shootings, drug use, and so on—affect a child’s growing brain? In a pilot study, psychologist Darby Saxbe and her team took a look at long-term effects on the brain, and found that certain structures—notably, the hippocampus and the amygdala—were smaller in 17-year-olds who had witnessed community violence when they were younger.

Find out why on https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/08/20/does-living-around-violence-change-a-childs-brain/