According to one popular theory, being determines consciousness, and neuroscientists and psychologists have found a number of circumstantial evidence of this, studying the differences in brain function in rich and poor.
One of the most compelling studies of differences in brain function across socioeconomic backgrounds was written by neuroscientists at the University of Arizona, led by Michael Varnum, in 2015. Varnum and his colleagues gathered 58 people and gave them questionnaires asking about family income, parental education, participants' own income, and the like. Then all the participants were shown cleverly composed pictures: they showed neutral objects and people's faces, sometimes emotionally neutral, and sometimes with expressions of intense emotion or physical pain. The researchers hoped that the participants in the experiment would not realize that they were being tested for their ability to empathize, so they asked people to focus on neutral objects, and not on faces distorted with pain.
The participants in the experiment looked at all these pictures while sitting in a chair with an EEG cap on their heads; The electrodes connected to the cap recorded and transmitted data on the bioelectric activity of the brain to the scientists' monitors. For many people, the sight of faces distorted by suffering caused a significant change in the electrical rhythms of the brain. It is impossible to say exactly what changed in the work of the brain, but the difference was obvious.
It was later found that there is a relationship between the economic situation of the participants and the strength of the reaction to emotionally saturated images: the less well-off participants in the experiment showed more active changes than the relatively wealthy (according to their own estimates) people. And this is despite the fact that those who are richer, in the questionnaire opposite the column "responsiveness" put "above average".
The next year, Varnum and his colleagues went further and decided to measure the difference in the activity of the mirror neuron system in the poor and the rich. Among neuroscientists, a popular theory is about mirror neurons - special brain cells that are responsible for empathy, that is, the ability to empathize. According to some studies on monkeys and humans, the sight of other members of their species doing some business or experiencing certain emotions excites neurons in the brain that lead the observer's brain to a state similar to the state of the observed brain. For example, when the person being looked at raises their hand, mirror neurons activate the regions of the motor cortex that are responsible for raising the hand of the person who is looking.
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An indirect indicator of the activity of mirror neurons can be the suppression of mu rhythms - bioelectrical signals that can be recorded using the same EEG. Varnum obtained results suggesting that mu rhythms are suppressed more actively in poor people than in representatives of wealthier segments of the population, which means that their mirror neurons react more sharply.
Another study was a bit more complex and consisted of three experiments. In the first, people on the streets of New York were given Google Glass glasses and asked to take a walk, fixing their gaze on what attracted the most attention. Coarsely, the result can be formulated as follows: people with low income spent more time looking at other people, while people with high income preferred to stop their gaze at other objects. In the second experiment, participants were shown photographs of different cities - and the poorer people spent more time exploring them than the rich. In the third experiment, people were shown rapidly changing pictures of human faces and other objects - and representatives of the poorer segments of the population responded more quickly to new stimuli.
All these results lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations. It is difficult to judge what the increased electrical activity of the brain indicates when viewing emotionally colored images. The theory of mirror neurons has been actively criticized in recent years by leading neuroscientists, claiming that the results are, of course, amazing, but what to do with them is a big question that will remain unanswered for many years to come. The results of the latest study may suggest that less well-off people are more attentive to others than those with higher incomes … But why? A vulgar interpreter might say that the poor man has to watch other people more closely, or that the rich man can afford to ignore others. It seems that money still changes the perception of the world around us - but we do not yet know how.
