Psychology says people who grew up poor in the 1960s and 70s develop a specific relationship to waste - they can't throw away a half-used candle or a rubber band or a piece of foil, not from habit, but because their nervous system still treats abundance as temporar - Silicon Canals

"Research published in PNAS by Kim, Evans, and colleagues used longitudinal fMRI data to examine what childhood poverty does to the adult brain. They found that adults who grew up with lower family income at age nine showed reduced prefrontal cortex activity and a failure to suppress amygdala activation during effortful emotion regulation at age twenty-four."

"The researchers described this as 'neural embedding': the brain's stress-response architecture is literally shaped by early financial deprivation. Chronic exposure to stressors associated with growing up poor produces lasting changes to the neural systems responsible for regulating emotion and managing threat."

"What the research describes isn't a preference or a quirk. It's a threat-detection system that was calibrated by scarcity. And once calibrated, it doesn't recalibrate just because the bank account changes."

Growing up in poverty significantly impacts brain function, particularly in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. Research indicates that adults who experienced low family income in childhood exhibit reduced brain activity related to emotion regulation. This neural embedding results from chronic stressors associated with poverty, creating a threat-detection system that remains active regardless of later financial stability. Behaviors such as saving plastic bags and other items reflect a deeply ingrained response to scarcity, not mere disorganization or hoarding.

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