Abuse stunts one part of the young mind, says a new study.
These changes are permanent. His team took hundreds of brain scans from children who had been admitted to the hospital after suffering neglect, physical or sexual abuse and compared them with scans of young people who had not suffered anything similar. They found that in the children who had been neglected or abused, the corpus callosum , the bundle of nerves that links the two hemispheres of the brain and act as the main information pathway between them, was up to 40 per cent smaller than average. An underdeveloped corpus callosum inhibits communication between one hemisphere and the other, the researchers claimed. As a result children could end up 'residing' in one hemisphere rather than moving rapidly and easily from one to the other, as is usual.