And also being poor dumbs you down real hard. When you have to worry about your food and don’t have steady sources of mood uplift, when your existence is just daily peppered by stress, your brain goes into power saving survival mode, not allowing you the luxury of deep perception, introspection or longer attention span, and most importantly, curiosity. By stress I mean such mundane things like your parents (or much more often your now single parent) being seemingly unhappy, or wearing the same old clothes and not being able to buy new ones. Why trying to learn anything if it’s just another chore in a life that sucks?