Marilyn Brookwood
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Marilyn Brookwood

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After serving as a counselor and psychologist helping adolescents, Marilyn Brookwood entered Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Education program to study the emerging science of early and adolescent brain development. There, she explored the downstream impacts of social, intellectual, and economic environments on the developing brain. At that time she also came upon a little-known history of Great Depression-era orphans who suffered intelligence declines while living in a destitute, unstimulating, and emotionally barren Iowa institution. When they were provided with persistent stimulation and affectionate care the children regained their intelligence. The discovery that environment influences intelligence might have revolutionized psychology but instead, it was spurned by the field’s eugenicist leaders, most of whom held classist and racist views. A brutal attack against Iowa’s research led to decades of disdain for the Iowa psychologists’ discoveries. Even after recent neuroscientific confirmation of Iowa’s landmark work, society continues to shortchange its disadvantaged children. The Iowa story, Brookwood recognized, had to be told.

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