Is being bilingual good for you brain? | BBC Ideas

[Music] it used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing that it would confuse or hold people back especially children turns out we couldn't have been more wrong learning new languages is an exercise of the mind it's the mental equivalent of going to a gym every [Music] day in the bilingual brain all our languages are active all at the same time the continue effort of suppressing a language when speaking another along with a mental challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages exercises our brain it improves our concentration problem solving memory and in

turn our creativity it's now widely accepted that there are huge benefits to being bilingual a key breakthrough came back in 2007 in Toronto when Ellen B alisto and her team made a discovery that shook the scientific community and has massive real world implications it was the first study which suggested that bilingual people people who speak more than one language develop dementia four to 4 and a half years later than those who don't it was a powerful confirmation of the idea of cognitive Reserve now what is cognitive Reserve cognitive Reserve is the idea that people develop

a reserve of thinking abilities and this protects them against losses that can occur through aging and disease as well as delaying the onset of dementia bilingual people have been shown to recover significantly better after a stroke learning anything new helps build cognitive Reserve but there's something special about language language is particularly Broad and complex it affects ideas and Concepts perception different sounds the more complex certain skill is the more likely it is to have a positive effect on cognitive Reserve so when is the best time to learn a new language well here's part of the

answer the brain is a complex set of new networks when you're learning a new language as a child you're building new [Music] networks but when you learn a language later in life you have to modify the existing networks and make more connections because learning languages later in life can be more challenging the benefits can also be greater but a 2023 study at Great Orman Street suggests this is just part of the story so we invited three groups of children that were aged 8 to 10 and we had a group of children who were monolingual a

group of children who had early exposure to Greek and English from birth they were our early bilinguals and finally we had a group who had been exposed to English between the ages of 2 and five and they were our later bilinguals so what we did that no one had done before is that we asked the children to line the scanner while doing nothing and just staring at a cross and during this we measured their brain activity so what we found that was really exciting for us is that our early bilingual group had the strongest connectivity

in a network at rest and these group of regions are regions that light up when we're doing nothing and just mind wandering a little bit like if you're going to the gym every day your muscles might look bigger at rest where similarly your brain might be better connected at rest because you are learning a language early and this is something no one had found before and there's more one lesser known behavioral effect of bilingualism in both children and adults is the ability to see the other people's perspective or to understand that it is possible to

have different points of view recent Studies have also found that people tend to react more emotionally in their first language and more rational in a more abstract way in the second and the way it is usually explained is that the first language is the one which we use to speak with family with friends in informal settings the second language is usually learned at school at the University at work scientists are discovering new upsides to be in bilingual all the time and it's not just our brains that benefit learning new languages and speaking more than one

language is very important not only for individuals but also for societies learning new languages can open doors to new cultural experiences life opportunities different people different communities and different ways of seeing the world and with that we'll say a [Music] final goodbye bye poil vow