The benefits of a bilingual brain

In truth, having multiple languages can have a significant impact on your brain and cognitive abilities. Let's explore deeper into what it means to know a language and how it can affect your brain.

Language proficiency is usually measured across four skills: speaking, writing, listening, and reading. Each of these skills involves different cognitive operations and abilities.

Speaking involves producing language and requires the coordination of various cognitive functions, such as selecting words, forming grammatically correct sentences, and pronouncing words accurately.

Writing involves similar cognitive processes as speaking but adds the challenge of translating your thoughts into written form. It requires an understanding of grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Understanding spoken language requires quickly processing auditory input, recognizing phonetic patterns, and comprehending the meaning of words and sentences in real-time.

Reading involves visual processing of written language, recognizing letters and words, understanding sentence structure, and comprehending the meaning of the text.

When you know multiple languages, your brain has to immediately switch between them, activating different neural pathways. This can lead to several cognitive benefits:

Enhanced Cognitive Control: Bilingual individuals often show better cognitive control, including skills like problem-solving, task-switching, and selective attention. They are adept at managing interference from one language while using another.

Increased Grey Matter: Studies have shown that bilingualism can lead to increased gray matter density in certain brain regions, particularly those associated with language processing and executive functions.

Delayed Cognitive Aging: Bilingualism has been linked to delayed onset of cognitive decline and diseases like Alzheimer's. The cognitive demands of managing multiple languages seem to create a cognitive reserve that helps protect against age-related decline.

Ensured Multitasking: Bilingual individuals may have a simpler time switching between tasks, as they constantly switch between languages, training their brains to manage multiple cognitive operations simultaneously.

Most bilingual individuals don't use their languages in perfectly equal proportions. Depending on their environment, context, and personal preferences, they might be more proficient in one language over the other. This can lead to a phenomenon called "code-switching," where individuals switch between languages within a single conversation or even a sentence.

Knowing a language involves a complex interplay of cognitive skills across speaking, writing, listening, and reading. Bilingualism can shape the brain's structure and function, leading to cognitive advantages and differences compared to monolingual individuals. The actual level of proficiency and language usage can vary widely among bilinguals, influenced by their life experiences and environment.

For example, let's take Gabriella, whose family refugee to the US from Peru when she was two years old. As a compound bilingual, Gabriella develops two linguistic codes simultaneously, with a single set of concepts, learning both English and Spanish as she begins to process the world around her. Her teenage brother, on the other hand, might be a coordinate bilingual, working with two sets of concepts, learning English in school, while continuing to speak Spanish at home and with friends. Finally, Gabriella's parents are likely to be subordinate bilinguals who learn a secondary language by filtering it through their primary language. Because all types of bilingual people can become fully proficient in a language regardless of accent or pronunciation, the difference may not be apparent to a casual observer. However recent advances in brain imaging technology have given neurolinguists a glimpse into how specific aspects of language learning affect the bilingual brain. It's well known that the brain's left hemisphere is more dominant and analytical in logical processes, while the right hemisphere is more active in emotional and social ones, though this is a matter of degree, not an absolute split. The fact that language involves both types of functions while lateralization develops gradually with age, has led to the critical period hypothesis. According to this theory, children learn languages more easily because the plasticity of their developing brains lets them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, language is lateralized to one hemisphere, usually the left. If this is true, learning a language in childhood may give you a more holistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts. Conversely, recent research showed that people who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in the second language than in their native one. But regardless of when you acquire additional languages, being multilingual gives your brain some remarkable advantages. Some of these are even visible, such as a higher density of the grey matter that contains most of your brain's neurons, and synapses, and more active in certain regions when engaging in a second language. The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases, like Alzheimer's and dementia by as much as five years. The idea of major cognitive benefits to bilingualism may seem intuitive now, but it would have surprised earlier experts. Before the 1960s, bilingualism was considered a handicap that slowed a child's development by forcing them to spend too much energy distinguishing between languages, a view based largely on flawed studies. While a more recent study did show that reaction times and errors increase for some bilingual students in cross-language tests, it also showed that the effort and attention needed to switch between languages triggered more activity in, and potentially strengthened, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that plays a large role in executive function, problem-solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information. So, while bilingualism may not necessarily make you smarter, it does make your brain more healthy, complex, and actively engaged, and even if you didn't have the good fortune of learning a second language as a child, it's never too late to do yourself a favor and make the linguistic leap from, "Hello," to, "Hola," "Bonjour" or "你好’s" because when it comes to our brains a little exercise can go a long way.