THE BENEFITS OF A BILINGUAL BRAIN

It is well-known that if you know more than one language certain things can be easier, like, travelling, watching movies without subtitles, looking for a job, meeting new people.

However there are other advantages in having a bilingual brain which often go unnoticed, I’m referring in particolar to the benefits for the brain.

Knowing two or more languages means that your brain may actually look and work differently compared to a monolingual brain.

A psycholinguist Ellen Bizlystok from the York University in Toronto has made surprising discoveries comparing a monolingual and a bilingual population. The results revealed that Bilingual showed sympoms of Alzheimer’s four to five years after monolingual suffering from the same pathology.

Scientists think that this is because bilingualism rewires the brain and improve the executive system, boosting people’s “cognitive reserve”. It means that as a part of the brain succumbs to damage, bilinguals can compensate more easily.

Could it be that the human brain has evolved to be multilingual,  and, who speaks just one language is not exploiting his full potential?

That probably is just a stretch, but all of these things should lead to think how learning a language is important for our future and also for our health.

Arico’ Alberto 4 A CM