If 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 day.
In the bilingual brain, all our languages are active, all at the same time should be tihor.
The continual effort of suppressing a language when speaking another, along with a mental challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages, exercises, etc.
It improves our concentration, problem solving, memory, and in turn our creativity.
It's now widely accepted that there are huge benefits to be in bilingual.
A key breakthrough came back in 2007 in Toronto.
When Ellen Bialestock and her team made a discovery that shook the scientific world.
community and has massive real-world implications.
It was the first study which suggested that bilingual people who speak more than one language
developed dementia four to four 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 have been shown to recover significantly better after a stroke.
Learning 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 it The certain 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 neural networks.
When you're learning a new language as a network,
child you're building new networks but when you learn a language later in life you have to modify the existing networks and make more connections.
Because learning languages lead you in life can be more challenging, the benefits can also be greater.
But a 2023 study at Great Ormond Street suggests this is just part of the story.
So we invited three groups of children, that were 8 to 10, and we had a group of children who were monolinguals.
A group of children who had early exposure to Greek and English from birth, they early bilinguals.
And finally we had a group who had been exposed to English between the age of two and five, and they were later bilinguals.
So what we did that no one had done before is that we asked the children to lie in the out across.
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 the 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,
you're 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.
One lesser known behavioral effect of bilingualism in both children and adults is the
ability 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 rationally in a more abstract way in the second.
And the way Today 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 different communities and different ways of seeing the world and with that we'll say a final good bye Cloud.
