New studies are bolstering an idea many language enthusiasts have believed for some time. The more languages you learn, the younger your brain seems as you age. Researchers observing patterns of brain activity in residents of the Basque region of Spain discovered that those who were multilingual had brain connectivity that appeared to be much youngersometimes over a decade younger! The results, which were presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Forum in Barcelona, come from a team led by Dr.
Lucia Amoruso from the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language. Using sophisticated imaging and artificial intelligence, the team working with researchers from Chile, Argentina and Ireland, have created what they call a brain-age clock. The research team train the system using magnetoencephalography recordings from hundreds of individuals between the ages of 18 and 89.
The clock is then run on another sample of 144 adults who speak between one and four languagesincluding combinations of Spanish Basque French and English. The findings were remarkable. Bilingual participants had brain scans that appeared approximately six years younger than those of comparable monolinguals. Multilingual subjectsthose who speak threehad brain traces that were roughly seven years younger.
It was the multilingualsthose who speak four languageswho had the greatest difference in agethey had brain signs characteristic of people thirteen years younger than their chronological age. Also, this linguistic age offset was not just a byproduct of having more languages on the list. Greater expertise and acquiring the second language at a younger age both showed an association with further delayed aging indices.
Amoruso was able to put it into simple, easy to understand language. Looks like multilingual experience may exist on a gradient. It is not a simple, dichotomous situation of all bilingual or all monolinguals. How much and for how long matters. Using more than one language in everyday life seems to maintain a certain level of flexible, interconnected neural networks that slows down less with age. The newly published paper is a follow-up to previous research that appeared in Nature Aging, which examined large-scale survey data from over 86,000 individuals across twenty-seven European nations. That earlier research demonstrated that individuals living in countries with higher proportions of multilingual speakers were By a lot less likely to have signs of advanced biological aging.
Individuals who reported speaking just one language had approximately twice the risk of exhibiting signs of faster decline. Two pieces of research combined give us a fairly clear story: language acquisition is something more than a social or cultural achievement. It seems to shape the biological aging of the brain. Scientists think the advantage comes from the relentless mental task switching faced daily by bilinguals. The mind is constantly trying to suppress one tongue as it emerges, juggling rival lexicons, and adjusting to small variations in meaning and grammar. Over years and over decades those repeated challenges seem to construct what researchers describe as cognitive reserve, extra capacity that enables the brain to bear the burdens of old age more gracefully.