Multilingual People Have Healthier, More Engaged Brains? (2016)

Later meta analysis that shows this effect is not true and is due to publication bias.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;m&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29494195&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;m&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29494195&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve been learning a second language, one that is very different than English, and it has been a complete mind fuck. I can see why knowing two languages would have a positive effect on your brain: another language is an entire other way of thinking about the world. Language is an artifact of the culture that created it, and it crystallizes the values and beliefs of that culture. By learning the language, you can enter into an entire other world.

I thought we pretty much agreed that&#x27;s how it works for programming languages, and from my experience it applies to natural language as well.<p>My native language is Swedish. I&#x27;ve studied English since I was 8 (and I&#x27;m 42 now), German for 3 years in school and lived there for 4, two years of Italian and two years of Chinese. It seems the more languages I learn, the more interesting and worthwhile it gets to compare similarities&#x2F;differences and the easier it is to learn new ones.<p>Learning a completely different language, such as Chinese coming from English, has similar benefits to learning Lisp coming from Java. It stretches the brain in exotic ways.

In my experience, learning a second language has clogged my brain up a bit. Maybe it’s healthier and more engaged, but it’s sometimes hard to say if it’s truly been beneficial from a cognitive perspective.<p>I’ve certainly been humbled and become more confident in pushing through mistakes made in public. It’s also a really cool skill. But it often feels like my memory for words is like a unordered linked list. Sometimes I get the wrong language and must iterate over the list to find the correct language version.

That seems like a lot of wasted associations. I already have an (english) word for most concepts, and don&#x27;t really feel like I need a second word for, say, &quot;bread&quot;, although words for new concepts or concepts grouped in interesting ways might have some value. I like the Swedish word &quot;lagom&quot;, which doesn&#x27;t seem to have an English analog. It&#x27;d interest me to know what aspect(s) of multilingualism promotes a healthier brain so that I can get the benefits from doing something more productive or useful. Can I block out conversation around me and do math problems for the same benefit? Meditate? Stop and consistently reframe situations by some other world-view? My mind just balks at the need to learn a second set of words for concepts I already know, since the first set seemed entirely arbitrary to begin with.

Not clicking through to TED &quot;everything will be solved with our optimism&quot;.

Might as well link directly to the TED-Ed talk instead of this two-paragraph article that introduces it.

I foresee a lot of comments from monolingual americans and brits trying to dispute this.

This is the kind of news story that can be so incredibly misused once it gets into public discourse.<p>I would expect that while the study comments on an interesting data point for academics in the field, in reality the variance that you&#x27;ll experience interacting with any one multi-lingual person or any one mono-lingual person will simply mean that it&#x27;s trivia in day-to-day life.<p>Even in designing curricula for a large group where anything of significance in this study would be worthwhile considering, you&#x27;d still want to know how this compares to other fields of pursuit on some sort of outcome basis before yelling, &quot;language programs for the win!&quot; The thesis of the title and the short article (no I didn&#x27;t watch&#x2F;listen to the media) doesn&#x27;t answer the relative merit question.<p>So maybe this research points to further study or is nice knowledge for knowledge&#x27;s sake... but unless there&#x27;s something more revealing in the linked YouTube video... I wouldn&#x27;t read into it any more than that.

Interesting point about adults acquiring language through the left side of the brain vs. children acquiring through both hemispheres. I wonder whether that is nature or nurture -- does it reflect changes in brain structure in adulthood, or does it reflect the ways in which each respective group tends to learn languages?

A lot depends if it&#x27;s the same culture ( eg. Roman)<p>I speak French, Dutch and English.<p>I understand German and can do simple things with it.<p>I can understand Spanish a little bit.<p>But I don&#x27;t think my brain is different. The mapping is very similar between those languages.<p>An Asian&#x2F;Russian language would be very hard for me to.

As a data point, I&#x27;m bilingual, and have been for about 30 years (my first language isn&#x27;t English), and I&#x27;m kind of an idiot. So there&#x27;s that.<p>In all seriousness though, this is something that&#x27;s only debated in very large countries with a dominant culture and common language (US, Russia, UK, France, etc). Growing up in a smaller country that has its own language, pretty much everyone has to read&#x2F;write and speak English at some level.

I often wonder if learning a dialect of a certain field has a similar effect. For example math terms or a complex programming language with things like monads

Although I’m bilingual, in practice I’ve become mostly monolingual in that I only ever speak English. I feel like this has resulted in my thinking becoming less abstract &#x2F; conceptual and more verbal.

I wonder if this is actually language, or just that language requires so much of your brain that anything that requires the same amount would have the same benefits.

What&#x27;s the best way to learn a new language?

I can speak 3 languages and can understand close to 3 more.<p>And I think I am the dumbest person at work, damn why is my Brain so slow? :(

What is a language, anyway? Is that where you use symbols to represent grunts?

Alternatively, people who know programming languages are on average smarter.<p>However, that would be confusing cause and effect

survivorship bias I guess.

Tastier as well

—. —

yeah no shit. multilingual people usually have more money.