How to make a resilient brain!
October 12th 2010 20:09
A lifetime of speaking two or more languages appears to pay off in old age, with recent research showing the symptoms of dementia can be delayed by an average of four years in bilingual people.
Multilingualism doesn't delay the onset of dementia—the brains of people who speak multiple languages still show physical signs of deterioration—but the process of speaking two or more languages appears to enable people to develop skills to better cope with the early symptoms of memory-robbing diseases, including Alzheimer's.
Scientists for years studied children and found that fluently speaking more than one language takes a lot of mental work. Compared with people who speak only one language, bilingual children and young adults have slightly smaller vocabularies and are slower performing certain verbal tasks, such as naming lists of animals or fruits.
But over time, regularly speaking more than one language appears to strengthen skills that boost the brain's so-called cognitive reserve, a capacity to work even when stressed or damaged. This build-up of cognitive reserve appears to help bilingual people as they age.
"Speaking two languages isn't going to do anything to dodge the bullet" of getting Alzheimer's disease or dementia, says Ellen Bialystok, a bilingualism researcher at York University in Toronto. But greater cognitive reserve means the "same as the reserve tank in a car: Once the brain runs out of fuel, it can go a little farther," she says.
Music Triggering Memories in Dementia Patients Specifically, the advantages of bilingualism are thought to be related to a brain function known as inhibitory or cognitive control: the ability to stop paying attention to one thing and focus on something else, says Dr. Bialystok. Fluent speakers of more than one language have to use this skill continually to silence one language in their minds while communicating in another.
The idea of building up cognitive reserve has led to the popular advice that doing crossword puzzles or brain teasers, anything to remain mentally active, helps stave off dementia symptoms. A panel convened by the National Institutes of Health in July cautioned, however, that there isn't enough evidence to conclude that such activities prevent Alzheimer's disease or related dementias.
Researchers don't know whether it is beneficial for people to learn more than one language if one doesn't speak them fluently or nearly every day. The age at which the second language needs to be acquired to yield the protective effect is also unknown.
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Comment by Anonymous
I believe there are many different ways, or pathways, for our brain to perform the same task. Language is one way to explore these many possibilities offered by our brain but it is not the only one. The thing, maybe, is that we get stuck on the one way traffic of our routine, we have (for most of us) a very limited scope of doing, thinking and therefore develop throughout our life a sort of "brain pathways sclerosis"...when our usual pathways close. for organic reason, we are lost and don't know how to use the many other pathways available, even though they exist.
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