Learning Another Language Appears To Slow Brain Aging By Up To 13 Years
- Reference: 0184338650
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/07/07/076229/learning-another-language-appears-to-slow-brain-aging-by-up-to-13-years
- Source link:
> Our brains are made up of billions of nerve cells that communicate with one another. But as we get older, the connectivity in our brains often deteriorates, causing memory and speed of thought to decline. While previous research had observed that people from European countries with greater language proficiency tended to age more slowly, this study measured the impact of speaking languages on individual brains. Scientists in Spain, Chile, Argentina and Dublin compared people living in the Basque region -- characterized by high levels of multilingualism -- who spoke Spanish, Basque, French and/or English.
>
> To measure neurological age, the scientists used magnetoencephalography to measure the brain activity of 728 people with varying ages and levels of linguistic ability. They then used AI to process the results to calculate a normal level of brain connectivity at any given age. A second unrelated group of 144 people were then scanned and compared, comprising equal numbers of people speaking one, two, three or four languages.
>
> Dr Lucia Amoruso, from the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastian, said: "In simple terms, people who spoke more languages tended to have brains that looked younger than expected for their chronological age. The effect was not only related to the number of languages spoken. Higher language proficiency and earlier acquisition of a second language were also associated with more delayed brain ageing. This suggests that multilingual experience matters as a gradient: it is not simply about being bilingual or not, but about the depth and duration of language experience."
[1] https://fens2026.abstractserver.com/program/#/details/presentations/5474
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/06/learning-another-language-appears-to-slow-brain-ageing-scientists-say
Yo quiero Taco Bell (Score:1)
Bought me 7 minutes of extra life
Learning another language is fun, too. (Score:2)
My native language is English, and because I live in Canada, I took French all the way through to first year university. In the last couple of years, I've started learning Dutch. Dutch is not a particularly useful language because it only has about 25-30M speakers, but I love The Netherlands and its culture.
Only problem is, Dutch is starting to push some French words out of my head!
Re: (Score:2)
When I was in the military, I was deployed to the Western Pacific. I learned Japanese and Tagalog so I could talk to girls.
Re: (Score:2)
Woah, cool. I think Japanese would intimidate me because it's so different from Indo-European languages. Same with Tagalog.
Re: (Score:2)
I had an RPN calculator in high school, so that made learning Japanese much easier.
so which is the cause and which is the result? (Score:2)
it always annoys me to see announcements of a correlation being described as a cause-and-effect .
Whenever I see cause-and-effect stated without them being clearly distinguished, I always ask myself "could they have the cause and effect flipped around?"
Maybe people that have "younger brains" are much more likely to be in the group that has learned another language recently?"
That seems to be much more likely than the stated order, since people with more youthful minds would be more likely to be learning new la
iow: use it or lose it (Score:2)
muscles and brain cells alike.