00:00It used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing, that it would confuse or hold people back, especially children.
00:07Turns out we couldn't have been more wrong.
00:10Learning new languages is an exercise of the mind.
00:13It's the mental equivalent of going to a gym every day.
00:22In the bilingual brain, all our languages are active, all at the same time.
00:27The continual effort of suppressing a language when speaking another, along with the mental challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages, exercises our brain.
00:40It improves our concentration, problem solving, memory, and in turn, our creativity.
00:48It's now widely accepted that there are huge benefits to being bilingual.
00:52A key breakthrough came back in 2007 in Toronto, when Ellen Bialystok and her team made a discovery that shook the scientific community and has massive real-world implications.
01:03It was the first study which suggested that bilingual people, people who speak more than one language, develop dementia four to four and a half years later than those who don't.
01:20It was a powerful confirmation of the idea of cognitive reserve.
01:24Now, what is cognitive reserve?
01:28Cognitive 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.
01:36As well as delaying the onset of dementia, bilingual people have been shown to recover significantly better after a stroke.
01:43Learning anything new helps build cognitive reserve.
01:46But there's something special about language.
01:49Language is particularly broad and complex.
01:52It affects ideas and concepts, perception, different sounds.
01:58The more complex a certain skill is, the more likely it is to have a positive effect on cognitive reserve.
02:07So when is the best time to learn a new language?
02:11Well, here's part of the answer.
02:13The brain is a complex set of neural networks.
02:17When you're learning a new language as a child, you're building new networks.
02:29But when you learn a language later in life, you have to modify the existing networks and make more connections.
02:38Because learning languages later in life can be more challenging, the benefits can also be greater.
02:47But a 2023 study at Great Ormond Street suggests this is just part of the story.
02:53So we invited three groups of children that were aged 8 to 10.
02:57And we had a group of children who were monolinguals.
03:00A group of children who had early exposure to Greek and English from birth.
03:04They were our early bilinguals.
03:06And finally, we had a group who had been exposed to English between the ages of 2 and 5.
03:11And they were our later bilinguals.
03:13So what we did that no one had done before is that we asked the children to line the scanner while doing nothing and just staring at a cross.
03:21And during this, we measured their brain activity.
03:24So what we found that was really exciting for us is that our early bilingual group had the strongest connectivity in the network at rest.
03:32And this group of regions are regions that light up when we're doing nothing and just mind wandering.
03:37A little bit like if you're going to the gym every day, your muscles might look bigger at rest.
03:42Where similarly, your brain might be better connected at rest because you are learning a language early.
03:47And this is something no one had found before.
03:50And there's more.
03:51One lesser known behavioral effect of bilingualism in both children and adults is the ability to see the other people's perspective.
04:02Or to understand that it is possible to have different points of view.
04:07Recent 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.
04:18And the way it is usually explained is that the first language is the one which we use to speak with family, with friends, in informal settings.
04:29The second language is usually learned at school, at the university, at work.
04:36Scientists are discovering new upsides to being bilingual all the time.
04:41And it's not just our brains that benefit.
04:42Learning new languages and speaking more than one language is very important, not only for individuals, but also for societies.
04:51Learning new languages can open doors to new cultural experiences, life opportunities.
04:59Different people, different communities, and different ways of seeing the world.
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