Saturday, February 19, 2011

Fight Alzheimer's with bilingualism

If you weren't yet convinced (still?!) that being bilingual has tons of benefits, consider this: A new research by Canadian neurologists indicates that speaking multiple languages throughout your life helps delay onset of symptoms of dementia.

According to this new study, bilingual individuals were diagnosed with Alzheimer's almost 5 years later than monolinguals. And this cannot be contributed to better education, because in many cases the bilinguals actually had lower level of education, as they immigrated to Canada from other countries.

The researchers explain this phenomenon through the idea that bilingualism requires rapid "code switching" (in other words, you have to quickly go back and forth between two languages in your daily life), which is just another form of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking, as many other brain activities, helps stimulate the brain, thus prolonging its active life.

And one more time, it turns out that our brain is not confused by it, but, on the contrary, gets its exercise from bilingualism.

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