I just attended the 60th Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association at Columbia University, where the first plenary speaker, Ellen Bialystock, gave a talk titled, “Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain.”
The main takeaway for me was the research she cited showing that people who are bilingual delay, on average, descending into dementia as they age by about 5 years, when compared with their monolingual peers. She illustrated this delay of cognitive decline with research that looked at mental functioning (for example, via memory tests and tests of verbal fluency), as well as research that examined brain scans.
In particular, Prof. Bialystock found that bilingualism enhances “executive control.” I’ve noted elsewhere that people with Parkinson’s disease tend to lose their executive functions as PD progresses. For newbies to these terms “executive functions” and “executive control,” let’s drop in on Mr. Wikipedia for a definition:
Executive functions is an umbrella term for the management (regulation, control) of cognitive processes, including working memory, reasoning, task flexibility, and problem solving, as well as planning and execution.
Prof. Bialystock mentioned that bilingual people not only have enhanced executive functions, but larger, more developed frontal lobes of the brain, where the executive functions supposedly take place. She showed a photo of ski tracks in the snow and stated that “all experiences leave a mark” in your brain; I believe she meant that intellectual work such as learning two languages (something children around the world accomplish all the time) creates new neural pathways in the brain that make it stronger long term. Perhaps this is true no matter how old you are. Neural plasticity continues even for older folks.
And finally, she quoted Newt Gingrich’s recent New York Times op-ed, in which he actually calls for more government spending! For the NIH! Doubling the NIH budget! His reasoning includes these words:
The total cost of care for Alzheimer’s and other dementia is expected to exceed $20 trillion over the next four decades — including a 420 percent increase in costs to Medicare and a 330 percent increase in costs to Medicaid. Even without a cure, the premium on breakthrough research is high: Delaying the average onset of the disease by just five years would reduce the number of Americans with Alzheimer’s in 2050 by 42 percent, and cut costs by a third. And that’s not even counting the human toll on both patients and caregivers (often family members), whose own health may deteriorate because of stress and depression.
– Newt Gingrich
So, where am I going with this?
- Write your senators, congressional representatives and other elected officials, and demand greater government support of the NIH and other organizations that do breakthrough medical research. Cc Newt Gingrich.
- Encourage your local school boards to institute more bilingual ed programs, and to greatly improve the quality of second language instruction. If you live in the USA you already know that we have one of the worst track records for 2nd language education in the entire world. Having more bilingual citizens makes us stronger as a country, and will stave off cognitive decline for more people as they age.
- If you’re bilingual, keep it up. If you were a Spanish major in college but haven’t used the language since 1980, travel to a Spanish-speaking country and vow not to speak a word of English while you’re there. If you’ve been monolingual all your life, sign up for a foreign language class, or, better yet, get some Rosetta Stone language software, as it’s constructed like a solve-it-yourself brain game.
Time’s a-wasting!
Por favor, ¡hay que hacerlo rápidamente!
빨리 하세요!
What would it mean to be trilingual?
Kudos, Bruce for this report. In my graduate school days, I wore a T-shirt that read: “Monolingualism can be cured.” Let that be our motto as we encourage the learning of an additional language.