Health
Do you want to be protected from Alzheimer's disease? Then you'll have to learn a foreign language! This was the conclusion of scientists after conducting new brain studies that showed that the brain of a bilingual person functions better and longer if the disease does begin to develop.
Psychologist Ellen Bialystok and colleagues at the University of York in Toronto recently tested 450 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Half of these patients were bilingual, while the rest spoke only their native language.
All patients had the same levels of cognitive impairment, but researchers found that bilingual patients were diagnosed with the disease on average 4 years later than the second groups. Moreover, in the first group, the symptoms of the disease actually began to appear 5 years later than in the other group.
“We were able to determine that bilingual people develop the disease 4-5 years later than those who speak only one language, which means that they are better able to cope with the disease,” says Bialistok.
Brain scans of Alzheimer's patients showed that bilingual people had less brain damage. The difference in patients' behavior, abilities and functioning was not very significant. Bilingual patients behaved in the same way as monolingual patients, although the former progressed more slowly.
“When the disease affects certain parts of the brain, bilingual people's brains continue to function,” Bialystock added. “Bilingualism provides protection to older patients, even when Alzheimer's disease begins to affect cognitive function in the brain.”
Researchers believe that bilingual patients receive this protection because they have differences in brain structure. Research has shown that bilingual people use specific areas of the brain and train them more. For example, the prefrontal cortex and several other areas are responsible for our ability to think more complex.
“This is one of the most important areas of the brain,” the scientist believes. “It controls our attention and everything we think about, which makes us uniquely thinking beings.”
In theory, bilingual people are constantly training these areas of the brain so that the two languages do not get confused into one. Their brains must sort out words that belong to different languages, and constantly switch from one language to another and speak both correctly.
All of this seems to benefit cognitive performance even when the brain is affected by diseases like Alzheimer's.
“Of course, this doesn't mean that being bilingual can protect you 100 percent from getting sick,” says Bialistok. However, this helps those who are sick to cope better with the disease.
Moreover, according to other studies, bilingualism is beneficial even if a person does not speak two languages from early childhood, but begins to learn a foreign language later.