8 ms·

Multilingual People Have Healthier, More Engaged Brains? (2016)

110 points by respinal 7y ago

laretluval 7y ago
Check back in 10 years after the replication crisis has burned through this field.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  It seems far-fetched to you that learning a second language has benefits for the brain?
  - tomerico 7y ago
    The fact that it seems intuitive increases the risk that the study is wrong
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Well, the article points out that the common sense until the 1960s was that bilingualism was worse. We also used to think neurogenesis/neuroplasticity didn't exist in adulthood. I think it would be major news wrt our modern understanding of the brain if it turned out that we indeed should learn fewer things rather than more things to keep our brains functioning optimally. That sounds like 1950s superstition all over again, like running out of neurons.
    - pen2l 7y ago
      As someone who grew up in a bilingual environment, it seems intuitive to me that I'm worse for it (in terms of my social dealings and my problem-solving skills). I think if I had linguistic skills tested, I would probably be rated above-average for both English and my maternal tongue, but somehow to me it just doesn't feel that way... and I find this profoundly annoying, I feel home nowhere.
      - graphpapa 7y ago
        Under-reporting of one’s ability is often related to having a _higher_ ability though. perhaps a heightened perception of your linguistic shortcomings is an unfortunate by-product of that superior ability I don’t know what I believe is true - I’m just saying it’s possible the study could be true AND it also be the case that many multilinguals feel the opposite
        JamesBarney 7y ago
        > Under-reporting of one’s ability is often related to having a _higher_ ability though. perhaps a heightened perception of your linguistic shortcomings is an unfortunate by-product of that superior ability I don't think this is true. Unless you've misreading the Dunning Krueger paper.
        Nasrudith 7y ago
        It is a corollary essentially of running it the opposite direction on the axis, Imposter Syndrome. It seems consistent with "every answer coming with two more questions" a "tree-like" question structure as knowing more means knowing more about the unknowns. So someone less familiar would think "Carpentry? Illiterate innumerate peasants could do it, more strength than skill." Meanwhile even a master carpenter of bespoke homes would know that they are inferior to a jouneyman cooper who worked before metallic barrel rings because they didn't have call for making joins that round and tight, that they hardly even worked with steam bending, and that they use automated tools that millenia ago would have been done by say hand and feel and calculations rather than using a micrometer.
      - fpgaminer 7y ago
        I'm not bilingual, so this is an outsider looking in, but piggybacking off the sibling comment I wonder if you feel you're worse at language because you'll often have thoughts during a conversation that your brain can express easily in one language but not the one currently being spoken? So you often feel like you're having trouble expressing yourself in any given language? One could argue that such events occur for everyone, but for a monolingual it would speak to the failings of the one language they speak, not of their inability to express thoughts. Or maybe such events occur more often for those who are bilingual because the brain can come up with a greater diversity of thoughts, owing to its mastery of two "modes" of thought.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Well, most common sense things are indeed right, so...
      - equalunique 7y ago
        Occam's razor is just another brand of shaving razors.
        coldtea 7y ago
        Well, Occam's Razor is just common sense based itself. It's not an absolute rule, and not something that has been (or can be) proven.
      - smt88 7y ago
        That's what GP is referring to. Because people don't expect common sense to be overturned, bad science that supports it tends to survive and reach wider audiences. So if you're ready about a study that supports common sense, it had unfair advantages to reach you and is less likely to have underlying merit.
    - sarbaz 7y ago
      There is actually a pretty good study that shows that people are able to guess which studies will replicate and which will not: https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/ https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/
  - xt11 7y ago
    The article is specifically about children who grow up bilingually. Until this "breakthrough", those children were thought to be disadvantaged, because they did not learn a single language in the same depth as the majority (so was the reasoning at least). As usual, it is hard to correct for other factors; children who grow up bilingually usually belong to privileged classes.
    - jotm 7y ago
      Easy - study children in Eastern Europe/Baltic states. Lots of people grow up bilingual, with English as a third language, too.
      - Avamander 7y ago
        Lots of those people become tetralingual because they have time left over the three languages that are taught anyways. E.g. Russian and Estonian as native language, English plus a fourth language from school. Those who do not have a bilingual family only learn three during the same time. E.g. Estonian, English and Russian. I kind-of envy the first group of people because it's cool to be able to access so many spheres of culture, I often use Google Translate to try and get a glimpse of Russian forums for example, it's just very different and so useful because of that.
        jotm 7y ago
        Russian forums have all sorts of nice software/hacks for smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. Only place I could find a programmer (and a ton of firmware) for washing machine and dryer boards. Chinese forums/websites seem to be even better, but harder to get into (translation issues, have to sign up/log in to a lot of them).
    - krastanov 7y ago
      I am wondering about the ending statement in your comment: > As usual, it is hard to correct for other factors; children who grow up bilingually usually belong to privileged classes. I am pretty sure that is true in Switzerland, but in the USA kids like that frequently start out in the lower-middle class (first generation Americans).
  - clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
    Maybe smart healthy people are the type to learn a second language?
    - OJFord 7y ago
      It's the norm for entire nations.
  - ouid 7y ago
    It doesn't matter if it's intuitive. Lots of intuitive things are false. Further, the more you think about it, the less intuitive it is. I believe that second languages, completely unstratified on other factors, is correlated with "better brains" by some metric. I do not believe that the statement that this is causal, or totally uniform. Could it not be that better brains seek out new languages? Could it be that learning a language is healthy for some part of the population and not others? For a trivial example, is learning a fifth language really worth your time? Is it possible that people who learn a new language would do absolutely nothing with that time otherwise? As for my own thoughts, learning a new natural language is extraordinarily boring. There are no problems to solve, it's just memorization and exercise. It takes a tremendous capacity to deal with boredom to learn a new language, and the tremendous capacity to deal with boredom does not strike me as uniformly good, though it does strike me as probably being correlated with higher average intelligence.
  - laretluval 7y ago
    Yes, I would bet that there is no causal effect.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  If a psychology study concluded that the sun will rise tomorrow, would you dispute it based on the replication crisis? This kind of knee jerk dismissal is becoming tiresome on this site.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - laretluval 7y ago
    I’d revert to my prior, just like here.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Might as well link directly to the TED-Ed talk instead of this two-paragraph article that introduces it.
awestroke 7y ago
I foresee a lot of comments from monolingual americans and brits trying to dispute this.
- asdf21 7y ago
  Am I really monolingual when I'm fluent in multiple programming languages and endless niche industry jargon? Jokes aside, I'd assume the context switching would be psychologically rather similar.
  - awestroke 7y ago
    Yes
  - smt88 7y ago
    The context switching between programming languages bears no subjective similarity to human language. As someone who knows 2 human languages and 6-8 computer languages, it's just not at all similar. They don't use the same parts of your brain, for starters. You can't describe a dream in Java.
    - asdf21 7y ago
      I know French and English and several programming languages, and they do seem very similar to me. >You can't describe a dream in Java. Before you write any code, you first imagine how the application should work. So yes, a person can codify something from their imagination into Java.
      - paganel 7y ago
        > and they do seem very similar to me. Maybe on a superficial level, as a lot of the English vocabulary is taken from (older) French, but once for you example read D.H. Lawrence and Proust in original (two great writers both of them) you'll be able to see and most especially feel ("feel" as in not "scientifically" provable) that the two languages are indeed very different. The same goes for French and Spanish or French and Italian, even though all three of them are Romance languages once you go down to the specifics things are starting to look and fell more and more different. I know that this being a programming-oriented website everything out-there is seen as either data or information, and as such languages are just seen as ways of forwarding or communication that data/information, but in the real world languages have a lot deeper meaning than that.
presstumer 7y ago
I often wonder if learning a dialect of a certain field has a similar effect. For example math terms or a complex programming language with things like monads
- fpgaminer 7y ago
  I would think so. I often find myself cross-germinating the concepts I've learned from new programming languages, paradigms, and mathematics to other problems and discussions. Most recently I learned TLA+ which plays heavily with set theory; in particular the construction of logical "filters" on infinite sets. Ever since, those ways of thinking have become part of my mental toolbox that I interject into other areas.
  - snakeboy 7y ago
    I think in mathematics and programming, you often are working with an abstract idea or algorithm, projected onto the tools you are using. Be that the syntax/style/limitations of a specific language, or a branch of mathematics. In that way, it is the same phenomenon of trying to express an abstract idea, projected onto the language in which you are speaking, with similar issues of syntax/style/limitations inherent to that language. However, a human language opens a whole dimension of culture and history that is somewhat truly inaccessible from the outside. In this way, math and programming don't appear to me to have an obvious analog.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Iwan-Zotow 7y ago
Tastier as well
saschag 7y ago
just because schizms can be the cause of more activity and different insights it promises no more health than someone without conflicts, in principle. new conclusions could be beneficial, ie. understanding that spanish and english are equally imperfect but at the same time it's like claiming that we need to experience bad for good to be good. i speak a number of different languages and dialects and all it gave me is the realisation that babel bla. the goal should be a whole(some) dense system. with only few necessary disconnects.
magwa101 7y ago
Not clicking through to TED "everything will be solved with our optimism".
- faitswulff 7y ago
  I don't know if this is against the rules here on HN, but I took the liberty of downloading and prettifying the subtitles from the talk: > ¿Hablas español? Parlez-vous français? 你会说中文吗？ > If you answered, "sí," "oui," or "会" and you're watching this in English, chances are you belong to the world's bilingual and multilingual majority. And besides having an easier time traveling or watching movies without subtitles, knowing two or more languages means that your brain may actually look and work differently than those of your monolingual friends. > So what does it really mean to know a language? Language ability is typically measured in two active parts, speaking and writing, and two passive parts, listening and reading. While a balanced bilingual has near equal abilities across the board in two languages, most bilinguals around the world know and use their languages in varying proportions. And depending on their situation and how they acquired each language, they can be classified into three general types. > For example, let's take Gabriella, whose family immigrates to the US from Peru when she's two-years old. As a compound bilingual, Gabriella develops two linguistic codes simultaneously, with a single set of concepts, learning both English and Spanish as she begins to process the world around her. Her teenage brother, on the other hand, might be a coordinate bilingual, working with two sets of concepts, learning English in school, while continuing to speak Spanish at home and with friends. Finally, Gabriella's parents are likely to be subordinate bilinguals who learn a secondary language by filtering it through their primary language. > Because all types of bilingual people can become fully proficient in a language regardless of accent or pronunciation, the difference may not be apparent to a casual observer. But recent advances in brain imaging technology have given neurolinguists a glimpse into how specific aspects of language learning affect the bilingual brain. It's well known that the brain's left hemisphere is more dominant and analytical in logical processes, while the right hemisphere is more active in emotional and social ones, though this is a matter of degree, not an absolute split. > The fact that language involves both types of functions while lateralization develops gradually with age, has lead to the critical period hypothesis. According to this theory, children learn languages more easily because the plasticity of their developing brains lets them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, language is lateralized to one hemisphere, usually the left. If this is true, learning a language in childhood may give you a more holistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts. Conversely, recent research showed that people who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in the second language than in their native one. > But regardless of when you acquire additional languages, being multilingual gives your brain some remarkable advantages. Some of these are even visible, such as higher density of the grey matter that contains most of your brain's neurons and synapses, and more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language. The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases, like Alzheimer's and dementia by as much as five years. > The idea of major cognitive benefits to bilingualism may seem intuitive now, but it would have surprised earlier experts. Before the 1960s, bilingualism was considered a handicap that slowed a child's development by forcing them to spend too much energy distinguishing between languages, a view based largely on flawed studies. And while a more recent study did show that reaction times and errors increase for some bilingual students in cross-language tests, it also showed that the effort and attention needed to switch between languages triggered more activity in, and potentially strengthened, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that plays a large role in executive function, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information. > So, while bilingualism may not necessarily make you smarter, it does make your brain more healthy, complex and actively engaged, and even if you didn't have the good fortune of learning a second language as a child, it's never too late to do yourself a favor and make the linguistic leap from, "Hello," to, "Hola," "Bonjour" or "你好’s" because when it comes to our brains a little exercise can go a long way.
timwaagh 7y ago
survivorship bias I guess.
stazz1 7y ago
What is a language, anyway? Is that where you use symbols to represent grunts?
dagav 7y ago
I've been learning a second language, one that is very different than English, and it has been a complete mind fuck. I can see why knowing two languages would have a positive effect on your brain: another language is an entire other way of thinking about the world. Language is an artifact of the culture that created it, and it crystallizes the values and beliefs of that culture. By learning the language, you can enter into an entire other world.
- point78 7y ago
  What language?
  - dagav 7y ago
    Hebrew.
    - point78 7y ago
      It's a mindfuck only when the alphabet is all goofy compared to your native language imo. Learned Spanish and was relatively easy...now learning Russian and yes...mindfuck!
    - edanm 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, why Hebrew? (I'm a Hebrew speaker) > Language is an artifact of the culture that created it, and it crystallizes the values and beliefs of that culture. By learning the language, you can enter into an entire other world. A common take, although I don't know if I would take it too far. Hebrew specifically has the advantage of having been re-created from nothing only a relatively short time ago (150 years more or less), so maybe in a sense it's more explicitly codified. I'm genuinely curious what kind of things you think that learning Hebrew shows about Hebrew-speaking culture though - I'd love to be proven wrong!
      - dagav 7y ago
        I'm Jewish and my father is Israeli, so I was learning to connect with them and my heritage. I'm no expert on Hebrew but one thing I noticed is it's connection to the Bible: Adam means "Man" or "Mankind" in Hebrew. "Earth" is Adama. "Human Being" is Ben Adam, literally "Son of Adam", or "Son of Man".
leroy_masochist 7y ago
Interesting point about adults acquiring language through the left side of the brain vs. children acquiring through both hemispheres. I wonder whether that is nature or nurture -- does it reflect changes in brain structure in adulthood, or does it reflect the ways in which each respective group tends to learn languages?
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  That point is actually about emotions. I think what it means is that children are only developing brain circuity related to emotions and so develop emotional associations with the words in a second language, while adults already did and can understand, control and ignore emotions better and do not develop emotional associations with the words in a second language, or at least not as much.
thendrill 7y ago
—. —
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
JamesBarney 7y ago
Later meta analysis that shows this effect is not true and is due to publication bias. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29494195/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29494195/
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  That meta analysis can't be more biased itself. Just from the first few lines it sounds like they are offended there are benefits to knowing multiple languages.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    I don't think the best way to evaluate a study is to read the first few lines and guess at how offended the 8 researches are who wrote the paper. Also I would describe the following as skeptical more than offended. > Because of enduring experience of managing two languages, bilinguals have been argued to develop superior executive functioning compared with monolinguals. Despite extensive investigation, there is, however, no consensus regarding the existence of such a bilingual advantage
    - zzzcpan 7y ago
      > "bilinguals have been argued to develop superior executive functioning compared with monolinguals" This is the one I find very problematic. They made up an entire unscientific claim to disprove.
      - casefields 7y ago
        Yup. That’s setting up the parameters in an obvious way to strawman an opponents argument.
        CrazyStat 7y ago
        It can't be a strawman when it's an argument that the opponents have actually made. Examples are easy to find: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-06955-009 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-06955-009 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28895004/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28895004/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22464592/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22464592/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sbuttgereit 7y ago
This is the kind of news story that can be so incredibly misused once it gets into public discourse. I would expect that while the study comments on an interesting data point for academics in the field, in reality the variance that you'll experience interacting with any one multi-lingual person or any one mono-lingual person will simply mean that it's trivia in day-to-day life. Even in designing curricula for a large group where anything of significance in this study would be worthwhile considering, you'd still want to know how this compares to other fields of pursuit on some sort of outcome basis before yelling, "language programs for the win!" The thesis of the title and the short article (no I didn't watch/listen to the media) doesn't answer the relative merit question. So maybe this research points to further study or is nice knowledge for knowledge's sake... but unless there's something more revealing in the linked YouTube video... I wouldn't read into it any more than that.
michaelcampbell 7y ago
I wonder if this is actually language, or just that language requires so much of your brain that anything that requires the same amount would have the same benefits.
OldFatCactus 7y ago
What's the best way to learn a new language?
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  Immersion. Learn as many random words as you can, by pure memorisation, and then sit around people who speak the language so you can force yourself to learn the language. I 'learned' 2 languages in school and by far the most important part is knowing as many words as possible, and actually speaking it with natives. Other than that, you wont get too much out of written exercises or duolingo or even books. Just stick to those two things. However, the best way to learn random words is to play a game or read a book, and then google / dictionary search any word you don't know. It should be easy to find people who can speak the language with you, but if you can't find anyone, well... why learn it?
- giovani 7y ago
  I don't know about any research on the matter, but I can say 2 things that worked very well for me: 1) take an intensive course first 2) then live in a country where the main language was the one I learned Granted, point 2 isn't easy, but nothing can beat it. The most important point is to use the language on a regular basis. If you don't, you'll forget it quickly. [edited: formatting]
- mistahenry 7y ago
  In my opinion, Assimil for learning the grammar and Pimsleur for speaking and listening comprehension. That’s how I learned German by myself enough in a year to get a job in Germany More important than the method, though, is that you never miss a day of practice
- einarfd 7y ago
  Move to somewhere they speak it and force yourself to use it. Even if you could get away with using a language you know better. Accepting that you would get it wrong, and keep trying even if you sound stupid and it feels hard would also help.
- theonemind 7y ago
Aperocky 7y ago
Alternatively, people who know programming languages are on average smarter. However, that would be confusing cause and effect
xenospn 7y ago
As a data point, I'm bilingual, and have been for about 30 years (my first language isn't English), and I'm kind of an idiot. So there's that. In all seriousness though, this is something that's only debated in very large countries with a dominant culture and common language (US, Russia, UK, France, etc). Growing up in a smaller country that has its own language, pretty much everyone has to read/write and speak English at some level.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
acroback 7y ago
I can speak 3 languages and can understand close to 3 more. And I think I am the dumbest person at work, damn why is my Brain so slow? :(
- thendrill 7y ago
  Because ignorance is bliss. The more you know the more you know you don't know. Which 3?
mistahenry 7y ago
In my experience, learning a second language has clogged my brain up a bit. Maybe it’s healthier and more engaged, but it’s sometimes hard to say if it’s truly been beneficial from a cognitive perspective. I’ve certainly been humbled and become more confident in pushing through mistakes made in public. It’s also a really cool skill. But it often feels like my memory for words is like a unordered linked list. Sometimes I get the wrong language and must iterate over the list to find the correct language version.
- Baeocystin 7y ago
  For what it's worth, I agree with you. I consider myself multisemilingal- English is my primary language, but I have up-goer 5 levels of proficiency in half a dozen other languages. I enjoy it, but I do not feel like it has been a net improvement in terms of cognitive function. If anything, more mental housekeeping is required when I sit down to write in any language, including English. I think many people, even multilingual ones, fail to truly consider what they mean by 'multilingual'. Words and grammar are only the bare surface of what you need to learn- what actually happens is that you grow a different model of mindset and culture, one where the words of the new language have meaning. This only happens over a lifetime of immersion and exposure to the prosaic realities of the language in question.
- distantaidenn 7y ago
  I somewhat agree. I'm a native English speaker, but I use Japanese daily and learning Korean, now. Sometimes it is a bit of a jumble, but I attribute it more to laziness than anything else. My brain just reaches for the easiest word, and I have to struggle to find the correct one. As a bit of an aside, because of the sentence order and cognates, when speaking Korean, I often first go from English to Japanese and finally can stumble out some broken sentence. Japanese to Korean is almost a one to one mapping when speaking simple sentences, based on both languages being agglutinative and having SOV ordering.
yelloweyes 7y ago
yeah no shit. multilingual people usually have more money.
- detaro 7y ago
  source? rationale?
theonemind 7y ago
That seems like a lot of wasted associations. I already have an (english) word for most concepts, and don't really feel like I need a second word for, say, "bread", although words for new concepts or concepts grouped in interesting ways might have some value. I like the Swedish word "lagom", which doesn't seem to have an English analog. It'd interest me to know what aspect(s) of multilingualism promotes a healthier brain so that I can get the benefits from doing something more productive or useful. Can I block out conversation around me and do math problems for the same benefit? Meditate? Stop and consistently reframe situations by some other world-view? My mind just balks at the need to learn a second set of words for concepts I already know, since the first set seemed entirely arbitrary to begin with.
- jddj 7y ago
  There's been some research which has shown the reframing being effective, but they only studied whether considering eg. a trolley problem in any second language produced significantly different results compared to a native language. Somewhat ironically in the context of wasted associations, the article is in Spanish. But this is one link: https://www.psicologosonline.cl/articulos/para-decidir-con-frialdad-piensa-en-otro-idioma https://www.psicologosonline.cl/articulos/para-decidir-con-f...
codr7 7y ago
I thought we pretty much agreed that's how it works for programming languages, and from my experience it applies to natural language as well. My native language is Swedish. I've studied English since I was 8 (and I'm 42 now), German for 3 years in school and lived there for 4, two years of Italian and two years of Chinese. It seems the more languages I learn, the more interesting and worthwhile it gets to compare similarities/differences and the easier it is to learn new ones. Learning a completely different language, such as Chinese coming from English, has similar benefits to learning Lisp coming from Java. It stretches the brain in exotic ways.
ummonk 7y ago
Although I’m bilingual, in practice I’ve become mostly monolingual in that I only ever speak English. I feel like this has resulted in my thinking becoming less abstract / conceptual and more verbal.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
A lot depends if it's the same culture ( eg. Roman) I speak French, Dutch and English. I understand German and can do simple things with it. I can understand Spanish a little bit. But I don't think my brain is different. The mapping is very similar between those languages. An Asian/Russian language would be very hard for me to.

110 points by respinal 7y ago

laretluval 7y ago

Check back in 10 years after the replication crisis has burned through this field.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
It seems far-fetched to you that learning a second language has benefits for the brain?
- tomerico 7y ago
  The fact that it seems intuitive increases the risk that the study is wrong
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Well, the article points out that the common sense until the 1960s was that bilingualism was worse. We also used to think neurogenesis/neuroplasticity didn't exist in adulthood. I think it would be major news wrt our modern understanding of the brain if it turned out that we indeed should learn fewer things rather than more things to keep our brains functioning optimally. That sounds like 1950s superstition all over again, like running out of neurons.
  - pen2l 7y ago
    As someone who grew up in a bilingual environment, it seems intuitive to me that I'm worse for it (in terms of my social dealings and my problem-solving skills). I think if I had linguistic skills tested, I would probably be rated above-average for both English and my maternal tongue, but somehow to me it just doesn't feel that way... and I find this profoundly annoying, I feel home nowhere.
    - graphpapa 7y ago
      Under-reporting of one’s ability is often related to having a _higher_ ability though. perhaps a heightened perception of your linguistic shortcomings is an unfortunate by-product of that superior ability I don’t know what I believe is true - I’m just saying it’s possible the study could be true AND it also be the case that many multilinguals feel the opposite
      - JamesBarney 7y ago
        > Under-reporting of one’s ability is often related to having a _higher_ ability though. perhaps a heightened perception of your linguistic shortcomings is an unfortunate by-product of that superior ability I don't think this is true. Unless you've misreading the Dunning Krueger paper.
        Nasrudith 7y ago
        It is a corollary essentially of running it the opposite direction on the axis, Imposter Syndrome. It seems consistent with "every answer coming with two more questions" a "tree-like" question structure as knowing more means knowing more about the unknowns. So someone less familiar would think "Carpentry? Illiterate innumerate peasants could do it, more strength than skill." Meanwhile even a master carpenter of bespoke homes would know that they are inferior to a jouneyman cooper who worked before metallic barrel rings because they didn't have call for making joins that round and tight, that they hardly even worked with steam bending, and that they use automated tools that millenia ago would have been done by say hand and feel and calculations rather than using a micrometer.
    - fpgaminer 7y ago
      I'm not bilingual, so this is an outsider looking in, but piggybacking off the sibling comment I wonder if you feel you're worse at language because you'll often have thoughts during a conversation that your brain can express easily in one language but not the one currently being spoken? So you often feel like you're having trouble expressing yourself in any given language? One could argue that such events occur for everyone, but for a monolingual it would speak to the failings of the one language they speak, not of their inability to express thoughts. Or maybe such events occur more often for those who are bilingual because the brain can come up with a greater diversity of thoughts, owing to its mastery of two "modes" of thought.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Well, most common sense things are indeed right, so...
    - equalunique 7y ago
      Occam's razor is just another brand of shaving razors.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        Well, Occam's Razor is just common sense based itself. It's not an absolute rule, and not something that has been (or can be) proven.
    - smt88 7y ago
      That's what GP is referring to. Because people don't expect common sense to be overturned, bad science that supports it tends to survive and reach wider audiences. So if you're ready about a study that supports common sense, it had unfair advantages to reach you and is less likely to have underlying merit.
  - sarbaz 7y ago
    There is actually a pretty good study that shows that people are able to guess which studies will replicate and which will not: https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/ https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/
- xt11 7y ago
  The article is specifically about children who grow up bilingually. Until this "breakthrough", those children were thought to be disadvantaged, because they did not learn a single language in the same depth as the majority (so was the reasoning at least). As usual, it is hard to correct for other factors; children who grow up bilingually usually belong to privileged classes.
  - jotm 7y ago
    Easy - study children in Eastern Europe/Baltic states. Lots of people grow up bilingual, with English as a third language, too.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      Lots of those people become tetralingual because they have time left over the three languages that are taught anyways. E.g. Russian and Estonian as native language, English plus a fourth language from school. Those who do not have a bilingual family only learn three during the same time. E.g. Estonian, English and Russian. I kind-of envy the first group of people because it's cool to be able to access so many spheres of culture, I often use Google Translate to try and get a glimpse of Russian forums for example, it's just very different and so useful because of that.
      - jotm 7y ago
        Russian forums have all sorts of nice software/hacks for smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. Only place I could find a programmer (and a ton of firmware) for washing machine and dryer boards. Chinese forums/websites seem to be even better, but harder to get into (translation issues, have to sign up/log in to a lot of them).
  - krastanov 7y ago
    I am wondering about the ending statement in your comment: > As usual, it is hard to correct for other factors; children who grow up bilingually usually belong to privileged classes. I am pretty sure that is true in Switzerland, but in the USA kids like that frequently start out in the lower-middle class (first generation Americans).
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
  Maybe smart healthy people are the type to learn a second language?
  - OJFord 7y ago
    It's the norm for entire nations.
- ouid 7y ago
  It doesn't matter if it's intuitive. Lots of intuitive things are false. Further, the more you think about it, the less intuitive it is. I believe that second languages, completely unstratified on other factors, is correlated with "better brains" by some metric. I do not believe that the statement that this is causal, or totally uniform. Could it not be that better brains seek out new languages? Could it be that learning a language is healthy for some part of the population and not others? For a trivial example, is learning a fifth language really worth your time? Is it possible that people who learn a new language would do absolutely nothing with that time otherwise? As for my own thoughts, learning a new natural language is extraordinarily boring. There are no problems to solve, it's just memorization and exercise. It takes a tremendous capacity to deal with boredom to learn a new language, and the tremendous capacity to deal with boredom does not strike me as uniformly good, though it does strike me as probably being correlated with higher average intelligence.
- laretluval 7y ago
  Yes, I would bet that there is no causal effect.
gerbilly 7y ago
If a psychology study concluded that the sun will rise tomorrow, would you dispute it based on the replication crisis? This kind of knee jerk dismissal is becoming tiresome on this site.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- laretluval 7y ago
  I’d revert to my prior, just like here.

hombre_fatal 7y ago

Might as well link directly to the TED-Ed talk instead of this two-paragraph article that introduces it.

awestroke 7y ago

I foresee a lot of comments from monolingual americans and brits trying to dispute this.

asdf21 7y ago
Am I really monolingual when I'm fluent in multiple programming languages and endless niche industry jargon? Jokes aside, I'd assume the context switching would be psychologically rather similar.
- awestroke 7y ago
  Yes
- smt88 7y ago
  The context switching between programming languages bears no subjective similarity to human language. As someone who knows 2 human languages and 6-8 computer languages, it's just not at all similar. They don't use the same parts of your brain, for starters. You can't describe a dream in Java.
  - asdf21 7y ago
    I know French and English and several programming languages, and they do seem very similar to me. >You can't describe a dream in Java. Before you write any code, you first imagine how the application should work. So yes, a person can codify something from their imagination into Java.
    - paganel 7y ago
      > and they do seem very similar to me. Maybe on a superficial level, as a lot of the English vocabulary is taken from (older) French, but once for you example read D.H. Lawrence and Proust in original (two great writers both of them) you'll be able to see and most especially feel ("feel" as in not "scientifically" provable) that the two languages are indeed very different. The same goes for French and Spanish or French and Italian, even though all three of them are Romance languages once you go down to the specifics things are starting to look and fell more and more different. I know that this being a programming-oriented website everything out-there is seen as either data or information, and as such languages are just seen as ways of forwarding or communication that data/information, but in the real world languages have a lot deeper meaning than that.

presstumer 7y ago

I often wonder if learning a dialect of a certain field has a similar effect. For example math terms or a complex programming language with things like monads

fpgaminer 7y ago
I would think so. I often find myself cross-germinating the concepts I've learned from new programming languages, paradigms, and mathematics to other problems and discussions. Most recently I learned TLA+ which plays heavily with set theory; in particular the construction of logical "filters" on infinite sets. Ever since, those ways of thinking have become part of my mental toolbox that I interject into other areas.
- snakeboy 7y ago
  I think in mathematics and programming, you often are working with an abstract idea or algorithm, projected onto the tools you are using. Be that the syntax/style/limitations of a specific language, or a branch of mathematics. In that way, it is the same phenomenon of trying to express an abstract idea, projected onto the language in which you are speaking, with similar issues of syntax/style/limitations inherent to that language. However, a human language opens a whole dimension of culture and history that is somewhat truly inaccessible from the outside. In this way, math and programming don't appear to me to have an obvious analog.
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Iwan-Zotow 7y ago

Tastier as well

saschag 7y ago

just because schizms can be the cause of more activity and different insights it promises no more health than someone without conflicts, in principle. new conclusions could be beneficial, ie. understanding that spanish and english are equally imperfect but at the same time it's like claiming that we need to experience bad for good to be good. i speak a number of different languages and dialects and all it gave me is the realisation that babel bla. the goal should be a whole(some) dense system. with only few necessary disconnects.

magwa101 7y ago

Not clicking through to TED "everything will be solved with our optimism".

faitswulff 7y ago
I don't know if this is against the rules here on HN, but I took the liberty of downloading and prettifying the subtitles from the talk: > ¿Hablas español? Parlez-vous français? 你会说中文吗？ > If you answered, "sí," "oui," or "会" and you're watching this in English, chances are you belong to the world's bilingual and multilingual majority. And besides having an easier time traveling or watching movies without subtitles, knowing two or more languages means that your brain may actually look and work differently than those of your monolingual friends. > So what does it really mean to know a language? Language ability is typically measured in two active parts, speaking and writing, and two passive parts, listening and reading. While a balanced bilingual has near equal abilities across the board in two languages, most bilinguals around the world know and use their languages in varying proportions. And depending on their situation and how they acquired each language, they can be classified into three general types. > For example, let's take Gabriella, whose family immigrates to the US from Peru when she's two-years old. As a compound bilingual, Gabriella develops two linguistic codes simultaneously, with a single set of concepts, learning both English and Spanish as she begins to process the world around her. Her teenage brother, on the other hand, might be a coordinate bilingual, working with two sets of concepts, learning English in school, while continuing to speak Spanish at home and with friends. Finally, Gabriella's parents are likely to be subordinate bilinguals who learn a secondary language by filtering it through their primary language. > Because all types of bilingual people can become fully proficient in a language regardless of accent or pronunciation, the difference may not be apparent to a casual observer. But recent advances in brain imaging technology have given neurolinguists a glimpse into how specific aspects of language learning affect the bilingual brain. It's well known that the brain's left hemisphere is more dominant and analytical in logical processes, while the right hemisphere is more active in emotional and social ones, though this is a matter of degree, not an absolute split. > The fact that language involves both types of functions while lateralization develops gradually with age, has lead to the critical period hypothesis. According to this theory, children learn languages more easily because the plasticity of their developing brains lets them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, language is lateralized to one hemisphere, usually the left. If this is true, learning a language in childhood may give you a more holistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts. Conversely, recent research showed that people who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in the second language than in their native one. > But regardless of when you acquire additional languages, being multilingual gives your brain some remarkable advantages. Some of these are even visible, such as higher density of the grey matter that contains most of your brain's neurons and synapses, and more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language. The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases, like Alzheimer's and dementia by as much as five years. > The idea of major cognitive benefits to bilingualism may seem intuitive now, but it would have surprised earlier experts. Before the 1960s, bilingualism was considered a handicap that slowed a child's development by forcing them to spend too much energy distinguishing between languages, a view based largely on flawed studies. And while a more recent study did show that reaction times and errors increase for some bilingual students in cross-language tests, it also showed that the effort and attention needed to switch between languages triggered more activity in, and potentially strengthened, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that plays a large role in executive function, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information. > So, while bilingualism may not necessarily make you smarter, it does make your brain more healthy, complex and actively engaged, and even if you didn't have the good fortune of learning a second language as a child, it's never too late to do yourself a favor and make the linguistic leap from, "Hello," to, "Hola," "Bonjour" or "你好’s" because when it comes to our brains a little exercise can go a long way.

timwaagh 7y ago

survivorship bias I guess.

stazz1 7y ago

What is a language, anyway? Is that where you use symbols to represent grunts?

dagav 7y ago

I've been learning a second language, one that is very different than English, and it has been a complete mind fuck. I can see why knowing two languages would have a positive effect on your brain: another language is an entire other way of thinking about the world. Language is an artifact of the culture that created it, and it crystallizes the values and beliefs of that culture. By learning the language, you can enter into an entire other world.

point78 7y ago
What language?
- dagav 7y ago
  Hebrew.
  - point78 7y ago
    It's a mindfuck only when the alphabet is all goofy compared to your native language imo. Learned Spanish and was relatively easy...now learning Russian and yes...mindfuck!
  - edanm 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, why Hebrew? (I'm a Hebrew speaker) > Language is an artifact of the culture that created it, and it crystallizes the values and beliefs of that culture. By learning the language, you can enter into an entire other world. A common take, although I don't know if I would take it too far. Hebrew specifically has the advantage of having been re-created from nothing only a relatively short time ago (150 years more or less), so maybe in a sense it's more explicitly codified. I'm genuinely curious what kind of things you think that learning Hebrew shows about Hebrew-speaking culture though - I'd love to be proven wrong!
    - dagav 7y ago
      I'm Jewish and my father is Israeli, so I was learning to connect with them and my heritage. I'm no expert on Hebrew but one thing I noticed is it's connection to the Bible: Adam means "Man" or "Mankind" in Hebrew. "Earth" is Adama. "Human Being" is Ben Adam, literally "Son of Adam", or "Son of Man".

leroy_masochist 7y ago

Interesting point about adults acquiring language through the left side of the brain vs. children acquiring through both hemispheres. I wonder whether that is nature or nurture -- does it reflect changes in brain structure in adulthood, or does it reflect the ways in which each respective group tends to learn languages?

zzzcpan 7y ago
That point is actually about emotions. I think what it means is that children are only developing brain circuity related to emotions and so develop emotional associations with the words in a second language, while adults already did and can understand, control and ignore emotions better and do not develop emotional associations with the words in a second language, or at least not as much.

thendrill 7y ago

—. —

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JamesBarney 7y ago

Later meta analysis that shows this effect is not true and is due to publication bias. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29494195/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29494195/

zzzcpan 7y ago
That meta analysis can't be more biased itself. Just from the first few lines it sounds like they are offended there are benefits to knowing multiple languages.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  I don't think the best way to evaluate a study is to read the first few lines and guess at how offended the 8 researches are who wrote the paper. Also I would describe the following as skeptical more than offended. > Because of enduring experience of managing two languages, bilinguals have been argued to develop superior executive functioning compared with monolinguals. Despite extensive investigation, there is, however, no consensus regarding the existence of such a bilingual advantage
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    > "bilinguals have been argued to develop superior executive functioning compared with monolinguals" This is the one I find very problematic. They made up an entire unscientific claim to disprove.
    - casefields 7y ago
      Yup. That’s setting up the parameters in an obvious way to strawman an opponents argument.
      - CrazyStat 7y ago
        It can't be a strawman when it's an argument that the opponents have actually made. Examples are easy to find: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-06955-009 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-06955-009 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28895004/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28895004/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22464592/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22464592/

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sbuttgereit 7y ago

This is the kind of news story that can be so incredibly misused once it gets into public discourse. I would expect that while the study comments on an interesting data point for academics in the field, in reality the variance that you'll experience interacting with any one multi-lingual person or any one mono-lingual person will simply mean that it's trivia in day-to-day life. Even in designing curricula for a large group where anything of significance in this study would be worthwhile considering, you'd still want to know how this compares to other fields of pursuit on some sort of outcome basis before yelling, "language programs for the win!" The thesis of the title and the short article (no I didn't watch/listen to the media) doesn't answer the relative merit question. So maybe this research points to further study or is nice knowledge for knowledge's sake... but unless there's something more revealing in the linked YouTube video... I wouldn't read into it any more than that.

michaelcampbell 7y ago

I wonder if this is actually language, or just that language requires so much of your brain that anything that requires the same amount would have the same benefits.

OldFatCactus 7y ago

What's the best way to learn a new language?

WilliamEdward 7y ago
Immersion. Learn as many random words as you can, by pure memorisation, and then sit around people who speak the language so you can force yourself to learn the language. I 'learned' 2 languages in school and by far the most important part is knowing as many words as possible, and actually speaking it with natives. Other than that, you wont get too much out of written exercises or duolingo or even books. Just stick to those two things. However, the best way to learn random words is to play a game or read a book, and then google / dictionary search any word you don't know. It should be easy to find people who can speak the language with you, but if you can't find anyone, well... why learn it?
giovani 7y ago
I don't know about any research on the matter, but I can say 2 things that worked very well for me: 1) take an intensive course first 2) then live in a country where the main language was the one I learned Granted, point 2 isn't easy, but nothing can beat it. The most important point is to use the language on a regular basis. If you don't, you'll forget it quickly. [edited: formatting]
mistahenry 7y ago
In my opinion, Assimil for learning the grammar and Pimsleur for speaking and listening comprehension. That’s how I learned German by myself enough in a year to get a job in Germany More important than the method, though, is that you never miss a day of practice
einarfd 7y ago
Move to somewhere they speak it and force yourself to use it. Even if you could get away with using a language you know better. Accepting that you would get it wrong, and keep trying even if you sound stupid and it feels hard would also help.
theonemind 7y ago

Aperocky 7y ago

Alternatively, people who know programming languages are on average smarter. However, that would be confusing cause and effect

xenospn 7y ago

As a data point, I'm bilingual, and have been for about 30 years (my first language isn't English), and I'm kind of an idiot. So there's that. In all seriousness though, this is something that's only debated in very large countries with a dominant culture and common language (US, Russia, UK, France, etc). Growing up in a smaller country that has its own language, pretty much everyone has to read/write and speak English at some level.

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acroback 7y ago

I can speak 3 languages and can understand close to 3 more. And I think I am the dumbest person at work, damn why is my Brain so slow? :(

thendrill 7y ago
Because ignorance is bliss. The more you know the more you know you don't know. Which 3?

mistahenry 7y ago

In my experience, learning a second language has clogged my brain up a bit. Maybe it’s healthier and more engaged, but it’s sometimes hard to say if it’s truly been beneficial from a cognitive perspective. I’ve certainly been humbled and become more confident in pushing through mistakes made in public. It’s also a really cool skill. But it often feels like my memory for words is like a unordered linked list. Sometimes I get the wrong language and must iterate over the list to find the correct language version.

Baeocystin 7y ago
For what it's worth, I agree with you. I consider myself multisemilingal- English is my primary language, but I have up-goer 5 levels of proficiency in half a dozen other languages. I enjoy it, but I do not feel like it has been a net improvement in terms of cognitive function. If anything, more mental housekeeping is required when I sit down to write in any language, including English. I think many people, even multilingual ones, fail to truly consider what they mean by 'multilingual'. Words and grammar are only the bare surface of what you need to learn- what actually happens is that you grow a different model of mindset and culture, one where the words of the new language have meaning. This only happens over a lifetime of immersion and exposure to the prosaic realities of the language in question.
distantaidenn 7y ago
I somewhat agree. I'm a native English speaker, but I use Japanese daily and learning Korean, now. Sometimes it is a bit of a jumble, but I attribute it more to laziness than anything else. My brain just reaches for the easiest word, and I have to struggle to find the correct one. As a bit of an aside, because of the sentence order and cognates, when speaking Korean, I often first go from English to Japanese and finally can stumble out some broken sentence. Japanese to Korean is almost a one to one mapping when speaking simple sentences, based on both languages being agglutinative and having SOV ordering.

yelloweyes 7y ago

yeah no shit. multilingual people usually have more money.

detaro 7y ago
source? rationale?

theonemind 7y ago

That seems like a lot of wasted associations. I already have an (english) word for most concepts, and don't really feel like I need a second word for, say, "bread", although words for new concepts or concepts grouped in interesting ways might have some value. I like the Swedish word "lagom", which doesn't seem to have an English analog. It'd interest me to know what aspect(s) of multilingualism promotes a healthier brain so that I can get the benefits from doing something more productive or useful. Can I block out conversation around me and do math problems for the same benefit? Meditate? Stop and consistently reframe situations by some other world-view? My mind just balks at the need to learn a second set of words for concepts I already know, since the first set seemed entirely arbitrary to begin with.

jddj 7y ago
There's been some research which has shown the reframing being effective, but they only studied whether considering eg. a trolley problem in any second language produced significantly different results compared to a native language. Somewhat ironically in the context of wasted associations, the article is in Spanish. But this is one link: https://www.psicologosonline.cl/articulos/para-decidir-con-frialdad-piensa-en-otro-idioma https://www.psicologosonline.cl/articulos/para-decidir-con-f...

codr7 7y ago

I thought we pretty much agreed that's how it works for programming languages, and from my experience it applies to natural language as well. My native language is Swedish. I've studied English since I was 8 (and I'm 42 now), German for 3 years in school and lived there for 4, two years of Italian and two years of Chinese. It seems the more languages I learn, the more interesting and worthwhile it gets to compare similarities/differences and the easier it is to learn new ones. Learning a completely different language, such as Chinese coming from English, has similar benefits to learning Lisp coming from Java. It stretches the brain in exotic ways.

ummonk 7y ago

Although I’m bilingual, in practice I’ve become mostly monolingual in that I only ever speak English. I feel like this has resulted in my thinking becoming less abstract / conceptual and more verbal.

NicoJuicy 7y ago

A lot depends if it's the same culture ( eg. Roman) I speak French, Dutch and English. I understand German and can do simple things with it. I can understand Spanish a little bit. But I don't think my brain is different. The mapping is very similar between those languages. An Asian/Russian language would be very hard for me to.