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This is why they chose Barcelona, where the use of 2 languages (Catalan and Spanish) was "highly variable" and everyone in the city spoke or at least understood

This is why they chose Barcelona, where the use of 2 languages (Catalan and Spanish) was "highly variable" and everyone in the city spoke or at least understood 2 languages: "We wanted to take advantage of this variability, and instead of comparing monolingual and bilingual people, we looked at whether in Barcelona – where everyone is more or less bilingual – there was a certain degree of bilingualism that had neuroprotective benefits."

andy_ppp 6y ago
I think this doesn’t disprove the theory I’ve set out that people who know more languages than the average local population are likely to have other markers correlated with lower Alzheimer’s risk.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  It's not about knowing more languages (I would be surprised to learn that they only knew two, after all it's Europe). This paper instead studies differences between people who actually use multiple languages, against people who don't. There's still corellation here, like professions where the lingua franca isn't the local language (programming, medicine, music (to some degree), sciences, etc). The paper claims the effect appears equally strong in all occupations though.
- lentil_soup 6y ago
  But that's not the case here, Barcelona is a bilingual city. The average population speaks both Catalan and Spanish.
pvaldes 6y ago
Very obvious propaganda to promote an agenda, not more, not less. And don't make me start to talking about how normal is the mental health of the same people that trashed and burned Barcelona last years, because they felt "oppressed" by a man that died 30 years before they born. Or the lobby trying to erase the history claiming than Leonardo Da Vinci, Cervantes and "put your name here" were really from Catalonia. Very sane behavior, for sure. Trust me (or your gut if you prefer). You can find crazy people equally among bilingual, monolingual, translingual and people with just mischieving tongues. Just take a look at how mental asylums are distributed. This is just one of thousands of articles that support a patriotic narrative so are published. Is politics disguised as science. The opposite idea would never reach the journals.

andy_ppp 6y ago

I think this doesn’t disprove the theory I’ve set out that people who know more languages than the average local population are likely to have other markers correlated with lower Alzheimer’s risk.

wongarsu 6y ago
It's not about knowing more languages (I would be surprised to learn that they only knew two, after all it's Europe). This paper instead studies differences between people who actually use multiple languages, against people who don't. There's still corellation here, like professions where the lingua franca isn't the local language (programming, medicine, music (to some degree), sciences, etc). The paper claims the effect appears equally strong in all occupations though.
lentil_soup 6y ago
But that's not the case here, Barcelona is a bilingual city. The average population speaks both Catalan and Spanish.

pvaldes 6y ago

Very obvious propaganda to promote an agenda, not more, not less. And don't make me start to talking about how normal is the mental health of the same people that trashed and burned Barcelona last years, because they felt "oppressed" by a man that died 30 years before they born. Or the lobby trying to erase the history claiming than Leonardo Da Vinci, Cervantes and "put your name here" were really from Catalonia. Very sane behavior, for sure. Trust me (or your gut if you prefer). You can find crazy people equally among bilingual, monolingual, translingual and people with just mischieving tongues. Just take a look at how mental asylums are distributed. This is just one of thousands of articles that support a patriotic narrative so are published. Is politics disguised as science. The opposite idea would never reach the journals.