Balance Your Health

New Advantages to a Bilingual Education

If you can speak and read in another language, your brain may have developed several advantages that your monolingual family and friends don’t have.

Research into the neurobiology of bilingualism reports that being fluent in two languages, particularly if you learned as a young child, can enhance your ability to concentrate. Probably more importantly, being bilingual may protect you against dementia and other age-related cognitive conditions.

The research also provides a better understanding of how the brain organizes speech and communication tasks. As a result more targeted and effective therapies fare being studied to help bilingual individuals recover their communication skills after a brain injury.

It wasn’t that long ago when parents and educators worried that exposing children to a second language when they were very young might delay language skills and intellectual growth. Not so. The research shows no difference in reaching language milestones like saying first words. In fact, just the opposite. Bilingual preschoolers could focus better than their monolingual classmates.

Here’s what the American Speech and Hearing Association says about the advantages of being bilingual:

Most children have the capacity and facility to learn two or more languages. Research suggests there are advantages to being bilingual, such as, linguistic and metalinguistic abilities and cognitive flexibility, such as, concept formation, divergent thinking and general reasoning and verbal abilities.

My advice: Teach your children or grandchildren a second language.

My big question: If it works so well for children, and the brain is known to have some elasticity, then if we learn a second language as adults, will that benefit us – our cognitive skills, our concentration as we get older? And will it also protect us against dementia – at least to some degree?

What do you think? Does anyone know of any research on adults and learning a second language? I’d be willing to take some time out of my life and relearn one of the languages I studied in high school and college. Would you make the effort?

Share your thoughts.

To a successful balanced and healthy lifestyle,

Ruthan

Ruthan Brodsky provides content marketing online and offline for entrepreneurs and health care providers.

www.balanceyourhealth.com     www.theagingofanorexia.com

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Another Reason Why the Mediterranean Diet Works

As long as you’re concentrating on your New Year’s resolutions to lose weight this year, I’d like to get you off to the really good start by motivating you even more.

Our brains need fat to perform correctly.

If you want to lose weight and you’re eliminating all fats from your diet, you could be starving your brain. On the other hand, if you’re a food junkie and consume sliders on a regular basis, you’re waistline may be growing and your brain may be sloshing in gunk.

The hitch is not every kind of fat is good for our brains and our brains are fussy about the amount of fat they receive. Unhealthy fat can impair the brain by clogging blood vessels, damaging communication among brain cells, and weakening the building of new nerve connections which are important to memory and learning. Not good.

Lefties Are Different

I am really interested in info about the brain. I think it’s fascinating that science is just starting to figure out why we do and don’t do the things we do and where all those processes are located in the brain. When I saw this story about left-handedness, I dove in head first.

I knew there had to be a reason why my husband and I see things so differently! I’m right-handed – very right sided – and he’s left handed. Now psychologists tell us that recent research demonstrates that the brains of left-handers even develop differently.

Research on left-handers has been going on for centuries. Plato and Aristotle wrote about it; so did Darwin. Everyone wants to know why some people are left-handed (10%) and why most of us are right-handed.

I’m interested because my dad and sister were left handed and my husband is left handed. Our two daughters and I are right-handed and the three of us agree we think very differently from their dad.

The good news is that brain scanning and genetic technology are cracking the left-handed code. For example, while searching for a specific gene for left-handedness researchers learned more subtle ways that DNA influences but doesn’t completely determine who we are and end up being.