Bilingual People Great at Saving Brain Power, New Study Claims

Lisa Franchi January 12, 2017

New research shows that years of bilingualism change how the brain carries out tasks that require concentrating on one piece of information without becoming distracted by other information. This ability makes their brain more efficient and economical with its resources, and could slash the risk of debilitating mental health problems, including dementia.

The study, led by Ana Inés Ansaldo, PhD, a researcher at the Centre de recherche de l’Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal, looked at the functional brain connections between seniors who are monolingual and seniors who are bilingual. They compared what the networks between different brain areas as people did the task. They found that monolinguals recruited a larger circuit with multiple connections, whereas bilinguals recruited a smaller circuit that was more appropriate for the required information.

"After years of daily practice managing interference between two languages, bilinguals become experts at selecting relevant information and ignoring information that can distract from a task. In this case, bilinguals showed higher connectivity between visual processing areas located at the back of the brain. This area is specialized in detecting the visual characteristics of objects and therefore is specialized in the task used in this study. These data indicate that the bilingual brain is more efficient and economical, as it recruits fewer regions and only specialized regions," Dr Ansaldo explained.

Benefits of Bilingualism

The research team highlights two benefits of being bilingual. The first is that bilinguals have more centralized and specialized functional connections which save brain resources. Second, they have more achieve the same result by not using the brain’s frontal regions, which are vulnerable to ageing. This provides extra protection against debilitating mental illnesses, including dementia.

"We have observed that bilingualism has a concrete impact on brain function and that this may have a positive impact on cognitive aging. We now need to study how this function translates to daily life, for example, when concentrating on one source of information instead of another, which is something we have to do every day. And we have yet to discover all the benefits of bilingualism,"

Their findings were published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics.

Source of this article:

Pierre Berroir et al, Interference control at the response level: Functional networks reveal higher efficiency in the bilingual brain, Journal of Neurolinguistics

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