Want a younger brain? Learn another language

""We wanted to address one of the most persistent gaps in ageing research, which is if multilingualism can actually delay ageing," says study co-author Agustín Ibañez, a neuroscientist at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago, Chile. Previous research in this area has suggested that speaking multiple languages can improve cognitive functions such memory and attention, which boosts brain health as we get older. But many of these studies rely on small sample sizes and use unreliable methods of measuring ageing, which leads to results that are inconsistent and ungeneralizable."

""The effects of multilingualism on ageing have always been controversial, but I don't think there has been a study of this scale before, which seems to demonstrate them quite decisively", says Christos Pliatsikas, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK. The paper's results could "bring a step change to the field", he adds. They might also "encourage people to go out and try to learn a second language, or keep that second language active", says Susan Teubner-Rhodes, a cognitive psychologist at Auburn University in Alabama."

"The researchers used a computational approach to explore the link between multilingualism and healthy ageing in 86,000 healthy participants aged between 51 and 90 years across 27 European counties. For each participant, they determined the biobehavioural age gap, the difference between their chronological age - the number of years they have been alive - and their 'predicted' age, which considers various physiological, lifestyle"

Multilingualism is associated with slower brain ageing and a roughly 50% lower likelihood of accelerated biological ageing compared with speaking only one language. A computational analysis examined 86,000 healthy adults aged 51–90 across 27 European countries and calculated a biobehavioural age gap comparing chronological age with a predicted age based on physiological and lifestyle factors. Prior smaller studies suggested language-related cognitive benefits for memory and attention but suffered from small samples and unreliable ageing measures. Findings imply language experience may support brain health and encourage maintenance or learning of additional languages to preserve cognitive function with age.

Read at Nature