As mentioned in a previous blog article last January, studies led in Canada have shown that a lifelong practice of bilingualism could act as a shield against Alzheimer-related degenerations.

This June 12, The Guardian took a closer look at these studies through an interview with Canadian neuroscientist Ellen Bialystok, professor at the York University of Toronto. The eminent specialist mentions the advantages of bilinguals over monolinguals, at different stages of their lives.

Among others, studies conducted on a group of children show that when a bilingual person is speaking in one language, the other language is active in his or her mind. According to professor Bialystok, these people develop a particular cognitive system called the executive control system, “whose job it is to resolve competition” between the two languages in presence.

She also claims “something as ordinary as speaking a couple of languages reconfigures the brain network in a way that positively affects certain things that brains do”. And most of the few examples she takes happen to relate to Alzheimer’s.

A study was led at a geriatric center in Toronto with 200 clear cases of Alzheimer’s disease. The research team separated the bilinguals from the monolinguals, and checked at what age the patients had been diagnosed. “The bilinguals were all significantly older, by about four years. We repeated that study using another 200 patients and got identical results”, Bialystok says.

Another similar study showed that bilingual Alzheimer-diagnosed patients could cope with the disease better than monolingual Alzheimer-diagnosed patients, even when they had a more advanced form of the disease.

Be that as it may, and that’s professor Bialystok’s conclusion, “any intellectually engaged activity requiring intense involvement will keep your brain healthy”. “Language should be a central part of the curriculum but not because bilingualism postpones the onset of dementia (…). Learning other languages is important because it helps you understand other people, other cultures, other ways of thinking“.

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