The Habit That Could Make Your Brain 13 Years Younger

Of course, there are a lot of things that one can do for general healthy longevity.

We wrote about some of the top ones, here: These Top Few Things Make The Biggest Difference To Health

But what, specifically, of brain health? Well, there are a lot of things for that too, but here’s one with what looks like quite a big impact:

You can choose how much…

Researchers (Dr. Lucia Amoruso et al.) investigated the relationship between the number of languages someone speaks, and the youthfulness of that person’s brain.

First, the initial population-level findings: in an analysis of 86,149 adults, greater multilingual exposure was associated with a lower probability of accelerated aging, while monolingualism was associated with a higher probability.

Next, the group-level findings: for this part, Dr. Amoruso and her team created an epigenetic brain-aging clock, which, per the press release from the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, was a case of…

❝They used a technique called magnetoencephalography which measures brain activity by the faint magnetic fields produced when brain cells are active. The researchers used artificial intelligence to process data on brain activity in people of different ages to show what is a normal level of brain connectivity at any given age. ❞

The results, in few words, were that (compared to monolinguals),

• Speaking 2 languages was associated with a brain appearing about 6 years younger
• Speaking 3 languages was associated with a brain appearing about 7 years younger
• Speaking 4 languages was associated with a brain appearing about 13 years younger
• Speaking more languages than that, the study cannot speak for, as the sample did not provide sufficient data

You can read about this, here: Speaking another language could slow ageing in the brain

And here: Multilingualism protects against accelerated aging in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 27 European countries

You might be wondering: doesn’t adding more languages start to run the risk of getting them confused with each other?

And the answer is: yes, yes it does. But it’s not that big a problem and at worst will create occasional sillinesses, usually only with small words.

Writer’s personal examples, as someone who speaks many languages:

• Someone messaging me “Hi!” and I got confused because my brain was in Ukrainian and I read it as “Ні!” (looks the same but is actually completely different Cyrillic letters, and would be pronounced “Nee!” and means “No!”)
• Having a momentary pause for thought because “vi” is “we” in Swedish and “you” in Esperanto and “ni” is “you” in Swedish and “we” in Esperanto
• Approximately 15 minutes ago at time of writing, briefly responding inappropriately to a Dutch friend who wrote “Nouja, je overschat hoeveel je niet weet” (“Well, you overestimate how much you don’t know”) because I have this silly thing whereby sometimes I accidentally parse je/jij (“you” in Dutch) as “I”, because “je” is “I” in French, which I speak fluently, and in Norwegian, which I also speak fluently, “jeg” (which depending on accent/dialect sounds similar to “jij”) means “I”. So, the brain pathways that I’ve used for very many years (for French and Norwegian) sometimes get accidentally selected when reading Dutch (which I started learning last week).

And this is not a common thing; those examples are years apart and I use at least four languages every day. So, nothing insurmountable and nothing that can’t be fixed in a few seconds once every few years. Keeps the brain sharp to have to respond to such challenges anyway 🙂

This is also interesting, in light of such things as: Language Fluency Beats General Intelligence & Memory For Longevity ← and in this one’s case, it doesn’t even have to be a second language, although that helps a lot.

Because if you are going to get started on even “just” a second language, then it becomes: An Underrated Tool Against Alzheimer’s ← you don’t even have to learn the second language to a high level, to benefit.

And when it comes to reading, this is of course a benefit in any language, especially if you apply such ideas as those we discuss in our main feature about that: Reading, Better: Reading As A Cognitive Exercise ← for specific, evidence-based ways to tweak your reading to fight cognitive decline.

Want to learn more?

We recommend also considering the following:

How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

Take care!