The brains of bilinguals are regularly studied. The latest was conducted by the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal, which discovered that people who speak several languages are more inclined to focus on the essentials than others. To reach this conclusion, the researchers observed and compared the way the brains of two groups functioned:on the one hand, unilingual elderly people and on the other, bilingual elderly people.
A very simple experiment has been set up. Participants were asked to focus on specific visual information, namely the color of an object, regardless of where the object was. Result:the brain of monolinguals follows a complex circuit rich in connections to finally arrive at visual information, while the brain of bilinguals goes straight to the point. Clearly, people in the second group dwell less on superfluous details because “their brain favors the use of the visual processing area located at the back of the brain. This area is expert in detecting the visual characteristics of objects, therefore expert in the task in question,” explains Ana Inés Ansaldo, one of the researchers in charge of the study. A more efficient brain and the mastery of several languages, we may be going back to our English books!
