Master a new language and grow hippocampus and cerebral cortex

Learn­ing New Lan­guages Helps The Brain Grow (Med­ical News):

The learn­ing of lan­guages allows the brain to stay “in shape”, by caus­ing cer­tain parts of the brain to grow, includ­ing the hip­pocam­pus and three areas of the cere­bral cortex…This find­ing came from sci­en­tists at Lund Uni­ver­si­ty, after exam­in­ing young recruits with a tal­ent for acquir­ing lan­guages who were able to speak in Ara­bic, Russ­ian, or Dari flu­ent­ly after just 13 months of learn­ing, before which they had no knowl­edge of the lan­guages…Johan Mårtens­son explained: “We were sur­prised that dif­fer­ent parts of the brain devel­oped to dif­fer­ent degrees depend­ing on how well the stu­dents per­formed and how much effort they had had to put in to keep up with the course.”

Study: Growth of lan­guage-relat­ed brain areas after for­eign lan­guage learn­ing (Neu­roim­age)

  • Abstract: The influ­ence of adult for­eign-lan­guage acqui­si­tion on human brain orga­ni­za­tion is poor­ly under­stood. We stud­ied cor­ti­cal thick­ness and hip­pocam­pal vol­umes of con­script inter­preters before and after three months of intense lan­guage stud­ies. Results revealed increas­es in hip­pocam­pus vol­ume and in cor­ti­cal thick­ness of the left mid­dle frontal gyrus, infe­ri­or frontal gyrus, and supe­ri­or tem­po­ral gyrus for inter­preters rel­a­tive to con­trols. The right hip­pocam­pus and the left supe­ri­or tem­po­ral gyrus were struc­tural­ly more mal­leable in inter­preters acquir­ing high­er pro­fi­cien­cy in the for­eign lan­guage. Inter­preters strug­gling rel­a­tive­ly more to mas­ter the lan­guage dis­played larg­er gray mat­ter increas­es in the mid­dle frontal gyrus. These find­ings con­firm struc­tur­al changes in brain regions known to serve lan­guage func­tions dur­ing for­eign-lan­guage acquisition.

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About SharpBrains

SHARPBRAINS is an independent think-tank and consulting firm providing services at the frontier of applied neuroscience, health, leadership and innovation.
SHARPBRAINS es un think-tank y consultoría independiente proporcionando servicios para la neurociencia aplicada, salud, liderazgo e innovación.

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