The cognitive benefits of being multilingual

Many studies have shown that the more elderly people "exercise" their brains every day, the less cognitive decline they experience overall.

Jumping between languages is a particularly effective way to attain this benefit!

In fact, several studies have demonstrated that bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by an average of five years!

When you are multilingual, you constantly switch between languages without thinking about it. And this is why multilingual people tend to have better developed executive control systems.

A more developed executive control system allows multilingual people to better perform tasks that require high-level thought, multitasking, and sustained attention.

Learning a new language requires the brain to express similar thoughts in different ways and because of this multilingual people develop greater cognitive flexibility. This translates into other areas as improved creativity and problem-solving, as well as the ability to perceive situations in different ways.

Inhibition is key to learning new information and skills, as it allows you to focus on what's important while reducing interference from what you already know, as well as similar concepts. Since multilingual people have better-developed inhibition, studies demonstrate that they can not only learn a third or fourth language quicker, but can develop any learned skill faster.

Brain imaging techniques, such as fMRIs, have shown that multilingual brains tend to activate the linguistic portion of their brains even when not engaged in linguistic tasks. This leads researchers to believe that the brain’s ability to connect skills tends to enhance cognitive function over time.

Studies show that multilingual people have a higher density of grey matter in their brains, and older bilingual people usually have better-maintained white matter, even late in life

A study done at the University of Chicago demonstrated that bilinguals tend to make more rational decisions. As language contains nuance and subtle implications in its vocabulary that can subconsciously influence your judgment, thinking in your native language tends to be fraught with emotional biases.

Multilingual people tend to be better at observing their environment and spotting misleading information. Perhaps this is because of their enhanced inhibition skills. Multilingual people have been shown to be keen observers of the world around them, as well as more skilled at identifying and correctly analyzing the sub-context of a situation and interpreting the social environment. This makes multilingual people highly perceptive,

As you can see, the cognitive benefits of multilingualism can potentially outweigh the concerted effort of learning a new language.