SEtalk: What a Second Language Does to Your Brain

Have you ever felt like a different person in another language? I have, and it took me years to understand why it happens. It's often said that learning a language opens doors. What I've come to believe is that it also rewires the mind. At forty-one, I moved to Lisbon, and I knew no Portuguese. Ordering coffee felt like an exam, and I failed it daily. About a year in, something shifted, and friends told me I was a different person in Portuguese. I was louder and warmer, and I was far more patient! Some of the clearest evidence comes from a military academy in Sweden, where recruits learn languages like Arabic or Russian from scratch. Researchers scanned their brains before and after three months of study. Parts of the brain linked to memory and language had physically grown! Medical students, who were studying just as hard, showed no such change. So it seems it wasn't hard work alone that made the difference. That study lasted months, but the benefits may well last decades. In a Toronto memory clinic, Ellen Bialystok's team compared hundreds of patients. Those who'd spoken two languages all their lives developed symptoms of dementia around four years later! Admittedly, not every study has found such a clear effect, but it's widely thought that juggling two languages keeps the brain flexible. Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding concerns how we make decisions. In 2012, a Chicago team gave people a classic decision problem, framed either in terms of lives saved or lives lost. In their native language, people's choices flipped with the wording, but in a foreign language, the bias largely disappeared! The less emotional a language feels, the more calmly we decide. It isn't that I'm a nicer person in Portuguese, it's that I have to slow down and choose every word. Had I never left my comfortable English-only life, I'd never have met this side of myself. So, provided you're willing to feel a little foolish, start a language, and allow yourself to be bad at it. What if a new version of you is waiting in another language? Thank you — or, as I'd now say, obrigada!