Being bilingual helps you tackle dementia
By: Team Ifairer | Posted: 10-01-2017
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Bilinguals may be better at saving brain power and are equipped to stave off cognitive ageing or dementia, a new study has found. Researchers from the University of Montreal in Canada compared what are known as functional brain connections between seniors who are monolingual and seniors who are bilingual.
They established that years of bilingualism change how the brain carries out tasks that require concentrating on one piece of information without becoming distracted by other information. This makes the brain more efficient and economical with its resources.
To arrive at this finding, they asked two groups of seniors - one of monolinguals and one of bilinguals - to perform a task that involved focusing on visual information while ignoring spatial information.
The researchers compared the networks between different brain areas as people did the task.