Language learning makes the brain grow, Swedish study suggests

"Previous research from other groups has indicated that Alzheimer's disease has a later onset in bilingual or multilingual groups."

That's reassuring to any of the many Hacker News readers who know some language besides English. A correlational finding like that, of course, doesn't demonstrate the direction of causation even if it is replicated many times. The kind of preliminary treatment-control finding reported in the press release submitted here would have to be replicated across several matches of experimental conditions and several variations of experimental conditions to figure out which learning programs, if any, reliably result in clinically meaningful increases in sizes of brain structures. (Then the next step would be following up on what the size changes really do for the patients over the long term.) All the usual considerations for evaluating preliminary research reports apply.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Having noted that, I'm curious about what other languages Hacker News participants speak. English is far from the only language known among us. Languages I have studied include (Modern Standard) Chinese to a proficiency level sufficient for employment as a translator and consecutive interpreter, German for reading professional materials, Japanese, Russian, other Sinitic languages, the original languages of the Bible, samplings of Latin and of various Romance languages, interesting constructed languages (conlangs), and others.

Here's a link to language-learning advice:

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

Here's one of my favorite links about one constructed language:

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=london-taxi...

They admit that this is a unique school for languages: from zero to fluency in just over a year, by practicing every waking hour of every day, at a pace not seen in any other language school. Do the medicine and science students used as the control group study as hard as this, and on the same deadline? Did they try looking at people who studied languages, but not at breakneck speed?

It seems to me that it's entirely possible, based on this data, that the causative factor is not that they studied languages, but that they studied so intently. I don't doubt that science students study hard, but language immersion schools can make it so everything you read, write, hear, or speak all day every day is 100% in the language you're studying. That's a hard feat to match: how do you make eating breakfast or checking email a medical lesson?

Sometimes, when I tell people this, they argue that they're "too old" to learn a new language. When they do, I tell them the following story.

I was in Berlin this March, and I met a Belgian who spoke 6 or 7 languages fluently (as many Belgians apparently do). I was currently on "vacation" from a semester abroad in Italy, where I was taking an intro Italian class and really enjoying it so far. I mentioned this to the Belgian, but I expressed my concern that I was too old to become fluent:

"You can't learn new languages properly once you're my age."

He scoffed. "Sure you can. You just have to open your mind!"

That line stuck with me. Now, it may or may not be true that your brain can't fully "accept" new languages past a certain stage in your development, but that's not the point. The point is that I believed that I couldn't, and that belief was actively discouraging my progress. So I followed the Belgian's advice: I stopped telling myself I was too old, I went out of my way to speak the language, and I pushed myself harder to become conversational. By the end of the semester, I'd achieved that. (I'm by no means fluent, but I'd like to live there again soon with fluency as a goal.)

I do wish that I'd started earlier, because I've uncovered a real passion and knack for languages that I didn't know I'd had. But—perhaps contrary to popular belief—it's never too late to start.

(As an aside, I found it interesting that after just three months, I spoke Italian better than I spoke German after three years of high school classes. I attribute this partly to actually living in Italy, but also to a broken language learning system in our public education. But that may be a comment for another day.)

piano tuning

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19398413

playing musical instrument

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-w...

I would expect similar effects from learning diff eq's or haskell and maybe from challenging sports like rock climbing, paragliding, or maybe Ashtanga yoga.