Learning another language appears to slow brain ageing by up to 13 years | Hacker News Reader

Learning another language appears to slow brain ageing by up to 13 years

theguardian.com

13 years if you speak 4 languages, 6 years for two languages:

> The study found that those who spoke two languages had brains that appeared around six years younger than those who spoke only one language. People who spoke three languages had brains that appeared around seven years younger, and for those who spoke four languages, their brains appeared about 13 years younger.

Years ago, when I was considering putting effort and time into learning more computer programming languages, I realized I cared far more about learning other human languages: I was a recent parent, and the importance of strong, positive bonds with other humans was dawning on me, along with an appreciation for mortality. So, I dropped a few energy levels in the computing realm and jumped into learning more spoken languages, using Anki, library books, podcasts, movies in the target languages (thanks to kanopy, another public-library resource paid for by tax money), and, more recently, Clozemaster and Mango (through the local public library! and they have some indigenous north american languages, but none from the region where I currently live; I'll seek local help for that).

> they could not rule out the potential influence of other factors that may have an impact on the brain, such as lifestyle and social engagement.

Social engagement has been shown in many ways to be crucial to health.

> The researchers took account of factors such as people’s age, sex and education, but cautioned that they could not rule out the potential influence of other factors that may have an impact on the brain, such as lifestyle and social engagement.

Perhaps it's just a correlation. Number of spoken linguages may correlate with income, frequent travel, sociability, or other factors that improve or filtre for health, brain health included.

Conversely, I would not be shocked to see the vast majority of multi-linguals to be low-income immigrants.

Perhaps there's a U-curve. When I worked in a hotel in a metropolitan city, almost all workers there were multilingual. People from lower-income countries tended to do the unskilled work, whereas people with higher education tended to work at the front desk and in office roles, both having a mix of temporary and permanent residents.

It makes sense to me that the great in-between has less incentive to learn another language, if they're in a monolingual milieu. They don't have the economic push to find better opportunities elsewhere nor the means (or at least the idea) to travel and explore.

Depends on the population they drew the study sample from.

One thing that stood out to me some years ago and I found interesting is that depending on the language I'm using my thought patterns kind of change.

Putting in another term, I think differently in different languages.

This phenomenon is referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Learning is the brains way of exercising, though I believe you genuinely need to want to learn something which helps in the slowing of ageing part

From the article: "the earlier you speak them, the better"

I don't think that this quite matches the notion that learning is the brain's way of exercising, if learning/exercising as a child prevents aging more than learning/exercising as an adult.

Imagine if we could get all of our physical exercising in as children and become lazy as adults. ;-)

An alternative hypothesis might be that conversation is the brain's way of exercising.

In my experience, children who excersise a lot become adults who have a far better baseline and exercise comes easier. Children who never do anything become adults for whom excersise is much more difficult. This seems in line with what the article says about learning?

It slows aging, not reverses it. If the first time you learn 4 languages or get into exercise is when you are 70, you don't immediately have the mine and body of a 57 year old

> This seems in line with what the article says about learning?

No?

Children who learn multiple languages don't necessarily become adults who continue to learn more languages beyond what they learned in childhood, so the analogy with exercise seems to break down.

Children learn the languages that are spoken around them. If it's one language, they learn one, if two or three, they learn two or three. This happens naturally, for all children, regardless of personal habits.

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48805652

Link to the actual research?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-025-01000-2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com