I strongly recommend language learning as a hobby. in my experience, it offers insight and opens up new ways of thinking about your mother tongue, too, as well as improving memory and ‘overall brain functionality’.

Exposure to 2 languages carries far-reaching benefits

People who can speak two languages are more adept at learning a new foreign language than their monolingual counterparts, according to research conducted at Northwestern University. And their bilingual advantage persists even when the new language they study is completely different from the languages they already know.

“It’s often assumed that individuals who’ve learned multiple languages simply have a natural aptitude for learning languages,” said Viorica Marian, associate professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northwestern University. “While that is true in some cases, our research shows that the experience of becoming bilingual itself makes learning a new language easier.”

In the first study to explore a possible advantage in bilinguals who learned a second language at a parent’s knee, Northwestern researchers asked three groups of native English speakers — English-Mandarin bilinguals, English-Spanish bilinguals and monolinguals — to master words in an invented language that bore no relationship to English, Spanish or Mandarin.

They found that the bilingual participants — whether English-Mandarin or English-Spanish speakers – mastered nearly twice the number of words as the monolinguals.

And they believe the bilingual advantage is likely to generalize beyond word learning to other kinds of language learning, including learning new words in one’s own language and a very basic ability to maintain verbal information.

“After learning another language, individuals can transfer language learning strategies they’ve acquired to subsequent language learning and become better language learners in general,” said Northwestern School of Communication’s Marian.

Marian and Margarita Kaushanskaya, now assistant professor of communicative disorders at University of Wisconsin-Madison, are co-authors of “The Bilingual Advantage in Novel World Learning.” Their study will be published in the August issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

The study has important implications for educators who are considering the appropriate age at which to introduce foreign language instruction as well as for parents who in increasing numbers have an option to enroll their children in dual language immersion programs.

“We’re seeing that exposure to two languages early in life carries far-reaching benefits,” said co-author Kaushanskaya. “Our research tells us that children who grow up with two languages wind up being better language learners later on.”

Although there are more opportunities today for children to participate in dual language immersion programs than in the past, parents often avoid them for fear that dual language instruction may end up confusing or distracting their children and inhibit subject learning.

In research presented in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, however, the two co-authors demonstrate that bilinguals actually are better able than monolinguals to inhibit irrelevant information while learning a new language. Repressing irrelevant information, after all, is something bilinguals do every time they speak.

What’s more, the majority of the world’s population outside the United States is bilingual or multilingual, Marian noted. In the U.S., approximately one out of five American households speaks a language other than English at home, according to the U.S. Census. And, with higher birth rates among Hispanics relative to the rest of the population, that proportion is rapidly growing.

Previous research already indicates that individuals who have formally studied two or more languages as adults more easily acquire a new language than monolinguals. New research even indicates that the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in bilinguals is, on average, delayed by four years compared to monolinguals.

The Northwestern researchers chose to study bilinguals who learned a second language at an early age and in a non-classroom study to avoid suggestions that their subjects simply were exceptionally talented or motivated foreign language learners.

For their study in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, the researchers controlled for age, education, English language vocabulary size and, in the case of bilinguals, second language proficiency. Sixty Northwestern University students in their early twenties — 20 monolinguals, 20 early English-Mandarin speakers and 20 early English-Spanish speakers – participated.

All participants were tested twice for word mastery in the invented language. The initial test took place immediately after they heard and repeated the invented language words. The second test occurred a week later.

Think about it – the human brain is thought to contain 50-100 billion neurons, and the human genome has 3 billion base pairs. So, you can see that the amount of digital storage required just to represent a headful of neurons is 3×10^20 – that’s at least 300 BILLION GIGABYTES of info.

Well, it really does boggle the mind. In the meantime, have a read:

New Scientist – Memories may be stored in your DNA

Polyphenols are a group of chemical substances found in plants, characterized by the presence of more than one phenol unit or building block per molecule. With more than 8,000 members in this chemical class, many of which are found in high concentrations in wine, tea, nuts, berries, cocoa and various plants, red wine polyphenols have been implicated in conferring resistance to the formation of the amyloid plaques that are thought to be the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers carried out some pretty fundamental analyses about how amyloid beta proteins – the building blocks of amyloid plaques – folded up and stacked together to produce the aggregates that are toxic to nerve cells. Then, they studied the effects of grape seed extract on this process. It was found that the polyphenols had a dual effect: the prevented the formation of the aggregates, and they decreased the toxicity of already-established aggregates when they were added to brain cells.

Human trials are next on the agenda for these research groups, and it’s hoped that administration of these compounds to AD sufferers might block the further development of amyloid plaques, thereby halting the disease, and in addition ameliorate their existing conditions.

This might be important news for those of you supplementing with chemically-pure resveratrol: There are potentially other beneficial, health-promoting components of red wine. So, don’t give up on your nightly glass!

Adapted from a Eurekalert! press release.

The brain constantly produces new cells that differentiate into a wide variety of mature neurons in a process called neurogenesis. Particularly in the hippocampus, a decline in the numbers of new cells being produced can lead to problems with memory and learning.

This decline starts in middle age and the drop is precipitous, particularly in the dentate gyrus, an area of the hippocampus thought to contribute to new memories as well as having other functional roles. It is notable as being one of a select few brain structures currently known to have high rates of neurogenesis in adult humans.

Two hypotheses prevail as the cause of this decline – one is the overproduction of corticosterone that occurs in middle age, which results in a drop in stem cell production, and is the presumed mechanism by which chronic stress (another trigger of corticosterone production) can lead to depression. The second hypothesis is that adequate stem cell production relies on nerve growth factors in the brain that also decline with age.

This study looked at whether a deficiency of this factor, known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), led to reduced neurogenesis in this brain region.

To this end, they had mice running on treadmills and others living a relaxing lifestyle, and they looked at the levels of BDNF and its receptor (TrkB), and neuron numbers in their hippocampuses.

The results were impressive:

• Neural stem cell production increased by 200% in the exercising middle-aged mice compared with their sedentary controls
• The survival of new cells increased by 170%
• The growth of new cells increased by 190%

The effects were not limited to aged mice, either. In fact, the effects were even more enhanced in young mice.

This shows that:

• Excercise increased levels of both BDNF and TrkB
• Decreases in neurogenesis are due to BDNF and not corticosterone

So, if any of you life-extensionists out there didn’t know it already, here’s further evidence that exercise is not only good for your body, but crucially important for maintaining your mind, especially as one enters middle age. One wonders why middle age per se is the time when levels of this hormone tend to decline, perhaps it’s because people generally become less active as they get older. Either way, I won’t be canceling my gym membership any time soon!

Adapted from a press release provided by Eurekalert!

By analyzing the brains of people who had died when they were older than 80, yet who scored well on tests of brain function, the researchers discovered that these so-called ’super-aged’ brains contained far less of the tau protein tangles that accumulate inside brain cells as people age.

These tangles eventually kill the cells, and are now clearly implicated in the degeneration of mental acuity that typically accompanies aging.

These are different from the amyloid plaques that are thought to be responsible for Alzheimer’s disease, and in fact, the super-aged brains had similar amounts of amyloid plaques to the normal-aged controls.

Changis Geula, the principal investigator had this to say about the future of this research:

“We want to see what protects the brains of these individuals against the ravages that cause memory loss,” he said. ” Understanding the specific genetic and molecular characteristics of the brains that makes them resistant, someday may lead to the ability to protect average brains from memory loss.”

It will be very interesting to see where this goes, and if future therapies will be able to do something for my no doubt already accumulating tau tangles.

Adapted from materials provided by Eurekalert!

A study from the American Academy of Neurology reports that despite evidence that increased IGF-I helps reduce beta-amyloid plaques in the minds of mice, the IGF-I stimulating drug MK-677 did not help humans given the drug for one year.

J.J. Sevigny of Merck Research Laboratories in North Wales, PA said:

This work suggests that targeting this hormone system may not be an effective approach to slowing the rate of Alzheimer’s disease progression. Importantly it challenges the common theory that hormones may attack beta-amyloid plaque in the brain and builds on the body of clinical evidence for Alzheimer’s disease as we seek to develop more effective treatments.”

Thanks to Eurekalert! for the press release.

I find this very comforting, because there are so many things I’ve spent countless hours learning, but have subsequently forgotten. I always thought, or at least hoped, that all that effort wasn’t completely wasted.

Fuller details are available in the press release, but to cut a long story short, the reason is this: When you learn something, structural changes occur in the brain. Neurons send out axons and dendrites to connect with other neurons and allow the exchange of information. The connection is called a synapse. When we have learnt something, these connections are fully functional, but when the information is no longer needed, the connections are ‘disabled’ and we forget. However, the connection remains and can be easily reactivated.

I guess an analogy is that learning something for the first time is like grabbing a power cable, plugging the appliance into a socket, and turning on the switch. Forgetting is like turning the switch off, and re-learning is like turning it back on.

So, go forth and learn, it’s just like riding a bike!

Now, an article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that in addition to health problems, psychological tendencies are revealing a basis in our genetic code, and this may enable scientists to make predictions about your personality based on a genetic test.

The researchers found strong and highly significant associations between known genetic variants and the five major dimensions of personality.

These were:

Although the effect sizes were small, it’s likely that once a greater number of targets are established for each of the personality dimensions, and indeed even more specific traits in future, it will become possible to create a detailed personality map of an individual simply by analyzing their DNA.

I just hope my future employers don’t look for my conscientiousness and agreeableness genes.