Language is food for the brain

BENEFICIAL: Studies have shown bilingualism can have positive effects on brain function.

JUST this week, when called upon to discuss the American election, I launched into one of those complicated explanations making me quickly realise I had committed the same sin as the author of a book on flowers which Mark Twain reviewed thusly: "The author tells me more about flowers than I care to know."

I had had to admit I was probably a "political junkie" and that my passion wasn't necessarily anyone else's interest.

Rather than become a bore, I'd sooner follow Nancy Reagan's advice to hard-core addicts of another stripe: "Just Say No!" and so I'll give it a rest - for a bit.

I'm reverting to an earlier passion: the brain, its mysteries and surprises. Recently there have appeared a number of studies on the benefits of bilingualism in children.

In the last century researchers and pedagogues viewed children learning a second language as an impediment to learning.

The resultant pedagogical philosophy delayed the introduction of "foreign" languages to the high school years, just in time for the real impediment to focused learning - adolescence.

Understanding the beneficial effect of early bilingualism was fostered through my work in the neuro-anatomy laboratory of my mentor, Prof. Paul Yakovlev. His seminal paper, Motility, Behavior, and the Brain, J Nerv Ment Dis. 1948 Apr; 107(4):313-35, has remained a touchstone of my understanding of man as a being in continuing evolution, through the interdependent influence of language, innovation and socialisation.

In contrast to an earlier understanding of neuro-anatomy as a closed and fixed system, Yakovlev's reasoning sees the brain and the major avenues of evolutionary development as a series of feedback loops in which anatomy is altered by what we do and say and create and relate in the world.

On the positive side is the pleasant surprise of data from a number of studies demonstrating that exposure to a second language from the earliest days of a child's life enhances that child's cognitive capacities.

In turn, focus enhances the so-called "executive functions", the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various mentally demanding tasks.

The shifting back and forth between the two languages enables an easier flow of conversion of symbols at the root of higher abstract functions like maths.

According to studies from the University of Chicago, children in multilingual environments have enhanced social experiences as a result of their routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content.

The brain is not a closed system.

Its plasticity is shown in the benefit to stroke victims whose aphasia is often ameliorated through learning a second language, even later in life.

This is a part of the good news about brain function illustrative of its plasticity and ability to benefit from exposure to salutary external experience.

The downside is the brain's anatomic vulnerability to external stressors. One of the seemingly intractable of our social problems is the one of multigenerational poverty and its associated crime, drugs, and intra-familial violence.

It's now understood by brain researchers that kids living in continuously stressful circumstances with exposure to routine violence have higher circulating levels of stress hormones.

These inhibit the development of the parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that are the anatomic bases for the same executive functions enhanced by multilingualism: the ability to focus, to plan, to delay instant gratification.

The problems of poverty are far too complex for me to suggest that multilingualism alone can solve those problems and magically heal a brain whose highest functions have been inhibited through the grinding exposure to the violence large and small that is the daily experience of the indignities of poverty.

Still, it is tempting, particularly in New Zealand, to examine the outcome of kids from low-decile schools where bilingualism is part of the curriculum from day one. It may surprise us.

-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who immigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.