Evelina Fedorenko at MIT used fMRI to scan how different languages activate the brain. Native and highly fluent languages light up a distributed language network strongly, while less-known languages show weaker activation. Multilingualism enhances cognitive flexibility.
Different languages restructure the entire brain. What have you found about the way we structure language and the way our brains work?
There's a lot of evidence that speaking multiple languages is cognitively valuable, and it increases our cognitive flexibility. It provides a number of cognitive benefits to us. But there is research done by a good friend of mine at MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Evelina Fedorenko, in which she has identified a language specific network in the brain that isn't in just one part of the brain, it's sort of distributed in different parts of the brain. She put me in an FMRI scanner for about three hours, testing me on the different languages I speak to determine how well I spoke each of them. She can actually tell this from the images because it shows how much effort was put into it. So if you don't speak a language really well, that language network part of the brain doesn't light up very well because it's not in control. If you are tested on your native language, it's lit up really well. And if you speak another language really well, it lights up in a very similar fashion. And then she was able to see how much cognitive effort I was putting into it based on electrical impulses.
