Have your travels taken you to a foreign country where you were unable to communicate with others because you didn’t know their language? Yet even the thought of quickly learning conversational phrases seemed a daunting if not an impossible task?
For those of us who are monolingual (meaning we speak just one language), the attempt to speak another language has been shown by research to be a truly challenging task.
Our embarrassment at what we will sound like stops us cold from trying out new words and phrases, so we often don’t. Or we adapt by limiting our travel choices to hotels, destinations and experiences where our native tongue is spoken.
This travel approach robs us of the deep, meaningful, novel and invigorating experiences available through connection with authentic culture and native people – aspects of travel most people crave.
Take heart, as what I am about to share will hopefully increase your motivation to speak another language or at least learn a bit of language for your future travel destinations.
Neuroscience has shown us many ways that travel is good for your health and your brain.
Benefits include novelty, lower stress levels, diminished risk of heart disease, stroke and depression, satisfying the human need to explore and discover new things, engaging in unique and interesting cultures, meeting new people, and increased cognitive functions such as problem-solving and memory.
New research supports that even trying to learn a new language can have an immediate, positive impact on mental agility, the process of concentrating on certain sounds and switching our attention to filter relevant information.
Strong mental agility plays out in daily life in many ways: multitasking, moving easily between conversations, handling interruptions, noticing a dangerous situation in your environment.
Mental agility improves focus, productivity and being able to keep our cool. It is one of the first functions to decline as we age – meaning from midlife onward, and it is one of the most noticeable early deficits of dementia and Alzheimer’s. After only one week of learning to speak another language, 5 hours total in fact, study participants demonstrated greater attention and mental agility and maintained that ability for up to 9 months.
We tune in better to others, we are able to consider another’s perspective more easily, and most importantly we are able to make the human to human connections vital to enriching our own and others life experiences. Language is one of the core wired-at-birth brain networks that must be maintained across the lifespan to keep our brains healthy and resilient.
In addition, the brain network associated with caring for others is as vital to survival as breathing, and that is what we tap by making meaningful connections with people and novel experiences. Learning languages tunes us into the sounds, vocabulary and meaning of communication.
Monolingual babies process the sounds of only their own language, but bilingual babies process many more sounds, tuning into whatever languages they hear from caregivers, accessing a much larger swath of brain networks.
A healthy brain throughout life means keeping multiple brain networks intact and working at their peak.