Multilingual People Have Healthier, More Engaged Brains? (2016)

Out of curiosity, why Hebrew? (I'm a Hebrew speaker)

> Language is an artifact of the culture that created it, and it crystallizes the values and beliefs of that culture. By learning the language, you can enter into an entire other world.

A common take, although I don't know if I would take it too far. Hebrew specifically has the advantage of having been re-created from nothing only a relatively short time ago (150 years more or less), so maybe in a sense it's more explicitly codified.

I'm genuinely curious what kind of things you think that learning Hebrew shows about Hebrew-speaking culture though - I'd love to be proven wrong!

In my experience, learning a second language has clogged my brain up a bit. Maybe it’s healthier and more engaged, but it’s sometimes hard to say if it’s truly been beneficial from a cognitive perspective.

I’ve certainly been humbled and become more confident in pushing through mistakes made in public. It’s also a really cool skill. But it often feels like my memory for words is like a unordered linked list. Sometimes I get the wrong language and must iterate over the list to find the correct language version.

Perhaps "another language is an entire other way of thinking about the world" is incorrect as long as that another language is another natural language.

You might find http://www.lojban.org/files/why-lojban/whylojb.txt interesting.

> because "bilingual advantage" is subjective

Yes, without any further qualifications, "bilingual advantage" is subjective... but then you're making a straw man argument. Here's that quote again:

> Because of enduring experience of managing two languages, bilinguals have been argued to develop superior executive functioning compared with monolinguals. Despite extensive investigation, there is, however, no consensus regarding the existence of such a bilingual advantage

The use of "advantage" here is with respect to some measure of "executive functioning", and I see no reason to suspect that in that paper the authors don't fully define what constitutes "executive function".

> bordering on defining the purpose of life to become objective

Where do the authors suggest anything remotely like this?

To step away from the topic at hand for moment: when one speaks of the efficacy of various running techniques, do you immediately dismiss them as if they were presuming that the purpose of life is to come first place in foot races? Your goals in life may not include coming first place in foot races, but that doesn't make the criteria for "winning" the race itself any less objective.

Similarly, you may find some or all of the models of "executive function" to be useless for your needs in that ranking high in these models doesn't mean living a prosperous and/or meaningful life for you. And that's perfectly fine, but that doesn't mean that speaking of an advantage with respect to these models is inherently subjective.

That seems like a lot of wasted associations. I already have an (english) word for most concepts, and don't really feel like I need a second word for, say, "bread", although words for new concepts or concepts grouped in interesting ways might have some value. I like the Swedish word "lagom", which doesn't seem to have an English analog. It'd interest me to know what aspect(s) of multilingualism promotes a healthier brain so that I can get the benefits from doing something more productive or useful. Can I block out conversation around me and do math problems for the same benefit? Meditate? Stop and consistently reframe situations by some other world-view? My mind just balks at the need to learn a second set of words for concepts I already know, since the first set seemed entirely arbitrary to begin with.