Speaker 1: The majority of the world's population actually uses more than one language to communicate. Many people grow up with two languages, but the majority of multilinguals acquire the languages at various times in their lives. Many people learn language to open doors to education, business, diplomacy, many other professional spheres. Many people learn languages to know enough so that they can introduce themselves, order a steak, ask for directions when they're abroad, and a lot of people fall into the Lauren category. I will fail you for this test, which means you will get an F for the entire module. Suis-je bavard? What? Suis-je bavard? Lauren? Je suis bavard? Lauren? Allo, allo? René? René? René? Je suis bavard? Je suis pas bavard? I ain't bavard. Well, like Lauren, millions of us learn a language because we have to. I fall into the Lauren category. I learned how to read and write in English before I could do so in my native language, Greek. And the reason for that is that my parents run a foreign language school in Greece. Here it is, the Athanasopoulos Foreign Language School, and that's a cute picture of me and my siblings, all proud alumni of the school. I would look very cute there, but my dad would tell you that we were right terrors in the classroom. We're like Lauren. We weren't bavard. But thinking about it and studying the subject and now doing research of it, I've come to realize that actually Lauren isn't just mixing up her languages for the sake of it. She isn't confused. She's trying to achieve maximum communicative effect. Notice how she pronounced bavard in the French sentence and how her pronunciation and pitch for the same word changed to English milliseconds later. Lauren is living life in high definition. Like millions of second language users, she adapts her behavior. She combines her languages to make her point to her French teacher. Yes, she knows enough French to pass the oral exam, and no, she ain't bavard. So using another language isn't just mindless translation from your first language. You actually enter into a new mode of thinking, a bilingual mode, and that's because languages aren't just different codes for the same meanings. They embody different world views, different ways to see the world, and in this respect, language works very much like vision. So how does vision work? Here's another childhood reminisce, the movie Wayne's World. I grew up with that movie, love it, couldn't resist the opportunity to play a clip here. Here's Wayne to explain us how vision works. Camera one, camera two. Tell me, when that first show is over, will you still love me when I'm an incredibly humongoid giant star? Yeah. Had to get that punchline in, right? Try this at home with your best half, it's a lot of fun, I can tell you. But Wayne discovers here the benefits of binocular vision. We don't actually need two eyes to see, one will do the job. But seeing with two eyes instead of one expands your visual field. It allows you to see in 3D, so then you're better able to judge the distance and size of objects. And this is because each eye sees the world from a different angle, creating a slightly different picture. And then the brain takes these pictures, combines them into a single three-dimensional image. Language works very much the same way, just like each eye presents a unique image to the brain, so do each of the world's languages present a unique worldview to the mind. So my point today is this, using more than one language expands your mind, just like seeing with two eyes expands your vision. Color is a classic demonstration of this. So we're used to a variety of standardized color terms in our industrialized societies, but in fact many of the world's languages have only two terms, dark and light. And the majority of the world's languages have five basic terms, including a grue term to refer to what English speakers would call green and blue. And many languages make even finer distinctions than English. So for example, they distinguish between different shades of blue, like Greek does. So the darker shade is called ble, the lighter shade is called halasio, and if you're describing a picture in Greek, you rarely mix those terms up. The difference between them is as fundamental as the difference between green and blue for a speaker of English. So we asked English monolinguals to point to the best example of blue on a color chart like this one that has tens of examples, and then we asked Greek monolinguals to do the same for the translation equivalent of blue, which is ble, and the two groups pointed to completely different examples. And then we asked Greek English bilinguals to do this, and their mind combined the two concepts into one. They picked a color that was in between the two monolingual examples, just like the brain combines the two images that come from the eyes into one picture. But integrating multiple perspectives can go as far as helping us overcome some deeply rooted stereotypes. One of those is gender. So despite our best efforts, no matter how hard we try to avoid gender stereotypes, they unconsciously creep up into our activity. It's the way we socialize, the way that we're bombarded with this by the media and so on, the way we're brought up sometimes. This is reflected in the language examples I'm using here. So shopping is typically associated with women, but guitar playing is something that men usually do. In fact, gender is so entrenched in the way that we operate that almost all of the world's languages have words that refer to gender. So English has what we linguists call semantic or natural gender. What you do is you use different words like she, he, hers, and his to refer to the entity's biological gender. Well, that is obvious when you're talking about animate reference. But there are many other languages, like Spanish, French, German, and Greek, who also mark gender for non-living things, like toasters and guitars and tables and so on. Anybody who has attempted to learn French or Spanish at school knows how difficult this is to learn. Every noun and every word referring to that noun takes a different ending to mark the object's gender. Now this kind of gender is called grammatical gender, and grammatical gender is almost entirely arbitrary. There's nothing to indicate that biologically a toaster should be male or female, and that's why it's so difficult to learn. Well, it turns out that if you're a bilingual in a grammatical gender language, like French, and a natural gender language, like English, that helps you to get rid of these deeply rooted stereotypical biases relating to gender. So we asked English monolinguals to describe a face that is gender neutral, and we presented the face in the context of things that are associated with female stereotypes, like an apron and a necklace. And the adjectives that they assigned to the face were things like charming and caring, which are considered to be female stereotypes, stereotypical traits. Then when we showed the same face to the same people, this time in the context of things that are associated with men, like an axe and a power drill, they tend to describe the face as muscular and realistic, which are male stereotypical traits. But when we showed that face to French-English bilinguals, they weren't affected by these stereotypes at all. They were just as likely to describe the face as caring or realistic regardless of the stereotypical context. So for them, it's as if these conventional stereotypical associations don't exist at all. It's like one language holds a mirror up to the other language, and it helps you pull out some kind of monolingual matrix. And coming out of the monolingual matrix can affect also our deepest most unconscious experiences, like the passage of time. Time is something that really fascinates me, because time is very abstract, but we're really obsessed with time. So I have a counter in front of me that tells me that my talk has to be over in 11 minutes and 35 seconds. I have to obey that, there's no other option. But for all strictness, time is very, very cool, because the way that we actually experience it inside of us very much depends on our imagination and on our language. So, speakers of different languages have distinct ways of visualising time in their mind. English and Swedish speakers picture time in their minds as a horizontal line, as distance travelled, a long amount of time. But on the other hand, speakers of Spanish and Greek picture it as quantity, as volume taking up three-dimensional space, a big amount of time. This affects how people unconsciously estimate time. So when we show to English speakers lines growing on the screen, and we ask them to estimate the time, they're influenced by how long the line grows. That the longer the line grows, the more time they think has passed in their mind. And we get this effect with Spanish and Greek speakers when we show them containers filling up with liquid. The more liquid that goes in the container, the more time they think has passed. But bilinguals are flexible. So when we prompt them with a Swedish word for duration, they actually estimate time like the Swedish way. When we prompt the Swedish-Spanish bilinguals with the word for duration in Spanish, then they're influenced by the Spanish way, doing it by container volume. And they do this, this is within the same individual, very, very quickly within the same experiment. Again, milliseconds between the two languages. It's not unlike the recent film Arrival with Amy Adams. So Amy Adams in Arrival, she plays a linguist who's trying to decipher an alien language. And here comes the spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen the movie. The way that the aliens talk about time in their language gives them the superpower that they can see into the future. And so as Amy Adams learns their language, gradually she also develops this ability to look ahead. Now, unlike Hollywood, we're not claiming in our lab that bilinguals can see the future. We can't. But actually learning a new way to talk about time does rewire your brain. It does something to your sense of time. And this can affect not only individuals, but entire societies. Let's turn into one of the foremost preoccupations of the modern world, money. So here's a graph showing you countries belonging to the OECD. And what you see here are the savings rates of each country expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product that is plotted on the vertical axis. Now what's very clear from this graph is that there is a lot of variation. Some countries save more of their GDP than others. Now these are all Western, democratic, industrialized societies. So why is there so much variation? The proposal by behavioral economist Keith Chen is that it's all down to how the languages spoken in these countries separate the present from the future. So in countries clustered towards the right side of the graph, those that have more trouble saving money, they are so-called future languages. The force that speak is to say different things depending on whether an event is happening now versus happening in the future. So in Greek, you say I dinner with a friend now, and I will dinner with a friend tomorrow. And English is very similar in that respect. You say it's raining now, and it will rain tomorrow. The point is that the verb changes. There's a linguistic barrier between the present and the future that makes the future seem more distant, more disconnected from the present. So you tend to worry less about the future if you speak one of these languages. But the languages spoken in countries clustered to the left side of the graph, those that do well in their savings, make no such demand from their speakers. They're so-called future-less languages. So in Swedish, a future-less language, you say I dinner with a friend now, and I dinner with a friend tomorrow. The verb stays the same. So this identical way of talking about the present and the future leads you to also feel about them identically, and that leads you to take more action in the present that has consequences for your future. But a few countries in Chen's graph are actually bi or multilingual. If there's a link between language structure and your ability to save, could there also be a link between bilingualism and future-saving strategies? So I took out Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Belgium from this graph, all countries with a multilingual population who crucially speak a mixture of future- and future-less languages, and I recalculated the GDP averages. So this time I'm comparing three groups, monolingual future-less speakers versus monolingual future-less speakers versus multilingual countries. The pattern that emerges is striking. There's a clear economic advantage for multilingual countries, while the difference between future-less and future-less countries all but disappears. It's a little bit like the gender example I showed earlier. It's as if one language holds a mirror up to the other, and having these two contrasting ways of separating the present from the future in your language repertoire helps you break free from the constraints of your native language. We need to verify this in the laboratory at the individual level, look at people's brains to see what's really going on. In the meantime, if you want to save more money, it might not be a bad idea to learn Swedish or Japanese. For that matter, if you want to experience different shades of blue, learn Greek. If you want to break free from gender stereotypes, learn French or German. If you want to experience time differently, like Amy Adams, learn Spanish or Swedish. The point is that, in this new light, learning and using a second language is like having a superpower. It allows you to become a mind-reader almost. You can understand and anticipate the behaviour of others, and, like Lauren does at the beginning of my talk, adapt your behaviour to achieve what you want. In fact, the payoff is far bigger than we ever imagined. Because language learning is difficult. This is no myth. It's pretty hard, especially if you're an adult. Learning requires cognitive efforts, monitoring the conversational situation, the language context, switching between these different perspectives. All these things take mental effort, even if it's unconscious. But this is precisely why I would strongly urge you to learn languages, because putting in all that mental effort is like sending your brain to the gym. The data from medical records is telling. In countries as diverse as Israel, Canada, India, and closer to home, Scotland, the number of languages you know correlates with better protection against cognitive decline in old age. Multilinguals actually get an average of five years more of healthy brain than monolinguals, with delayed onsets of Alzheimer's and dementia. This is regardless of education level, and some studies show, regardless of when in life you started learning your languages. The really cool thing is that you don't even have to learn your language at a super-proficient level. Just like you don't go to the gym to get a body like Arnie. So a little goes a long way here. As long as you use more than one language in your everyday life, you are firing up your neurons, keeping your brain in good shape. Well, having only one language allows you to get by just fine. Don't get me wrong. Just like having one eye allows you to see. You can adequately communicate with others, function well in your job, even get by in many parts of the world that speak your language. But just like seeing with two eyes allows you to see in high definition, speaking, using, two, three, or more languages opens up new dimensions in your thinking, in your outlook, in your everyday behavior. This allows you to live life in high definition. So let us not restrict ourselves to only one language, one worldview. Modern medicine has made it possible for us to live longer. Learning languages can give us better quality of life as well. It's never too late to start. Thank you. Thank you.