Learning New Langugages Instills Brain Growth

Even something that has been traditionally seen as the purview of the young—the ability to learn new languages —continues to change the landscape of the brain late into life. When a group of adults took a nine-month intensive course in modern standard Chinese, their brains’ white matter reorganized progressively (as measured monthly) in the left hemisphere language areas and their right hemisphere counterparts—as well as in t h e genu (anterior end) of the corpus collosum, that network of neural fibers that connects the two hemispheres, which we encountered in the discussion of splitbrain patients.

Adults who learned Chinese showed white matter reorganization in their brains.