The multilingual brain how different languages make thoughts

One of the most common questions is whether all human beings think in a similar way—regardless of the language they use to convey their thoughts—or if the language we speak affects the way we think. This question has entertained philosophers, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, and many others for centuries.

At present, we still lack a definitive answer to this question, but we have gathered evidence that argues in favor of a universal groundwork for perception and thought in all human beings, while language is a filter, enhancer, or framer of perception and thought.

Language functions as a filter of perception, memory, and attention. Whenever we construct or interpret a linguistic statement, we need to focus on specific aspects of the situation that the statement describes. Interestingly, some brain imaging facilities are now allowing us to examine these effects from a neurobiological perspective.

Around the world, more than half of people – estimates vary from 60 to 75% – speak at least two languages. Many countries have more than one official national language – South Africa has 11. People are increasingly expected to speak, read and write at least one of a handful of “super” languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish or Arabic, as well. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority, and perhaps to be missing out.

Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages. Moreover, researchers are finding a swathe of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia.

For centuries, people thought that words were just labels for objects, and that different languages merely attached different strings of sounds to things—or, more accurately, to concepts. Now it is known that the world might be perceived differently by people speaking different languages. Or, more radically, that people could only perceive aspects of the world for which their languages have words.

In the past, there were warnings that bilingual children would be confused by two languages, have lower intelligence, low self-esteem, behave in deviant ways, develop a split personality and even become schizophrenic. It is a view that persisted until very recently, discouraging many immigrant parents from using their own mother tongue to speak to their children, for instance. This is in spite of a 1962 experiment, ignored for decades, which showed that bilingual children did better than monolinguals in both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests.

Research in the last decade by neurologists, psychologists and linguists, using the latest brain-imaging tools, is revealing a swathe of cognitive benefits for bilinguals. It’s all to do with how our ever-flexible minds learn to multitask.

Many bilinguals say they feel like a different person when they speak their other language. This idea that you gain a new personality with every language you speak, that you act differently when speaking different languages, is a profound one. English speakers focus on the action and typically describe the scene as “a woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”. German speakers, on the other hand, have a more holistic worldview and will include the goal of the action: they might say (in German) “a woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”.