interesting read

A friend tipped me off to this interesting article by Barbara King titled, Jared Diamond, A New Guinea Campfire, And Why We Should Want To Speak Five Languages.

This from one of the final paragraphs about a Canadian study of Alzheimer's disease in monolingual vs. bilingual patients:

"Bilingual patients," Diamond concludes, "suffer less cognitive impairment than do monolingual patients with the same degree of brain atrophy: bilingualism offers partial protection against the consequence of brain atrophy." The reason? The brain of a bilingual person "is constantly having to decide" to speak, think, or comprehend sounds in one or the other language.

Fascinating! I enjoyed both the article itself, and the comments below it from readers. In my travels, I constantly meet many Deaf people who know many more languages (both spoken/written and signed) than I do.