Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.

Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.

Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?

Colombia’s oil industry-- Gushers and guns

IT HAS attracted much less attention than the big deep-sea oil finds in Brazil, but Colombia is also enjoying an oil boom. Its output of crude has nearly doubled in the past six years, from 525,000 b/d in 2005 to a daily average of 914,000 last year. But as exploration pushes deep into the country’s eastern lowlands, oil companies face a familiar problem in rural Colombia: security.

Emerald Energy, a British subsidiary of China’s Sinochem, has endured repeated attacks by the FARC guerrillas on its small Ombú field in Caquetá. Security officials in the area say the FARC is demanding $10 for each barrel of oil. Because the company refused to pay, three of Emerald’s Chinese staff, together with their translator, were kidnapped last June. After a bomb attack on a well, Emerald announced on March 6th that it would suspend operations “until security conditions improve”. After receiving assurances from military commanders, production resumed the next day, but six days later oil tankers carrying crude from Ombú came under guerrilla fire, leaving two civilians dead.

Although Colombia is generally a much safer country than it was a decade or more ago, attacks on oil infrastructure more than doubled between 2008 and 2011, according to the Centre for Security and Democracy at Bogotá’s Sergio Arboleda University. In January and February there were 13 separate attacks on the country’s main pipeline, from Caño Limón to Coveñas, which was able to pump oil for only 20 days in that period. The trans-Andean pipeline in the south was attacked 51 times last year. In February the ELN, a smaller guerrilla group, kidnapped 11 men in Casanare who were building the Bicentenario, a big new pipeline. Officials say that guerrillas are behind some disruptive protests by local people in oil areas, demanding more money and jobs.

The spike in violence “has us worried”, says Alejandro Martínez, president of the Colombian Petroleum Association, which groups together private oil companies operating in the country. But he adds that the industry’s security problems are in part a consequence of its own success. It offers a much bigger target nowadays.

Several things lie behind the oil boom. To attract investment, the governments of Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s president from 2002 to 2010, licensed large areas of the country for exploration and offered tax breaks. Private firms were no longer required to form partnerships with Ecopetrol, the state oil company. And the government sold shares in Ecopetrol, allowing it to increase its capital spending fourfold since 2007. At the same time, Colombia benefited from the improvement in security, and the hostility of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina to foreign investors.

In all, foreign direct investment in the oil industry jumped from $278m in 2003 to $4.3 billion in 2011, according to the central bank. Many of the new investors are start-ups, listed in Canada but run by technicians sacked from PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company, by Hugo Chávez after a strike in 2003. Though some new fields are in Caquetá and Putumayo, where few foreign firms dared venture before, most of the extra output comes from using new technology to increase recovery at old wells. Production at the Rubiales field, discovered in 1981, has risen from 8,000 b/d in 2007 to 165,000 last year.

The spate of attacks on oil installations, however, meant that output fell short of the government’s forecast of 1m b/d by the end of last year. Reaching the target of 1.5m b/d by 2015 will require continuing pressure on the guerrillas.

The violence is in part a reaction to a reform of royalties by Juan Manuel Santos, Mr Uribe’s successor. Most used to go to mayors in oil areas, and were often stolen by guerrillas or paramilitaries. Royalties now go to the central government, which hands them out according to stricter criteria. So the gunmen have switched to extorting from oil companies rather than mayors. That, too, looks like a problem of success—but one that needs to be fixed.