Art of Memory
Get started

Increasing Brain Size through Intensive Language Study

1-minute read • Updated on

A study done in Sweden suggests that intensive language study might increase brain size:

At the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy in the city of Uppsala, young people with a flair for languages go from having no knowledge of a language such as Arabic, Russian or Dari to speaking it fluently in the space of 13 months. From morning to evening, weekdays and weekends, the recruits study at a pace unlike on any other language course.

…While the brain structure of the control group remained unchanged, specific parts of the brain of the language students grew. The parts that developed in size were the hippocampus, a deep-lying brain structure that is involved in learning new material and spatial navigation, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.

The article also mentions that multilingualism may be related to a later onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Fluency in 13 months is impressive, especially with Russian. Has anyone every achieved results like that when learning a language before?

Brain (pd)

Tags

Feedback and Comments

What did you think about this article? Do you have any questions, or is there anything that could be improved? We would love to hear from you! You can leave a comment after clicking on a face below.

Comments

Renee
Renee

I was thinking of taking up chinese next semester. Audit the class and take it for my personal enrichment.

Josh Cohen
Josh Cohen

Mandarin would be a great language to learn. Memrise.com is a good resource for learning the characters.

Nick
Nick

The US military has similar training programs

Nick
Nick
Josh Cohen
Josh Cohen

That's interesting. I wonder if they use any memory techniques for vocabulary.

Nick
Nick

When I was in high school an army interrogation unit came to some language classes to recruit and talked about the military's language training programs. They said it was technologically advanced and some of it is classified. I wonder if there is any public info on their methods.

Lacy
Lacy

http://www.fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php "In the 1960's the Foreign Service Institute of the United States Government developed a series of foreign languages courses for the major languages of the world. Top flight linguists analyzed these languages and developed courses using the best audio-lingual methods available. These courses are in-depth presentations which will develop high levels of fluency. They are public domain since they were developed with taxpayers money. Several publishers have made the available for purchase; BUT this site is making them available for FREE. This includes the books, teachers' manuals, and even the audio recordings." quote from http://donpotter.net/spanish.html

TJ
TJ

Here's a link to a paper on how to teach a large Russian vocabulary using the mnemonic keyword method: https://web.archive.org/web/20161228163039/http://suppescorpus.stanford.edu/techreports/IMSSS_256.pdf

Ray
Ray

Hi Josh, Just a quick correction. The old FSI course page has been down for a few months. The same public domain material for all the languages has been put back up at:

http://www.livelingua.com/fsi-language-courses.php

I hope this helps.

Josh Cohen
Josh Cohen

Thanks for the links. :)