When you learned a foreign language as a child and struggled with the complicated grammar, tenses, and verb conjugations, you may not have thought that this kind of effort could benefit you in your old age. A U.S. study shows that people who start speaking bilingually in childhood are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and have a more flexible brain in old age. Researchers at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine recruited a group of volunteers aged 60 to 68 and asked them to complete a series of identification tasks while scanning their brains with the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The first task was to recognize whether an object in a picture was a circle or a square, the second was to recognize whether an object in a picture was red or blue, and the third was a mixture of the first two tasks. A portion of the volunteers were bilingual or more multilingual since childhood. The results showed that the volunteers were able to give accurate answers regardless of whether they spoke a foreign language, but those who were bilingual or more bilingual took less time to complete the third set of tasks. The brain scans also showed that the prefrontal cortex was less active in these individuals. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for task switching and judgment and reasoning, and is associated with a variety of higher mental activities, such as consciousness, thinking, imagination, organization and planning of movement, and attention. The UK’s Daily Mail quoted the head of the research project, Dr. Brian K. Gold, as saying. Gold, Ph.D., reported, “The results of the study show that the brains of bilingual seniors work more efficiently than those of monolingual seniors.” As the human body ages, the brain’s cognitive adaptability, i.e., its ability to adapt to the ecological environment in which it is placed and its brain’s ability to perform, decreases, and the results of the study by Gold et al. confirm that speaking more than one language helps to boost brain vitality. The researchers suggest that this may have something to do with the fact that the brain is constantly “switching” between two modes when speaking bilingually.