"Sparkles with insight."--Daniel Pink
One of Behavioral
Scientist's Summer Books of 2023
One of Next Big
Idea Club's "7 Books that Reveal the Wonders of Writing and
Language"
This
revolutionary book goes beyond any recent book on language to dissect
how language operates in our minds and how to harness its virtually
limitless power.
As Dr. Marian
explains, while you may well think you speak only one language, in
fact your mind accommodates multiple codes of communication. Some
people speak Spanish, some Mandarin. Some speak poetry, some are
fluent in math. The human brain is built to use multiple languages,
and using more languages opens doors to creativity, brain health, and
cognitive control.
Every new language
we speak shapes how we extract and interpret information. It alters
what we remember, how we perceive ourselves and the world around us,
how we feel, the insights we have, the decisions we make, and the
actions we take. Language is an invaluable tool for organizing,
processing, and structuring information, and thereby unleashing
radical advancement.
Learning a new
language has broad lifetime consequences, and Dr. Marian reviews
research showing that it:
- Enhances executive
function--our ability to focus on the things that matter and ignore
the things that don't.
- Results in higher
scores on creative-thinking tasks.
- Develops critical
reasoning skills.
- Delays Alzheimer's
and other types of dementia by four to six years.
- Improves decisions
made under emotional duress.
- Changes what we
see, pay attention to, and recall.