Abstract
The Englishman calls an animal that has four legs, a tail, meows and hunts mice, and a cat. The Czech would call the same animal a kočka and the Portuguese a gato.
If someone speaks all these languages, three different names are connected to the same animal in his brain. Research shows that all the languages we know are activated in the brain whenever we use at least one of them.
Thus, multilingual people need to solve an everyday conflict in their heads on many language fronts, constantly... The human brain can apply this training in this conflict associated with the use of two languages in other cognitive activities.
In this lecture, you will learn how bilingualism trains our brains, why bilingual speakers are usually more creative, have improved attention and the ability to resolve conflict, but also how knowledge of multiple languages delays the manifestations of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia.