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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.

Evidence suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes used 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, holding information in mind, and a heightened ability to monitor the environment.

A study published in NeuroReport measured how long students could keep their hands in cold water. During the exercise, they could repeat an expletive or a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured 40 seconds longer. "Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it," says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University, who led the study. "I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear," he adds.

Earlier studies have shown that unlike normal language, which relies on the outer few millimeters in the left hemisphere of the brain, expletives hinge on evolutionarily ancient structures buried deep inside the right half. One such structure is the amygdala, an almond-shaped group of neurons that can trigger a fight-or-flight response in which our heart rate climbs and we become less sensitive to pain. Indeed, the students' heart rates rose when they swore, a fact the researchers say suggests that the amygdala was activated.

I would like to stand up for the language nerds and give some reasons for studying Arabic that have nothing to do with politics. The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years, but until colleges start teaching Martian, Arabic is going to remain the strangest, most interesting language you can study in an undergrad classroom.

And do not fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper. Arabic, on the other hand, twists healthy minds in twelve ways.

http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm

ILUNGA: From the Tshiluba language spoken in Congo, often chosen as the world's most untranslatable word. "Ilunga" indicates a person who is ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it the second time, but to neither forgive nor tolerate a third offense.

MAMIHLAPINATAPEI: From Yagan, the indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego. This word has been translated in several ways, always implying a wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.

TORSCHLUSSPANIK: From German, this word literally means "gate-closing panic" and is used to describe the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages. This word is most frequently applied to women who race the "biological clock" to wed and bear children.

People on the Yemeni island of Socotra speak an indigenous language called Soqotri. Many female Socotrans have DNA that is found nowhere else on Earth. Also, a third of the island's plant life is found nowhere else on the planet. Socotra has been described as "the most alien-looking place on Earth."

http://goo.gl/maps/jpbA

German researchers say babies begin to pick up the nuances of their parents' accents while still in the womb. The findings suggest that unborn babies are influenced by the sound of the first language that penetrates the womb. The French newborns cried with a rising accent while the German babies' cries had a falling inflection. It was already known that foetuses could memorise sounds from the outside world in the last three months of pregnancy and were particularly sensitive to the contour of the melody in both music and human voices.

Despite what countless people seem to think, it is "totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong" to use two spaces after a period, writes Farhad Manjoo. It has been the case since the early 20th century, but you would not know it based on his readers or his friends: When he asked a dinner party group consisting of doctors and computer programmers, "Everyone -- everyone! -- said it was proper to use two spaces." When he told them they were doing it wrong, they ask: Says who?

In one word: Typographers. It is a "canonical" rule of the profession, "in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork." So why do we insert spaces to our heart's delight? Blame manual typewriters, which used monospaced type -- each letter was afforded the same amount of space. On those machines, two spaces after a period made things more readable. But nearly every font on the modern PC is proportional: an "I" gets less space than an "N," for example. Now, "adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it," writes Manjoo.

Babies can understand many of the words that adults are saying. Scientists at the University of California show that babies process words they hear with the same brain structures as adults, and in the same amount of time. Moreover, the researchers found that babies were not merely processing the words as sounds, but were capable of grasping their meaning.

"Babies are using the same brain mechanisms as adults to access the meaning of words from what is thought to be a mental database of meanings, a database which is continually being updated right into adulthood," said the study's first author, Katherine Travis, of the Department of Neurosciences and the Multimodal Imaging Laboratory at UC San Diego.