A skill you could start learning right now to delay dementia: It holds back the flood

Keep your brain sharp — it’s the most important tool you have to stave off mental decline.Games, puzzles and crosswords have been shown to lower the risk of dementia, a neurodegenerative condition that affects nearly 7 million Americans.Studies also suggest that speaking another language can do more than impress your date when you’re ordering Mexican food — it may delay the onset of dementia.“What is emerging consistently is that older adults who speak more than one language have clear advantages against dementia,” Natalie Phillips, a psychology professor at Concordia University in Montreal, told New Scientist this week.Scientists have known about the purported link between bilingualism and dementia for some time, since Canadian psychologist Ellen Bialystok and her colleagues examined the records of 184 patients with dementia in 2007 and found that those who were bilingual showed symptoms four years later than their monolingual peers. It was unclear if other factors were at play, but a 2013 study out of India seemed to confirm the findings.Bilingual people developed dementia symptoms 4.5 years later than monolingual people regardless of their occupation, sex, education and residence. But why that might be the case has puzzled researchers — until recently. Phillips and her colleagues used advanced neuroimaging techniques to determine that bilingualism seems to help keep dementia at bay in three major ways. First, it boosts brain reserves, making it capable of sustaining more damage before reaching its breaking point. Second, it benefits cognitive reserve, which is the brain’s ability to adapt and maintain cognitive function despite aging-related change or damage.“If you think of brain reserve versus cognitive reserve, it’s like comparing a hardware advantage with a software advantage,” Phillips said. When bilinguals hear a word in one language, their brains automatically activate associations for similar words in both languages.For instanc...