Who says you have to settle for the brain you were born with? We devote countless hours towards self-improvement, so why can’t we super-size our minds? Fortunately, recent research conducted at Lund University, Sweden, suggests that we can have some control over how big our brains get.
How do we enlarge our minds? Learn a new language – any language. Researchers scanned the brains of participants with an MRI before and after three months of intensive study. The volunteers were enrolled in either a rigorous language program (meant to get you from novice to fluent in 13 months) or a medical and cognitive science program.
The result? Only those who learned a new language saw a rise in brain size. One region was the hippocampus, which is involved in learning. There was also an expansion in three areas of the cerebral cortex (responsible for thought, perception and understanding language). Funny enough, the increase was directly related to how much effort the participant put into learning. More language improvement = bigger brain. Sure, this was just a short, 3 month study, but it’s still nice to know that we have some control over our own heads.
