This Is Your Brain on Language | Compilation 

"Learning another language has benefits that no one can argue with, like for example, you will know another language" This is the deep, thought provoking content I subscribed for.

My intuition was right. When I’m coding, I feel like I’m doing a riddle that might involve language, basic math, and logic.

I am Dutch and I’ve heard the language described as ‘drunk German’ or ‘drunk Swedish’ or ‘drunk Norwegian’ before by natives of those languages, so ya know, the boozed up Germans from this experiment might’ve sounded better because Dutch already just sounds drunk :p

No mention of sign language? I'm curious about how differently the brain processes sign language vs. spoken English in persons for whom ASL is their first language.

The best way to learn something is to try and explain it to someone else. Currently kids are forced to memories things which is a bad system. The emphasis is currently on teaching a concept then issuing homework to solve 100's of examples. The emphasis should instead be getting each student to come up with their own way to explain the concept to others. This could be through written help guides, verbal explanations, or even a RU-vid video (whatever the student wants to to). This kind of system would be extremely effective because any kids in the class who don't yet understand the particular math concept are helped by all the different teaching content being created by all the kids who have already understood it. The best teaching content created can then be shared and used to teach other classes and the next years students. The best teaching content rises to the top because it works the best and the content is created "by students for students" so it remains relevant. The whole education system then starts to feed back on itself to become better and better.

Programming languages are all defined by a VERY SPECIFIC set of rules (what we call the language's grammar [but not like normal English grammar]). I know more than 10 programming languages and 3 normal languages, and i struggle more with those 3 natural languages compared to any programming ones. You need a specific logic for programming languages, and once you learn it, it's easily transferrable to any other programming language you want (most of the time [if we ignore paradigms but these aren't too hard to learn either]).

Yeah a lot of programming is really creative problem solving like a complex puzzle.

The part about programming languages is unsurprising to anyone who does coding for a living :) Programming languages are unlike natural ones, as natural language is more complex and flexible, and can afford to be more vague. In contrast, coding is more of an engineering discipline, and requires precision, attention to detail, and knowing some of the moving cogs underneath the whole thing.

As a lifelong programmer, I would suggest that reading and writing code would map more directly to the parts of the brain that control behavior. Blocks of code are not about communicating ideas the way language does, but about producing a specific change in the environment.

i say getting a second set of semantics increases your horizon, widening perspective.

This is interesting, but I wonder how English-centric a lot of it is. For example, Japanese and Korean are really context-dependent and can't be directly translated to English.

In Canada, having a second language (especially French) enhances your employability in government offices and a number of corporate operations such as banking.

Bilingualism should be looked at as those who learn it from childhood vs those that study independently. I dont think learning Spanish Spanish English would have given any cognitive boost. But going out and learning Japanese, or actually going to school and learning how to write in other languages did I begin to see benefits within my own languages. I was learning obscure words with extrapolation by cross referencing them in other languages.

Watching my dog's ear go up during the whistling🐶

This all ignored the American bias in these research studies. People all over the world speak multiple languages. My friend from Pakistan knows four, grew up speaking them. My friend from Germany learned three growing up. People in China have learned Mandarin and their local dialect for hundreds of years. Oh but American researchers who just know English gotta see if leaning another language makes your smarter. It doesn't, it just makes you more educated

Woah! Science for why I understand better when my headset is on my right ear rather than the left. I thought it was super strange that I had better listening comprehension in one ear over the other [9:50]

When my family became refugees, from the Russian communist regime that took over Hungary, my parents were told to only speak English in the home instead of Hungarian by the school system. My parents spoke Hungarian with each other, but tried to speak English with me and my sister. My father was slow to learn English and would constantly slip Hungarian into conversations with us. My mother, who spoke German and Russian at the time because she was forced to learn the languages, was able to learn English much quicker. When my Hungarian grandmother moved in with us, my sister and I had to learn Hungarian again through a Hungarian/English dictionary in order to communicate with her. She was never able to learn conversational English, but she was fluent in Hebrew as well as Hungarian. My parents continued to speak English in the home and Iost the Hungarian language after my grandmother moved to a nursing home. In junior high, I elected French instead of Spanish because it was still considered a worldwide language at the time. I would convert English to Hungarian and then French and back again for the longest time. I found learning another language difficult at school because it was taught like written English by my 3rd year. The same way students learn about vowels, etc. in English class. I learned English as a 5 year old by sound. I continued, even in English class, to know how it is spoken and written by how it made sense by sound. Fourth year French was spoken and written almost entirely in French. I could not learn this language by sound and made the lowest passing grade. I never used the language again in my adult life. I can't even count to 10 in the language, but I can in Hungarian and Spanish. This Spanish is only due to my children watching educational TV like Sesame Street. I should have elected Spanish instead French. Oh well, my loss.

I suck at mathematical thinking, but I am very good at coding - i.e. to see a logical flow of operations, which programming essentially is. Math might have laid the ground for computer science, but applied programming is so much more than it, when it comes to what is beyond the bits.

I've skimmed some research on neurology and language, it seems there are quite significant differences on what's happening on the brain depending on things like a language's script being left to right, top to bottom, or back and forth. I think it also has significant differences on whether the script is ideographic or phonetic.

True story about drinking and languages: I'm an opera singer, so I have some familiarity with languages besides my mother tongue, including Italian and French. I was doing a concert in Spain, sponsored by a wine company, and after the show we of course were given quite a bit of free wine. I do not speak Spanish AT ALL, but with the wine in hand, and with my limited knowledge of French and Italian, I found myself being perfectly able to communicate with and understand patrons who only spoke Spanish and some limited French and Italian, besides. We all had had wine, and the conversation was easy as heck!

Whistle languages are so important!!! I'm 30 and I'm the only one out of 3 brothers that can't whistle loud, normal whistles are fine and all but loud ones those are the really important ones... I'll master it one day lol. This was a great vid!!!

Why isn't this labeled as a compilation?

Coding isn't language. It's effectively learning tools and then creating stuff using those tools with a problem solving layer on top. It's like learning how to use a hammer and then using that hammer to build a house, but you also have to figure out how to actually build a house too. That's programming. The code is just tools. You're just told what those tools look like. It's like learning how to draw a hammer in order to have a hammer. If you draw it wrong, you have nothing. But once you know how to draw it, you can repeatedly draw it and use it. But that's just code. You learn how to write a "For loop." That for loop is a logic tool. Then you have to figure out how that tool is useful to perform a task. You learn a lot of tools. You're then picking and choosing which tools to use when and in which combinations to achieve a functional goal. A simile is being asked to draw a car that actually works. You have to learn how to draw a steering wheel, tires, an engine (and each part within), down to every nut and bolt. You first learn the 2000 unique pieces, but you have to learn them without even knowing you're eventually going to create a car from them. A wheel is just a wheel. You know what that one thing does. You know how it interacts with an axle and how it rolls down a road, but the code is just "wheel." Then you're eventually asked to create a car. Maybe you're asked to make a tank or submarine. Tanks have types of wheels, but you have to know which specific types work. A submarine doesn't have wheels, but you have to understand the context of a submarine to know that the wheel tool isn't useful. So you're slapping together piles of tools to create a thing. Real code performs a task. Maybe you're asked to make a program to search a database for an input keyword. You have a pile of code tools that you know or can research, but in the end you need to be able to perform specific functions. You need pieces of code to draw a visual interface to ask a user what to search for. You need code of mouse and keyboard control, reading position, clicks, etc. When the user clicks a search box you have code that runs to recognize that click and enables typing. Text is inserted, and there is code used to read and store that text. There's code to access and read database data. You have code to ask that code to run and search for the input text. You create code to perform a task if the data isn't found, maybe outputting "word isn't in database." And there's code that draws that text on the screw and details the size, position, font, color, etc. ALL this code is just tiny pieces of functional tools. One piece of code has the sole function of drawing a vertical line and is one part of your visual interface. You have another piece of code that's sole function is to read and track where the mouse is on the screen and it outputs the x and y coordinates. That's all that piece of code, that tool does. You piece together all these pieces to build up a massive logic system and organized system with rules and behavior. You're building up this system of things. Hmm, what's the closest thing related to language? Well, maybe writing a book is probably the closest thing. An author will have to go through a similar process because they too are building up this world, but they use the language as tools and less as language. They play with psychology, sentence structure, pacing, controlling known and unknown data, and building this winding path of a narrative. They're treating language and context of language as tools. They understand how to use language as tools. Word use, pharasing, and dialect can convey age, origin, education, confidence, fear, etc. So, making a program is like writing a book. What about the actual language? Well, the language is either known, for example a person knows english and writes a book in english or a person knowns C++ and writes a program in C++. Or the language is not known. A person first learns how to code with .NET and creates a program based on acquiring knowledge of how to write the code. Or a person writes a book in a foreign language, has to learn the language, enough of it and societies and cultures of that language, and then write a book with it. These are two very different processes. One is application of known towards complex problem solving. The other is learning how to read and write, and then using that learned text towards complex problem solving.

"I ended up texting my ex, but hey I passed my dutch test!" - Some test subject

Oddly, I feel like I think about coding mostly how I think about navigation. Following the flow through the program, various paths and dead ends. It doesn't feel like either language or maths to me, it's more like route finding or town planning... something like that.

You should repeat the Dutch study with a language other than Dutch.

I was going to say something about humor and language, but I didn't want to get into semantics.

I love you Brit Garner !!

Also side note, if anyone out there wants a fun and motivating way to practice a language that they’re afraid of losing (especially one you learned in school or as a child, but don’t have much opportunity to use now), I HIGHLY recommend buying translations of either children’s “middle grade” chapter books (think reading levels like Harry Potter, Nancy Drew, etc) and using those for practice. Or if you’re more confident, you could also do this with adult books haha. I like to do it with HP because I know the books so well in English that I can use context clues to parse the things I don’t understand in French (and let me tell you, my Catholic school did not teach me a lot of French words related to magic 😆). Another good way of doing this is, if you’re someone who often gets stuck in a Wikihole, try switching to the language in question when you’re doing that! They even have Wiki.simple pages that explain topics in less depth and simpler terms to help practice if you’re feeling a bit lost :)

4:10 You know what's not surprising in literally any way? That our problem solving areas are active when solving problems... These questions of whether code is treated like math or language clearly don't understand what's going on when coding.

What I know, when I look at code of my co-workers, is that the brain is not involved in programming at all.

I have executive dysfunction and I can barely speak on a bad day. But I can do sign language, and it's super useful for kids with autism and adhd for that reason. Unfortunately, it is taught like a language so it's very difficult to learn in an academic environment, but very easy to learn through exposure.

I have dyslexia and before I got tutored for it, I used to sometimes read a word out loud and say the wrong sounds without realizing it. It would usually take me a couple of tries to realize I was saying the wrong thing. The last video in this compilation reminded me of that.

when i had covid i happened to be in miami FL, im chilean and have learned english to the point i think in english and spanish, brain fog was my main symptom and i also caught covid at disney world five days into the vacation, with brain fog my speaking got so impaired i could not tell if i was speaking or spoken to in spanish or english, i was directly translating back and forth to a point even my spanish was incomprehensible to my family,i also had a stereotipe latino accent wich has never happened during my learning process

Swahili: Habari gani, mzuri sana. Karibu East Africa

And it gives you lucid dreams as a side effect

Im multilingual. Its true what this vid say. Im one of the highest scorers in my classes in post graduate school in uni. When my tutor only speaks mandarin ... It helps.

I love my daily science with my morning cuppa ❤️ thanks SciShow 😘

I speak 6 languages and it really does gives you advantage, but i mostly having a hard time switching language, whenever someone speak in native language i always use English xD

Well, learned something new today. Now I have a reason to carry alcohol to school.

I appreciated the subtle JavaScript 'let' reference at 0:34

Omg, my teacher was more right than probably even he thought. He told us that before a major test we should stop studying at 7, have a glass of wine and go to bed early. And we should get up early enough so we won't be in a hurry in the morning.

5:50 - "You know how to whistle don't ya? You just pucker up & blow ..." ... but not as shown by Kate in the SNL-sketch based on that movie's scene LOL. Think of 'playing a flute' (or maybe that sound people make blowing across/into the mouths of bottles). Practice makes perfect ... but usually practicing without thinking about it too much.

What about reading music. I’m learning Spanish and German and music. Either way it makes your brain smarter to know more than one language. I’ve noticed a big difference since I really doubled down spending four years and still learning Spanish.

Perfect show for example. Very complicated and contradictory unless you hear and understand every word. Only said they are experimenting hoping their guess was right. Researchers need to study their own mind. Nevermind Hank explained that at the end.

I didn't know this! I began to learn simple coding in my mid-50s. That's around the same time I began to speaking French with a really terrible American accent. Now I can read a short bit of coding, but it has no sound to me. My spoken French is still awful. Worse, my written American English has mixed with the British English, also I remember words by the picture in my brain, but can't remember the American or British English or French spoken word of that picture. I have very little problem reading French and no problem at all reading typed or written of those 3. Interestingly, 73 years ago I born in the far southern tip of Texas and I hear, relate to the brain's image, and fall right back into the Texan deep country southern country accent that I had such a problem unlearning in my 20s to my 30's. Perhaps I need an elocution coach again, but this time attuned to French. As a side note, coding first made me more interested in numbers at a recognition. When I was a small child, all numbers were images with personalities, for example: 1 had a little kid hat and was never disrespectful or mean while 7 had an big hat and was always disrespectful and mean while running away. Maybe why I can so easily accept gender identifications also, because 6 was just running right while 9 was a 6 just taller and running left. This is not a good way to learn numbers because: 1,056,789 is a very confounding thought, even now it continues to teach me that different people are just different. That's all.

Learning a second language makes you smarter ! I am German... there is no SciShow, SmarterEveryday, Veritasium or Kyle Hill in german... i had to learn english for that ;P And to be honest... dutch already sounds like drunk german... so... makes sence to be better at it after having a drink XD

I wonder if what we know with whistle language can be applied to other call languages like yodeling, kulning, or lalling.

i've said this before. it's a mathematical language or a linguistic mathematics.

I have MERLD (Mixed Expressive Receptive Language Disorder) and I wonder if there are any research paper or videos that might explain causes, treatments and what happens in the brain with someone with that disorder.

Gee, I'm doing a medical degree and they taught us Broca's and Wernicke's area the old school way. I don't recommend medicine in Poland :x

When I went from php to javascript to dart I could def see the similarity in going from Spanish to French as a native English speaker.

Hi me and my brother use 2 whistke talk.and use hand signals speak love him.

Very professionalism

Man, the coding section on this made me even more in awe of my brilliant, computer-genius husband who is %100 self-taught. I’m a total language nerd, but my brain just totally short-circuits with high-level math, algebra ESPECIALLY was the bane of my existence. I have tried almost a dozen methods to comprehend it over the years, and had wonderful teachers dozens of tutors and just- NOPE. When I met my husband while I was in college (and him being 6 years older, plus having taken his last algebra class in high-school for college credit, he was a decade out from doing or using any algebra, and he just flipped through my book and was like “oh ya, I remember all this”. He could do any equation in the book. He also tried to help teach me, and it was unsuccessful. We joke that after trying to teach me, he realized that, while I was “crazy smart” in language, psychology- (the “soft sciences” that he always struggled with)- he married me because I couldn’t do algebra and knew I would need someone to take care of me since I wasn’t going to be able to graduate. 😂 My nephew thought this was the truth until he was 13, and it seemed very reasonable to him, sweet boy. 🤣😂 (I actually couldn’t ever graduate because I could never pass the f-ing algebra class that was a core requirement to EVERY SINGLE DEGREE- I was a social work major...what a waste of someone who could have been a great social worker and really helped people, just because I couldn’t do algebra. Ya, I’m not not bitter anymore, I have a better life than I deserve with my husband, we make a great team, just annoyed thinking about other people like me out there struggling to get by in life because they couldn’t learn something that would have had no impact on learning how to do something something they had a great aptitude for and being really good at it.) My husband also never realized his mind was anything special, never thought he was smarter in any way than most if the other people around him. It took about a decade for me to convince him of this, but him just deciding to trust that I was right when we first started out gave him the boost he needed to really start demanding more from employers and going for bigger things. He has his dream job now, at a company he idolized since high school, (and they are even more amazing to their employees than he ever knew). I’m so proud of him. I’d say that is probably one of my greatest gifts- a natural ability I have always had- a fantastic aptitude for reading people, especially telling who has all their lights on upstairs, how bright they are, and who is bullsh!tting everyone. I could tell he wasn’t like your average “computer wiz kid”, his brain does so many things differently. Its crazy. 12 years married and we still end up finding quirks about eachother, one of my favorite things about marriage.

5:38 well, Brit, you may not be talking about it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t recognize it before you showed up on screen. ;)

i first learned to code when i was 12 years old but then had bacterial meningitis when i was 13 which made me forget how to eat food and other important things for being alive. But i studied code in college (Css/html/java/dreamweaaver/python) and it was pretty easy to pick back up, so to me its almost like riding a bike rather than learning a language.

In the past I've often inserted a word into a sentence unconsciously while I was looking at something described by that word. It led to some odd sentences.

11 year old me had no idea how I was changing my brain by making dumb little games in scratch lmao

If you can follow the instructions to set up your ikea shelf you can read machine code.

‘‘Similarly, it turns out Wernicke’s area isn’t end-all and be-all of language comprehension.’ 🤔 *Broca’s area lights up*

I am death on my left ear how does this play. I was born with the best hearing on my left ear. I feel stronger vibrations on my left ear just can't hear thorough my actually ear.. I can hear through my bone behind my left ear.

I was born in Helsinki to then Finnish speaking family. I went to high school parties in Stockholm where my Swedish while drinking became acceptable. Later in life I was an American in Japan after being a Finn in Sweden. In a Kyoto bar after a few beers and talking to a very pretty woman my Japanese became way better than it used to be. She showed up knocking on my office door here in Los Angeles (Manhattan Beach) some weeks later. Drinking definitely helps with language skills, as do pretty women.

Those myths about bilingualism reminds me of the idea that a kid with autism can't be raised in a bilingual household, because it causes more language delays and they can't differentiate between the two. Which is honestly weird and ableist, for so many reasons.

Experimental intervention (in the brain) could make it harder for people to understand what to do when what they're told conflicts with written instructions. Wouldn't anyone have trouble in that situation?

Then do one of the "areas" have to do with stuttering, or speech impediments? I had to go to speech therapy for years as a kid for a major stutter. I could form the thoughts in my head, but I'd get stuck on saying the words. Do I have brain damage?

Cultural wisdom is summed up in a handful of emotionally derived phrases. The repeated struggle for some form of supremacy or control is behind the use of these successful phrases. When you come from one country to the other its usually poor moving to rich countries. This exposure to the logic of both scarcity and abundance gives the individual a complete spectrum. At least at the subconscious level where one is more in tune with the odds of reality.

are there studies regarding tradeoffs? development in the linguistic department leads to poorer development in another cortex

Hmmm I wonder about signed languages now. I'm just thinking of the time I went to go write something and my brain confused ASL and writing, like, it would be easier for me to sign the word to get it on the paper... if only that were true

So can people with damage to Wernicke's area write sentences and/or words, since that is different than speaking??

Liking for the Packers vs Tom Brady snark. Also, for the excellent content 😄

I think about cetaceans and birds with the whistle languages.

"teach your child French and you get a better child" lmao

If I had to go with personal experience, I see and treat coding more like a lny problem solving task.. for example, say I have to organize a party and I start thinking of all the issues and ideas to make it work, I can think "we have to eat, so we can go to the supermarket in the morning and buy food", similarly I would think at coding in this abstract, non li guistic, not particularly mathematic, "problem solving" way Then sometimes you do math with coding, so you add that, but you don't always do math with Coding, sometimes you do very abstract stuff that are converted in "math" by the coding language itself

What if you did the split brain tests with someone fluent in a whistle language? Would CGP Grey’s summation in “You are Two,” that the right brain is a separate intelligence that is unable to speak, be testable in this situation? The right brain would be able to explain itself; I think that would be a fascinating test

kinda funny that it mentioned swahili and spanish, while talking in english about code. sasa, najifunza jinsi ya kuongea kiswahili, puedo hablar en español, i’m fluent in english, and i’d like to learn code eventually

Where's ur explanation of FMRI's?

Bilingual stroke patients can sometimes loose primary language, but maintain second language.

This episode just reminded me to rewatch Beerfest.

I wonder why @scishowpsych didn’t look into ASL and other signed or non spoken languages. I’d love to know more about how the brain processes signed language.

CITATION NEEDED at 11:39 When were parents _ever_ warned against allowing their kids to learn a second language? I'm 53, and was raised on the syndicated shows of the 1940s, '50s, '60s, and those current in the 1970s, and one theme always popped up. Some wealthy person's kid was said to be unable to be interrupted to go do whatever, because they were in the middle of private instruction, usually in French. The idea was universally presented as a status symbol of wealth and success. Not once did anyone act like, let alone say, that being bilingual was bad. Ever. I've also seen t.v. and movies from the 1920s and '30s, and whether it's "The 3 Stooges," or whatever else, someone speaking a second language _always_ meant that they were smarter and more successful. I'm calling bollox on this alleged "warning," until I see proof.

I'm bad at learning languages and I'm really not too great at math either. But I'm quite a proficient programmer in various languages. Not to toot my own horn. Also, the rewards I feel when learning French or Japanese, or solving a math equation is nowhere near as powerful as the reward I feel for solving a particularly difficult programming problem. The results of the study aren't surprising to me at all.

I feel like coding is more math for me than language. I am very bad at learning actual language (i.e French, etc…), but code to me is a little bit more comprehensible

My brain sees coding as a puzzle. Sure you have to learn the "language" of the puzzle, but getting the code to work without error? Puzzle.

I've known some Dutch people. I think you have to be drunk to speak the language... that's why there's such good beer there. 😇

I just figured out why the brain is wired like that. If a threat signal is received from the right side. The brain is on the other side away from harm. Wait now I'm confused.

Idk how they could've overlooked the obvious. Coding at its core is giving procedural instructions via the use of fixed structural components which neither matches language nor maths. Basically you break a task down into its atomic parts as given by the coding language (loops, if/else etc.) and then write an algorithm that handles the task.

To find early child hood baby memories or even fetal memories is quiet your mind of words think more in images feelings sounds sensations heart beats . Colors or lack of color. Heart beats voices sounds movements. Urges cravings sensations I found when brain is creating your brain Deciding how to feel if you'v already been in a position your neurons already know how to feel and things start flowing back to you . I found if your brain

Having multiple languages hasn't helped my ADHD! 😅 But it does give me multiple ways of looking at the world.

Code is definitely a language. If you can write or say it and someone else can decode and understand it it's a language. If code isn't the neither is Latin. That doesn't even take into consideration braille or sign language.

1:19 Watch out with that, one might find you are talking to yourself... quite literally. (wow, what a pun. No ill intended. This from an uneducated 60yro fart). 7:20 thank you for that information about whistling. Though I do not know what I would do with it now. When I was young, I would have gotten friends together and tried to work out some proficiency with it. What an experience that would have been. It would take a lot of time and thought too. A great project. 13:18 I speak a little Korean though it sits in the dark like a voice with no face, speaking or hearing it. There is a context that is not present. That is the dark. 이것은 내가 처음 본 날만큼 나에게 이상합니다, or heard it. I can read it, hear it and understand it. Being fluent would not fill the void. 31:03 Oh yeah, babies will change your brain alright. You will learn a lot about yourself through them too.

I used cannibas. I can now read greek, Arabic, Russian, Italian, and Russian. The brain is a beautiful body part.

When I saw "Language" in the notification (without the thumbnail) I thought this was about how cussing affects the brain *!#%&$🧠*

Is sheet music also considered language?

I expected at least one fried egg in this video.

Is it known if the lady who presented the first segment is wearing an ace ring?

So maybe this is why a shot of Jameson helps me play Irish music?

Okay but Dutch sounds like drunken german

Could pariedolia be used to send secret messages

lol 0:34 I see what you did there