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Texting can mold a child or teenager's brain negatively.

Currently, one-quarter of American children don't learn to read. This not only endangers them socially and intellectually, but cognitively handicaps them for life. One 2009 study of 72 children ages eight to ten discovered that reading creates new white matter in the brain, which improves system-wide communication. White matter carries information between regions of grey matter, where any information is processed. Not only does reading increase white matter, it helps information be processed more efficiently. Reading in one language has enormous benefits. Add a foreign language and not only do communication skills improve-you can talk to more people in wider circles-but the regions of your brain involved in spatial navigation and learning new information increase in size. Finally, research shows that reading not only helps with fluid intelligence, but with reading comprehension and emotional intelligence as well.

The FOXP2 gene, a front-runner to explain the evolution of language in humans, may have rewired the brain to allow more advanced learning, according to preliminary research presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting this month. In a recent experiment, Christiane Schreiweis of the Max Planck Institute and colleagues looked at the human version of the gene in mice.

"People deaf from birth may be able to reassign the area of their brain used for hearing to boost their sight, suggests a study."

How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. A 2017 study conducted by Panos Athanasopoulos, Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and felllow linguist Emanuel Bylund, shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. Learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals. It seems that by learning a new language, you suddenly become attuned to perceptual dimensions that you weren't aware of before. The fact that bilinguals go between these different ways of estimating time effortlessly and unconsciously fits in with a growing body of evidence demonstrating the ease with which language can creep into our most basic senses, including our emotions, our visual perception and now it turns out, our sense of time. But it also shows that bilinguals are more flexible thinkers and there is evidence to suggest that mentally going back and forth between different languages on a daily basis confers advantages on the ability to learn and multi-task, and even long term benefits for mental well-being.

Bilingual education is controversial in the world today but so is its value. While bilinguals with Alzheimer's retained brain function longer than monolinguals, the cost of bilingualism is having a smaller vocabulary in each language. The thing about the bilingual brain is that knowing more than one language and knowing when to use each rewires your brain completely, giving those people certain advantages and maybe some disadvantages.

Article provides a quick overview re: the neuroscience of positive thinking and its effect on emotional and physical health.

The critical period hypothesis is one of the reasons that some adults are hesitant to take on learning their heritage language. The theory essentially argues that there's a biological window where language learning is the most automatic, somewhere between the age of 2 and puberty. This theory has entered our popular consciousness as a rule that you can't learn a second-language fluently when you're older. However, scientists disagree with this notion because although it will take more conscious effort, it is still possible to become fluent in another language past the "critical window." Specifically, second language acquisition becomes more difficult with age because it requires rewiring your brain to break certain habits that relate to language learning. For example, pronunciation and accent requires breaking habits related to the way you move your mouth to speak, making it more difficult to have native-level pronunciation as you grow older. Beyond neuroscience, though, research has shown that other factors, such as exposure and education influence language learning.