Your growing mulitlingual brain
Published by Maria Garraffa on April 27, 2019
Bilingualism or Multilingualism is not an exception and we all know about its benefits for our brains as well as our social life. In March the Lab took part to the Mother Tongues Festival. A carousel of cultural activities for promoting diversity and languages with the aim of focusing on languages not as barriers but actually as opportunities to get in touch with a community. Speakers and non speakers of a particular language were engaged in sessions of origami in Japanese, puppetry in Chinese as well as concerts and gigs in any possible language. This babel of languages promoted a very rich set of interactions, aiming at developing a universal understanding of the each human cultural practice and mutual respect for each other diversity.
The venue was the fantastic Rua Red Art Center, in Tallaght, hosting a perfect exhibition on the language of politic. The two days were rich due to the genuine interest of everyone to share our human most precious competence.
The Lab had the idea to test a different format for science communication, including as main speaker of our activity not a scientist, not an expert but actually a bilingual child with some instructions on the specific terminology on language and brain. An 8 years old bilingual speaker lead the session guiding the audience towards sharing more about their bilingual brain.
This inclusive communication stratagem was exceptionally effective and the session was much enjoyable and fun!
At the end of it, people were sharing a new set of knowledge obscure before the session, making sense of words such as gray matter density or inferior parietal cortex. The session was a call for sharing the words of our universal language capacity and we hope the beginning of this urgent need to learn more about our human nature.
Stay tuned, more will happen soon in Scotland!