Sam Kean Quotes

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever.

My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development. Deprivation experiments demonstrate that neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development.

The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.

Study a foreign language if you have opportunity to do so. You may never be called to a land where that language is spoken, but the study will have given you a better understanding of your own tongue or of another tongue you may be asked to acquire.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior. In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent. That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth - faster than us, anyway. But in humans, we continue to grow our brains. That's why we need care from our parents.

As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used.

My parents are both Belgian-born, and so am I, actually. I'm bilingual, so I had experience with French.

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent.

'Marielena' was a wonderful experience that so many people still remember today. It challenged me to practice my Spanish. Having been born and raised in Miami, English was very much my dominant language!

Neuroscience is now a very important research area in biology. We are now understanding a lot more about brains in babies, as well as children and adults.

Children raised in families at the high end of the socioeconomic scale are more likely to be exposed to a stimulating environment and set upon an advantageous path in life with respect to health, cognitive development and social skills. If the brain does not receive the requisite environmental stimulation at certain critical periods, the window of opportunity closes and development fails to occur.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

I love learning language and ideas that I didn't know before and making them sound like my own.

Mum and Dad sent us to a bilingual school, so we had half the lessons in English and half in French. But I remember being hugely lost.

I'm very proud that I have learned German and Russian. Especially Russian, because of how difficult and beautiful it is and because of how much I struggled in the beginning to get my head around how it works.

It is not easy, but young people have to learn languages.