When you learn to speak a foreign language, there are many obvious benefits: You can communicate better with people from another culture. You are able to enjoy a vacation in a foreign country much more. It might positively affect your career. It’s good to keep your brain fit. But there’s another benefit:
It helps you to make better decisions, and reduces psychological biases that distort clear thinking.
Scientists found this out recently when they did an interesting study, which Wired magazine reported.
A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.
“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.
“It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team.
There is of course a downside to speaking a foreign language: it’s difficult and time-consuming.
Fortunately, you can do something about it: Hypnosis can help your mind to assimilate foreign language knowledge a lot faster, and integrate it into your semantic knowledge. It’s kind of like pushing the fast-forward button on your mental language-learning machinery. To find out more about learning languages faster and easier with hypnosis click here.
