Dr. David Eagleman

It turns out, surprisingly, when we're playing, she's beaten me like crazy, but my brain's the one using all the activity.

I'm the one burning all the calories with my brain.

Why?

Because she has burned tennis into the hardware of the brain, so it's fast and efficient.

I, on the other hand, am trying to simulate lots of things and figure out where I should go and all that.

So the brain does this for reasons of efficiency.

Obviously, the brain's main job is to save energy because we are mobile creatures who run on batteries.

And so this is one of the big things about plasticity.

So people get extraordinarily good by doing things over and over.

These three women, the Polgar sisters, who are chess champions, they're the best, to my knowledge, are still the best three female chess players in the world.

Their father from day one started teaching them how to do chess and so on, and they all became world champions at this.

You know, the thing about whether you need to have diversification, that's an interesting question.

I can see why it would be useful because you're learning different ways, different moves about it in the same way that if you learn how to snowboard and ski, you know, you might get better at both of them.

But

I got to say, when children grow up, let's say, trilingually or even bilingually, they end up having a lower vocabulary in both languages than if they grow up monolingually.

Really?

Yeah.

It's just because of the amount of practice you get with a language.

Kids still do your second language homework.

But you're saying- A lot of kids are resisting this, by the way, now, because they say, look, I can do Google Translate or, you know, my meta sunglasses.