Dr. David Eagleman

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.

And so they're resisting it.

I totally agree.

My father spoke eight languages fluently, without accent.

And that's because he went to medical school in Europe and did his clinical rotations in different countries.

And he was a young man, so everywhere he went, he got a girlfriend.

And then he had the incentive to learn the language.

And by the way, maybe we'll come to this, but when it comes to brain plasticity, the reward systems are a big part of what makes change happen in the brain.

Actually, let me just mention this is tangential, but let me just mention this while it's on my mind.

You know, a lot of people really for the last 30 years, ever since the Internet became a big thing, really worried about what this is going to mean for kids and education.