Research shows that multilingual brains don’t just juggle words—they're wired differently. From boosting memory to enhancing creativity, here are five fascinating ways speaking multiple languages changes your brain for the better.

1) Did you know that speaking more than one language can help you age better? Speaking different languages requires the brain to use a lot of energy, which, in the long run, can protect it from some forms of cognitive decline. Research has shown that older adults who know more than one language have better memories, and population studies have found that multilingual countries have fewer cases of Alzheimer’s.

2) A multilingual brain processes every language everywhere all the time: It used to be believed that different languages were stored in different parts of the brain and that each one would get “turned on” when it was actively being used. But research has shown that the theory’s all wrong. A multilingual brain processes all languages in parallel, keeping them co-activated all the time. Multilingual brains have more pathways connecting different words, concepts, and memories across different languages.

3) Multilinguals are more creative and divergent thinking than monolinguals: Creativity essentially boils down to your brain making connections between seemingly unrelated things. That’s how inspiration arises for art, music, writing, and even creative problem-solving. Because a multilingual person has more of these connections hard-wired into their brain through different languages and cultures, they tend to perform better on many creativity and divergent thinking tasks.

4) Multilingual People are more efficient and have better-developed executive control in the brain: When you are multilingual, you constantly switch between languages without thinking about it. This is why multilingual people tend to have better-developed executive control systems, the part of the brain that controls your ability to switch your attention between things and exercise working memory. A more developed executive control system allows multilingual people to better perform tasks that require high-level thought, multitasking, and sustained attention.

5) Changes in neurological processing: Brain imaging techniques, such as fMRIs, have shown that multilingual brains tend to activate the linguistic portion of their brains even when not engaged in linguistic tasks. This leads researchers to believe that the brain’s ability to connect skills tends to enhance cognitive function over time. Bilingual brains tend to show a higher level of activation to auditory stimuli overall, which gives them an advantage in sensory processing. Even the actual structure of the brain is affected.

Read The Power of Language: Ways Multilingual Brains Work Differently for a more in-depth look at these facts.