Language: the Builder of Bridges | Brenda Milner | TEDxMcGill

Dr. Brenda Milner, a McGill neurology and neurosurgery professor and researcher, is a pioneer in the domain of neuroscience. She leads research on cognitive neuroscience of memory where sophisticated tools such as MRI and PET are used to assess the regions of the brain responsible for languages. She also studies the role of the right hippocampal region in the memory of spatial location of objects. Her expertise and her work have led her to obtain many prestigious prizes, obtain significant grants and be honoured by more than 20 different universities with an Honorary Degree.

Well,

What I want to communicate to you today

is my enthusiasm for language,

and language as a bridge to other people,

and language as a joy in itself.

I grew up in England, many years ago,

and was fortunate in learning,

First, a little German,

when I was very small,

but, then, French, very steadily,

from the age of 7 onwards,

Very well educated in French.

But, not traveling to France,

I never had any money to travel to France,

and not really using my French,

Very bookish French,
but I was good at it.

But I refused, I defied my school,

that wanted me to go on with languages

and go to Oxford,

I wanted to go to Cambridge,

and I wanted to do mathematics.

I defied them, I managed it,

and I got to Cambridge,

I became a mathematician,
then a scientist.

Not a very good mathematician,

but, a better scientist.

During that period,

I kept a promise to myself

that I would continue only to read French

for pleasure,not other languages.

That meant while I was
studying psychology,

for 3 years, I was reading,

The obvious, romantic novelists,

Stendhal, Flaubert,

and reading also, poets.

This kind of things, not science.

So I had a scholarly French,

A literary French and an unusable French,

because I wasn't speaking it.

The war came

and then, for various reasons,

we had the chance,

I married Peter Milner, physicist,

and we were told we were going

with a group of other
physicists to Canada.

We didn't know where...

to begin the study of research on

atomic energy.

Peter and I got married,

we crossed the Atlantic,

still not knowing where
we going to end up.

We took the train up from Boston,

and lo and behold, I was in Montreal.

Now, I had never been out of England,

and I had dreamed of a French milieu,

of a chance to speak French,

and here I was, right there,

in a French speaking city.

But, it got better,

because the first job I was offered

was at Université de Montréal

where they were just starting
a new department

of Psychology,

and they wanted me to teach

experimental psychology, and run a lab,

and teach, the psychology of memory

in French.

This was a triple challenge.

First of all: I had never taught.

Secondly: I had never really

used my French beyond , you know

a few courtesies here and there.

And thirdly: my French was literary,

I didn't have the vocabulary

to teach science in French.

So, it took me hours
to prepare my lectures.

But, I never hesitated to accept

the challenge, in fact, I welcomed it.

I was so excited

that I would be teaching there.

And the students welcomed me,

because,they had no
experimental psychology,

it was very clinical at UdeM
in those days.

So,

I taught them what they wanted,

and they taught me.

They would say,

"Madame Milner,
do you want to learn a new word?"

And I said, "Yes, please!

(Laughter)

As many words as possible."

So I got to be a part of this.

The french became part of my life,

as I lived it.

It was very enriching,
and till this day,

friends from those days

when I spend every
New Year's Eve

with friends that I made

during those first years,

because my students

were only about two years younger than me.

So, this was a wonderful start.

But, I owed it of course to having had

this very good grounding
from the beginning

in French,

and it made me feel so strongly,

how useful this was.

but of course,

I still hadn't been anywhere,

well, I'd been across the Atlantic,

big distance,

but, I hadn't yet been into Europe.

But, a few years passed,

I got a little more money,
things got easier.

And I was even invited to France,

because of my work here,

and there, suddenly,
I found such a welcome.

People just greet you,

you just make a few steps,
and people greet you.

I also discovered,

living in this French environment,

how one's personality

even changes a little.

I feel, every time I switch,

of course, I'm switching all the time,

between French and English.

I didn't tell you that I,

as a hobby,

late in the war in England,

I began to learn Italian.

My Italian was more imperfect in a way,

but, Italians were very welcoming.

I made Italian colleagues,

and one day, I arrived in Italy,

expecting to give a lecture in French

because they said

that it was easier than English

and they said,

"Brenda! We have a surprise for you."

"We decided that you're going

to lecture in Italian tonight."

(Laughter)

And, from then on,
believe it or not, I did.

And this has gone on.

So, I really believe in languages

as a builder of bridges,

as a great joy to oneself.

Now, but, I'm a brain scientist,

what do brain scientists

have to say about language.

And, about this switching,

first, this switching that I do all day,

the grocery store, then at the lab,

so on, back and forth, English and French,

what do they say about it?

They say it's very good for the brain,

you are using the frontal lobes
of the brain

to do this kind of switching.

It's a kind of multitasking,
it doesn't have to be language.

In my case, it's language.

But, it's good for the brain.

And, what else do you know?
You know that

if you have Alzheimer,

Bilingualism is not going to protect you

from Alzheimer, unfortunately.

But, if you have that devastating disease,

it can affect the course of it,

if you have a bilingual
or multilingual brain,

your decline, your inevitable decline

with Alzheimer will be slowed.

So the message from brain science

is that this is a good thing.

But, now I come back
to the reality of today,

and why should we especially,

in this wonderful city of Montreal

take care of this.

It is that, we are here
with this opportunity,

you know, I don't think I would be happy

living in a uni-lingual city anymore.

I'd be back in my beloved England,

and in many ways, a wonderful place.

But, after a while I say,

why is everybody speaking English?

(Laughter)

I want to hear something else.

Of course, you can in London,
in the streets.

But, hearing in the streets

is not the same thing.

I am very frustrated
in the grocery stores,

because, we have now
many people from Asia,

and I hear this melodious,

up and down sounds that
I can't pause at all,

that I'm so frustrated,

I wish I had that also to excite me.

But in this amazing city
that invites us,

why do we not and
why the anglophone

part of the city

why do we not go out more,

and speak more in French?

There are many reasons.

One is that people are afraid

that they would make a mistake.

Something very curious
happened last night.

Really, this is true.

I went home from the rehearsal here,

and I got in the elevator

in my apartment building,

and a gentleman who I very rarely see

because our work times
are different,

who is a school teacher

in the French system,

we got on, and we exchanged greetings

and I said, in French,

"Oh, I have been talking about language."

And he said,

"Today, I was telling
people at the school

that children should
learn three languages

before the age of 7

because they are not self conscious yet,

and they are not afraid
of making mistakes"

And I said,

"I'm going to tell them that tomorrow."

(Laughter)

It really happened last night

and I believe it thoroughly.

I was thinking that a lot of people

One of the problems is that people seem

to find English superficially easy.

So, if you're a little hesitant,

and you're a little scared
of speaking French,

German, Italian, or whatever,

the person in the other nationality comes

rushing in, English,

"Don't worry about the French.

I speak English."

And you retreat and say,

wasn't that fine, I did make an effort
but, I don't have to try, really.

This is wrong.

we heard today, as I heard yesterday,

we heard today, being told,

that making mistakes is helpful.

Psychologists know we learn
by making mistakes

Also, in many ways,

the speaking of a language,

is not only learning

the vocabulary, or the syntax,

it's actually practicing it.

It's also a motor skill also.

And, you know very well,

you don't improve
a sport except by doing it.

you're going to come to a plateau

and be discouraged,

unless you actually try to use
the language,

and to make mistakes if you have to.

And then, the reward.

The broadening of your culture,

the broadening of your knowledge

of yourself is just so amazing,

and we,

we here today,

are so privileged to be in a city where

we can do this as often as we want,

walking around the streets,

whereas other people have to travel

in order to have the opportunity

to speak another language.

So let us profit by our great fortune,

and please,

let us all go in a Tower of Babel

Talking as many languages as we can

to one another.

It's good for our brain,

it's good for our happiness,

it's good for society.

Thank you.

(Applause)