Medical News Today – Tim Newman
“Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the normal resting activity of students’ brains before embarking on a French language course. The team, led by Xiaoqian Chai and Denise Klein, measured whether differences in connectivity predicted the success of the language students. The results, published in The Journal of Neuroscience this week, are a tantalizing peek into why some people seem to learn second languages with more ease than others. Even at times when you are consciously thinking of nothing at all, the brain still presents measurable activity. It never truly sleeps…Sections of the brain that are spatially distant from each other continuously interact. This is called functional resting-state connectivity…The study found that preexisting differences in resting-state connectivity predict how well a student will learn a second language.”(more)