Iwas raised by a fervent gardener, so my young nose often took in sensory treats transported from yard to vase

daily tip to help you stay healthy and hopeful all through January
Iwas raised by a fervent gardener, so my young nose often took in sensory treats transported from yard to vase. To this day, I know that a room graced with a freshly cut lilac or mess of herbs is the place to be — especially when my mood swings low.
There’s science behind that. As Ashley Abramson writes for Elemental, “of all five senses, smell is the one most closely linked to emotion and memory.” Consider investing in a small batch of essential oils to drop in a diffuser or even a pot of hot, steamy water. New to aromatherapy? Lavender is a great place to start. If you’re a fan of woodsy smells, experiment with burning dried sage or palo santo or even clipping evergreen branches. Scented candles can be lovely as well, but there’s reason to be picky about these and steer clear of chemicals.

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Given that all realms of life happen under one roof for so many of us right now, you might try using scents to draw some lines in your day. Maybe fresh greens keep you company at your desk (or work-from-home spot) and rose oil diffuses by your bed, signaling you to power down.
“Learning a foreign language is one of the non-pharmacological cognitive interventions that can boost cognition in young and older adults,” says Giovanna Bubbico, PhD, first author of the study and a postdoctoral research at the University of California, Irvine and D’Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara in Italy.
“The phrase use it or lose it — there’s a lot of neuroscience behind that.”
Unlike other novel activities — the cognitive benefits of which tend to fade once a person’s brain has gotten the hang of things — a second language never stops challenging the brain in helpful ways. “A second language forces the brain to switch between two languages — inhibiting one and favoring the other — depending on the context,” Bubbico says. The cerebral processes involved in this sort of context-monitoring and switching seems to beef up the brain’s executive functions, or its ability to plan, concentrate, make decisions, and engage in other important aspects of cognition, she explains.
Caldwell-Harris adds to this point. “Being cognitively flexible and able to switch from one task to the other, rather than staying in autopilot, is an important aspect of executive functioning,” she says.
People who have poor executive functioning — an issue that often emerges late in life, or in some cases following a brain injury — have a reduced ability to shift their thinking or behavior in response to changing circumstances. Basically, their brains become mired in old or unhelpful patterns of activity. “If you’re bilingual, you have to constantly be alert to what language is being spoken to you, which keeps alive this switching aspect,” she says. This may be one way in which bilingualism helps keep the brain agile and healthy.
At this point, Caldwell-Harris says that it’s not clear whether learning a second language during childhood or early adulthood is somehow better for the brain than tackling this challenge later in life. But she points out that much of the research on the benefits of bilingualism — such as the work showing its associations with delayed Alzheimer’s disease — have involved people who learned a second language at a young age.
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elemental.medium.com
Just as adopting a healthy diet or exercise routine early in life is surely better than doing so only in old age, it’s a good bet that challenging the brain with a second language while young will be better for the brain than doing so later on. And apart from making the brain sharper or more adept, there’s evidence that learning a second language can enrich the way people interact with others and with the world.
The concept of “linguistic relativity”
The Aymara, an indigenous people of South America, aren’t looking forward to 2021. That’s because, in their native language, the idea of “looking forward” to anything in the future would make no sense.
For a 2006 study in Cognitive Science, researchers documented the way the Aymara talk about time. While English speakers — and the speakers of most other languages — describe the future as something in front of them that they’re moving toward, the Aymara people talk about time from the opposite orientation. Since the future is unseeable, they reason, it must be behind them and out of sight. The past, which can be seen, therefore lies before them. The Aymara even gesture at their backs when talking about the future, the study team found.
“It’s as complicated as chess or any science, but it also involves social interaction and activation and all of those processes.”
This is just one example of how language can influence the way a speaker thinks about life and the world. This influence is known as linguistic relativity. Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language — whether Spanish or French or Chinese — has likely noticed how that language’s treatment of certain ideas or concepts may differ from one’s own.
“When you learn a foreign language, you learn that other people may think about things very differently than you do,” Caldwell-Harris says. “This experience can reveal new shades of meaning.”
She offers two more examples. The Russian language, unlike English, has two distinct words for the color blue — one referring to light blue shades and the other to dark blue shades. And research has found that, thanks to this