Psychological studies on bilingualism and sensory perception show evidence that multilingualism affects our brain’s perception of the world. Psycholinguist Viorica Marian, Ph.D., notes bilingualism can alter both top-down and bottom-up processes of the brain. Psychologists define top-down processing as that which starts from the brain’s existing knowledge and then guides sensory interpretation, while they describe bottom-up processing as that which starts from sensory stimuli and then is used to inform higher cognitive analysis.

Marian notes “bilingual experience can lead to greater brain matter density and volume in regions associated with sensory processing.” In the experience of learning other languages, I believe we open ourselves to new realms of culture, each with their own corridors of history, art and philosophical traditions. These things — seeing culture, history and meaning differently through language — are the crux of a linguistic theory experts in the field posit as linguistic relativity.

The linguistic relativity theory asserts our native languages affect how we see the world. For example, in English, the number “92” is organized as one whole numerical entity, whereas in French, it is thought of as “four 20s and 12,” or quatre-vingt douze. Another example to illustrate this concept is the way different languages describe color. In English, we say “dark blue” and “light blue,” with various gradients corresponding to our experience of the light, whereas in Russian, there are two distinct categories for blue: siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue). These small shifts in a language’s code leave us with different ways of seeing color but also, ultimately, the world itself. Let us put on, with cheer, the new glasses of multilingualism so we may see the world more beautifully and through more lenses.