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Learning a new language re-wires your brain and you’ll begin to perceive of time in a unique way.

It turns out, Hollywood got it half right. In the film Arrival, Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks who is trying to decipher an alien language. She discovers the way the aliens talk about time gives them the power to see into the future – so as Banks learns their language, she also begins to see through time. As one character in the movie says: “Learning a foreign language rewires your brain.”

A study I worked on with linguist Emanuel Bylund shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. But unlike Hollywood, bilinguals sadly can’t see into the future. However, this study does show that learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals.

We have known for some time that bilinguals go back and forth between their languages rapidly and often unconsciously – a phenomenon called code-switching. But different languages also embody different worldviews and different ways of organising the world around us. The way that bilinguals handle these different ways of thinking has long been a mystery to language researchers.