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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Some adults learn a second language better than others, and their secret may involve the rhythms of activity in their brains [futurity.org].

New findings demonstrate that a five-minute measurement of resting-state brain activity predicted how quickly adults learned a second language.

The study, published in the journal Brain and Language [doi.org], is the first to use patterns of resting-state brain rhythms to predict subsequent language learning rate.

“We’ve found that a characteristic of a person’s brain at rest predicted 60 percent of the variability in their ability to learn a second language in adulthood,” says lead author Chantel Prat, a faculty researcher at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

The previous way to predict how fast adults pick up French was how badly they wanted to date the person they're trying to talk to, but the study suggests using EEG monitoring to find the correct pattern of brain activity and neurofeedback to induce it.

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