MEG Brain-Aging Clock Shows Multilingual Adults 6–13 Years Younger in 144-Person Basque Cohort

Researchers trained an AI model on magnetoencephalography recordings from 728 participants to predict chronological age from resting-state connectivity, then applied it to the independent 144-person sample. Higher proficiency and earlier second-language acquisition strengthened the association, producing a graded rather than binary effect. The design captures functional network integrity but cannot yet separate lifelong multilingualism from correlated lifestyle variables such as social engagement or occupational complexity. Prior observational work in Neurology (2019) on 648 older adults found bilingualism associated with 4.7-year later dementia onset; the current MEG data supply a plausible mechanism via preserved long-range coherence. The team plans extension to prodromal Alzheimer cohorts and comparison of typologically similar versus distant language pairs. Next required evidence is a prospective 5-year longitudinal replication linking baseline brain-age gap to incident mild cognitive impairment rates.