More than half the world's population uses two or more languages every day, and it appears that being bilingual could have brain boosting powers. New research has shown that bilingual people have more efficient brains than those who only speak one language. Experts believe that this could explain why the brains of bilinguals are better equipped at staving off the signs of cognitive ageing or dementia. The researchers asked two groups of elderly people to perform a task that involved focussing on visual information (the colour of an object), while ignoring spatial information (the position of the object). Using fMRI scanning to look at their brains during the task, the researchers found that monolingual brains allocated a number of regions linked to visual and motor function and interference control, which are located in the frontal lobes.