Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery.

Time flies when you're learning super cool stuff. I'm Nate.

And I'm Callie.

If you're dropping in for the first time, welcome to curiosity

where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you're a loyal listener,

welcome back. Today you'll learn about how the bilingual brain might be better at multitasking, good news

for women who are at risk for morning sickness, and the strangely complex science behind

cat purring.

Without further ado, let's satisfy some curiosity. People who are

bilingual, it turns out, might just be better at switching gears from one task to

another than people who only speak one language. That's according to a new study out of the University of Florida.

Okay, switching gear, so you mean like, multitasking?

Well, sort of.

To really understand what this means, you have to think about how we process information.

So new ideas, stimuli, info and all kinds of shiny objects are always trying to steal

away our attention, right? Sure, but most of that stuff is just kind of useless fluff.

Exactly. Most of the things that try to pull our focus away from a task are just

irrelevant. But for most of us those irrelevant things kind of get stuck in our minds

and we have to punch them down or suppress them in order to maintain our focus. But this study found that

bilinguals are better at simply ignoring the useless stuff.

Oh, okay. And if you can ignore useless information, you can more easily get to the heart of each new issue that arises.

Something like that. They're not totally sure why this happens, but the study represents a totally new approach to studying the bilingual mind.

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