Bilingual experience helps strengthens our cognition skills by training our brain muscles. It also decreases the risk of suffering from memory loss.
Researchers have found that learning languages decrease the risk of Dementia. This disease affects mental cognitive tasks, such as memory and reasoning. Dementia is an umbrella term that Alzheimer's disease can fall under (Timothy J. Legg). “In a study of more than 200 bilingual and monolingual patients with Alzheimer’s disease, bilingual patients reported showing initial symptoms of the disease at about 77.7 years of age—5.1 years later than the monolingual average of 72.6” (Viorica Marian, and Anthony Shook, 2012, p.1). Imagine somebody you love suffering from dementia, well, learning a language before they get diagnosed delays the symptoms for about 5 years, letting that person remember you for a longer time, along with other real-world health benefits.
The cognitive and neurological benefits of bilingualism, such as inhibitory control, improvement in memory, and decision making skills, extend from childhood to old age as the brain more
efficiently processes information (Viorica Marian, and Anthony Shook). Bilingual people are more skilled at inhibiting information; they can switch between tasks faster than monolinguals.
In addition, the cognitive skills improve, helping you pay more attention to things, and understanding them better. Delaying dementia and memory loss by a couple of years isn’t something the brain can do by itself, you have to do something in order to train your brain muscles, and that is learning a language because you memorize things, and the part of the brain that deals with memory improves. Due to these facts, I strongly suggest you start training your brain right now, learning short phrases in a different language.