When you next you go on holiday try to think about learning a few words of the local lingo. It could keep your brain ticking over.

Indeed it could do more than that, it could make your brain resistant to ageing, even improve your mental capacity, whatever your age.

This is a fertile area of research, examining the benefits of speaking more than one language.

One surprising study showed in people speaking only one language, the average age for developing the first signs of dementia was 71.4, whereas it was 75.5 for people who speak two or more languages.

Would you believe bilingual people remember shopping lists, names and directions better than people who speak only one language?

Bilingual people are also more alert to their surroundings. They can focus on important details and ignore the less important ones.

And now researchers at the ­University of Reading claim to be the first to “test the idea that speaking multiple languages protects against decline in brain function”.

To do this they firstly compared the brain activity of bilingual people with and without multiple sclerosis.

Then they compared the thinking abilities of people with and without MS who spoke only one language.

They found that MS patients who spoke more than one language attained similar scores to bilingual people without MS.

In the other group, however, “patients [with MS] who only had fluency in one language performed worse than the mono- lingual control” group.

This is a pretty spectacular result according to any criteria.

What makes this study special is that it examined two cognitive ­functions in detail.

The first is known as “monitoring”, which is your ability to analyse a problem and change your way of thinking to come up with new solutions for solving problems and making decisions.

It’s described as “thinking outside the box”.

The second is ­“inhibitory control”, which is your ability to control natural impulses.

The study found that MS patients who spoke only one language had similar inhibitory control to people without MS but showed “significantly worse monitoring abilities”, suggesting that speaking a second language could help creative thinking when having to face a thorny problem.

Christos Pliatsikas, an associate professor from Reading, said: “Previous studies have provided clues as to the potential effect of speaking multiple languages on the brain and its power to protect against disease, including increasing the volume of several brain areas connected to language learning and processing. This study shows how this idea is taking place in practice.”