New research shows that the experience of becoming bilingual itself makes learning a new language easier

In order to be truly bilingual, most people require exposure to multiple languages in early childhood. Children who grow up in multilingual settings never seem to have any difficulty learning more than one and keeping each language separate. Similarly, children who learn to read at a very early age have a textual comprehension that is both different from and superior to that of children who become literate later.

words and meaning often conflict. How does multi-liguistics affect understanding of deep/complex concepts.

It's hard to tell without a general example. Traditional structural linguistics gives us a picture of language that only has an arbitrary relationship to meaning, while transformational models insist that all languages have a shared underlying structure, an approach that suggests that underlying concepts are a human universal. The structural model is useful for explaining vocabulary, while the transformational models do a better job of explaining things like sentence structure.

On a very superficial level, knowledge of more than one language gives an individual awareness of multiple ways of expressing a given concept.

I would like to point out that it is not a simple as it is seems.If you are truly bilingual you are also bi-cultural.
It is not a question of learning a language parrot fashion.
A language emanates from a cultural setting, that is why
an artificial language like Esperanto has little chance of success. Esperanto has no historical or cultural baggage. A truly bilingual person will normally translate concepts and not just words.