This network, whose activity is spread throughout the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, is typically recruited for tasks that require holding many pieces of information in mind at once, and is responsible for our ability to perform a wide variety of mental tasks. Instead, they found that the coding task mainly activated the so-called multiple demand network.
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The researchers saw little to no response to code in the language regions of the brain. While the programmers lay in a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) scanner, the researchers showed them snippets of code and asked them to predict what action the code would produce. The subjects in the study were all young adults proficient in the language they were being tested on. The two programming languages that the researchers focused on in this study are known for their readability - Python and ScratchJr, a visual programming language designed for children age 5 and older. To shed light on this issue, the researchers set out to study whether brain activity patterns while reading computer code would overlap with language-related brain activity. The other suggests that because of the parallels between coding and language, language skills might be more relevant.
One holds that in order to be good at programming, you must be good at math. There are two schools of thought regarding how the brain learns to code, she says. “Here, we were interested in exploring the relationship between language and computer programming, partially because computer programming is such a new invention that we know that there couldn’t be any hardwired mechanisms that make us good programmers,” Ivanova says. In previous work, her lab has shown that music and math do not appear to activate this language network. In particular, she has been studying the question of whether other functions rely on the brain’s language network, which includes Broca’s area and other regions in the left hemisphere of the brain. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Tufts University were also involved in the study.Ī major focus of Fedorenko’s research is the relationship between language and other cognitive functions. Middleton Career Development Associate Professor of Neuroscience and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in eLife. It’s not the same as language, and it’s not the same as math and logic,” says Anna Ivanova, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the study.Įvelina Fedorenko, the Frederick A. “Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing.
However, although reading computer code activates the multiple demand network, it appears to rely more on different parts of the network than math or logic problems do, suggesting that coding does not precisely replicate the cognitive demands of mathematics either. Instead, it activates a distributed network called the multiple demand network, which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles. In spite of those similarities, MIT neuroscientists have found that reading computer code does not activate the regions of the brain that are involved in language processing. The computer code must also be clear enough that other programmers can read and understand it. It requires learning new symbols and terms, which must be organized correctly to instruct the computer what to do. In some ways, learning to program a computer is similar to learning a new language.
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