Design and thinking: how the brain works during coding
People have an opinion that learns program languages looks like learning a foreign language. Technically, there are common points, but in fact, things don’t look exactly the same to the brain. To find out which parts of the brain are responsible for coding scientists scanned the brains of volunteer developers. The young people worked using the textual Python language and the ScratchJr graphic language.
The study found that the parts of the brain responsible for processing information about the language were not involved in the coding process. But scientists have noticed activity in those parts of the brain that begin to work in the course of solving complex mathematical problems.
With mathematical problems, everything is not so simple: according to recent studies, when solving problems in logic and mathematics, the left hemisphere works more actively. And when searching for answers to spatial navigation problems, the right part of the brain is more involved.
So, coding activates both parts at once. It turns out that despite the fact that coding is more like mathematics, in reality everything is not quite so.
How else does programming affect the brain?
Programmers are known for specific thinking. Scientists have long studied the effects of programming on thinking. Here are three interesting takeaways.
1. Programming shapes our way of thinking and lays mental models.
How does this happen? The language with which you started is very important. It could be any language for example Basic or Pascal.
But, in any case, the idioms of the first programming language strongly influence the vision of structures, building a logical tree, building an algorithm, and so on.
There is also an opinion that proficiency in two programming languages at the same level is almost impossible: one of them will always be “native”, and the second, third, and all other— additional.
2. Writing code affects our health.
The brain, like a muscle, can (and should) be trained. Research on the impact of programming on student ability dates back to the late 20th century. Then there was an improvement in indicators on tests of cognitive abilities among students who know how to program or have experience in writing code.
An eight-year-old study argued that only specific types of activities that require learning and involving constant problem solving and overcoming difficulties affect the degree of brain activity. Programming does not directly affect our health, but improves the current state of the brain, positively affecting the efficiency of the thinking apparatus, cognitive abilities, etc.
3. Programming is also speech.
As mentioned above, when a developer is coding, the areas of the brain responsible for language functions are dormant. The situation is different when a programmer reads someone else’s code. While the programmers studied the fragments of the source code, the authors of the project performed an MRI scan of their brain. As it turns out, developers’ code review involves areas of the brain that are usually associated with speech processing, memory and attention.