To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language mit.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mit.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
What exactly happens when we read computer code? Some interesting research was recently funded to find out by the National Science Foundation, the Department of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Four researchers three from MIT and one from Tufts University performed MRI scans on the brains of dozens of participants performing “program comprehension tasks” in which they predicted a program’s output.
The idea was to determine how exactly computer code is comprehended in the brain how the variables, function names, and keywords become meaningful expressions and then coalesce into a larger whole. Would there be clues for computer science educators or even some tantalizing insights for the IT world’s developers? And perhaps most notably for computer programming instructors, it seeks to answer the question what part of the brain is most responsible for learning coding skills. Is it the
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CAMBRIDGE, MA In some ways, learning to program a computer is similar to learning a new language. It requires learning new symbols and terms, which must be organized correctly to instruct the computer what to do. The computer code must also be clear enough that other programmers can read and understand it.
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. 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.