Code isn't a Language?
hendrikboom writes:
It seems that the language processing areas of the brain aren't much involved in reading computer code:
There are two schools of thought regarding how the brain learns to code, [Anna Ivanova, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the study] says. One holds that in order to be good at programming, you must be good at math. The other suggests that because of the parallels between coding and language, language skills might be more relevant. 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 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. The subjects in the study were all young adults proficient in the language they were being tested on. 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 researchers saw little to no response to code in the language regions of the brain. Instead, they found that the coding task mainly activated the so-called multiple demand network. 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.
[...] Previous studies have shown that math and logic problems seem to rely mainly on the multiple demand regions in the left hemisphere, while tasks that involve spatial navigation activate the right hemisphere more than the left. The MIT team found that reading computer code appears to activate both the left and right sides of the multiple demand network, and ScratchJr activated the right side slightly more than the left. This finding goes against the hypothesis that math and coding rely on the same brain mechanisms.
Maybe learning C shouldn't be accepted for a foreign-language requirement in university.
-- hendrik
Journal Reference:
Anna A Ivanova, Shashank Srikant, Yotaro Sueoka, et al. Comprehension of computer code relies primarily on domain-general executive brain regions, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.58906)
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