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How is the Brain Programmed for Computer Programming?
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Despite the increasing popularity of computer programming, little is known about how the brain adapts to this relatively new human activity. A study by researchers in Japan examined the brain activity of 30 programmers of diverse levels of expertise, and found that seven regions of the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices in the expert programmer's brain are fine-tuned for programming. The finding suggests that higher programming skills are built upon fine-tuned brain activities on a network of multiple distributed brain regions.
The researchers describe their work in "Expert Programmers Have Fine-Tuned Cortical Representations of Source Code," published in the journal eNeuro.
The researchers observed groups of novices, experienced, and expert programmers, who were shown 72 different code snippets while under the observation of functional MRI (fMRI). An analysis revealed that the amount of information in seven brain regions strengthened with the skill level of the programmer: the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus pars triangularis (IFG Tri), left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), left supramarginal gyrus (SMG), left middle and inferior temporal gyri (MTG/IT), and right middle frontal gyrus (MFG).
"Identifying these characteristics in expert programmers' brains offers a good starting point for understanding the cognitive mechanisms behind programming expertise," says Takatomi Kubo, an associate professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, and one of the lead authors of the study. "Our findings illuminate the potential set of cognitive functions constituting programming expertise."
From Nara Institute of Science and Technology
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