After reading the study about musicians, it compares the gray matter in musicians and no musicians. In particular:<p>> <i>The cluster of cerebellar gray matter differences in our study is located in</i> [...] <i>This region may correspond to the area of the cerebellar finger-hand representation as shown in some functional imaging studies</i> [...]<p>In the paper there is relation with IQ or any other metric of intelligence or language ability.<p>And the study about coding says:<p>> <i>Here, we used fMRI to investigate two candidate brain systems: the multiple demand (MD) system, typically recruited during math, logic, problem solving, and executive tasks, and the language system, typically recruited during linguistic processing.</i> [...] <i>We found that the MD system exhibited strong bilateral responses to code in both experiments, whereas the language system responded strongly to sentence problems, but weakly or not at all to code problems.</i> [...]<p>Also, in the paper there is relation with IQ or any other metric of intelligence or language ability.<p>So, none of the research study support the claims of the press article.
Not music... cooking. Write a recipe. It's the same as code.<p>To bake a cake you need explicit instructions, including time, temperature, and exact ingredients.<p>You need 'subroutines' for things like icing, which is another recipe.<p>And when you write a recipe for me, it is not sufficient to say "stir"... you need to say what the stopping condition is. The stopping condition has to be 'measurable'. For example, I can't cook hamburger because I can't tell when "all of the red" is gone (I'm color blind to red-green).<p>There are 'user interface' issues... cake decorating.<p>Plus if someone find out that your 'cake' is over a month old, they are sure to insist it needs to be 'redone', just like real code.
I both program as well as play guitar.<p>When learning these, I felt my brain physically change for the better. First for coding, then again later for the guitar.<p>Why choose one, when you can have both?