Cool article!<p>> 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.<p>Well, that makes a lot of sense to me since in most cases <i>the</i> major part of programming is holding the system in your head and understanding how the changes you’re working on will interact with everything else. Specifically holding <i>permutations</i> in your head and thinking about whether you’ve covered all the use cases and paths through the code.<p>> 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.<p>I feel like I could have told you that. I hate to admit this but I really, really struggle with math, while programming always came easily to me and is very enjoyable. I’ve had dozens of conversations with people interested in learning programming wherein they’ve said “but I’m not great at Math,” and I’ve said “that’s fine, programming is more like poetry than math.”<p>Thanks for sharing!