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 part that does math? Or is it the part responsible for learning language?