Computer programming has powered modern society and made the AI ​​revolution possible, but little is known about how our brains learn this important skill. To answer that question, researchers at Johns Hopkins University studied the brain activity of college students before and after they learned how to code.

“Many of the things we do in the modern world, such as programming, driving, reading, and math, are not things our brains evolved to do,” says lead author Marina Bedny, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies brain plasticity and development.

“In programming classes, areas of the logical brain are ‘recycled’ for code. What we found is that by the time you get to college, your brain already has the neural infrastructure for programming.”

AI ツールにより、コーディングがますます利用しやすくなりました。 With programming becoming accessible to more people, Bedney and lead author Yunfei Liu, a postdoctoral researcher, set out to understand how the human brain adapts when beginners begin learning a skill.

The research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of undergraduate students before and after they took a semester-long introductory course in the programming language Python.

When students read the code after the course, groups of neurons in the frontoparietal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for logic, represented the meaning of the program. But even before class, when students read the plain English instructions for coding programs, the same neurons are already activated for the program algorithms.

“Learning to code uses the same neural mechanisms that we use for logical problem solving. Everyone has these abilities,” said Liu, who studies how the brain learns cultural skills related to education.

This finding suggests that all humans have the necessary fundamentals (primarily logic) to learn programming. And developing logical skills through puzzles, games, and daily table discussions may prepare children for future success in programming.

“People who are new to coding may look at Python and think they’ll never understand it, but our research suggests that we all have the ability to code,” Bedney said. 「私たちは生まれながらにそれを持っているのかもしれません。」