Learning to Code Changed My Brain
And probably yours too!
“To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language” — Anne Trafton, MIT
If you’ve ever learned to code, you know it’s like nothing else you’ve done in your life. It challenges parts of your brain you‘ve never used before.
I’ve always heard that coding is very similiar to learning a new lanuage. I personally never felt this way as I always struggled to learn foreign languages, but picked up on coding rather fast. In this recent study published by MIT, it shows that coding does actually use a different part of the brain when compared to reading a language.
After about a year of coding professionally, I started to notice a difference in how my brain operated. After some research, what I’ve experienced happens to most people who learn to code.
So what’s changed for me?
Instructions
One of the first things I noticed is that I started to process instructions differently. I learned that we use if, and, or a bit differently in the English language when compared to logical statements in a programming language.
A classic programming joke that sums this up greatly is:
“I need butter, sugar and cooking oil. Also, get a loaf of bread and if…
