How learning computer programming ‘rewires’ parts of the brain

By Stephen Beech

Parts of the brain are “rewired” when people learn computer programming, according to new research.

Scientists watched university students’ brains as they learned to code.

The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of undergraduates before and after they took an introductory course in Python, a programming language.

They found that areas involved in logical reasoning are “repurposed” during the learning process.

When students read code after the course, groups of neurons in a part of the brain responsible for logic – the fronto-parietal regions – represented the meaning of the programmes.

But even before class, when students read plain English descriptions of the coding programmes, the same neurons are already activated