I’m taking a course to learn to program (Python) and while reading the text and doing the coding exercises, there’s a part of my brain that feels like it’s ‘observing’ the part(s) of my brain trying to learn and do this new thing. Obviously I can’t really feel or observe new neural connections forming, but the contrast between other things I do without struggling as much (learning a language, problem-solving, business analysis, etc – ie: not the cotidiana (love that word, that and zopilote are my favorite Spanish words to randomly say out loud)) makes the effort to connect what I read to what I can (mostly can’t) do very striking.

Somewhere on this blog I’ve posted about how I enjoy making connections between disparate things and yet here it’s so fascinating to observe my brain making this laborious effort to connect concept to practice. Something that is, when broken down to its parts, not that complicated.

For example (you can skip this paragraph, btw), one problem to solve for was to write a function such that this input: changeColor(pict, .30, 2), would increase the amount of green in a picture by 30%. I had to open up the original picture, point to a random pixel and find its RGB value. In this case the green value was 75. Using a calculator I computed that the new green value had to be 97 (the program drops any numbers after the decimal point).  I was able to remember at least some rudimentary math enough to scribble down 75 x f(.30) = 98. So what was the relationship between f and .30? This is not advanced math (and I’ve taken college level maths in the past) and yet it took my brain a ridiculously long time to work out that my program would correctly change the color if written as   setGreen(pix, value * (1 + amt))   – where the ‘amt’ in the program took the input of .30 and performed the calculation on the RGB green value for a given pixel.

This is probably not even an optimal way to write the code but it worked and I could understand what it was doing. Interesting to me, however, were the pauses and false starts my brain was encountering because the connections just weren’t there.

There’s a lot of interest lately in teaching children (and adults to some extent) STEM/STEAM in an applied manner. I can see now why people are experimenting with so many ways to accomplish this – even being adept at solving problems in the ‘real’ world doesn’t develop thought processes and neural connections needed to think in a programmatic or mathematical manner.

It would be fun to have an over-the-counter brain scanner like a mini-MRI or CT machine to record/observe one’s own brain firing in different cortices while learning different things – sort of like brain biofeedback. People could compare the scanner image from when they started learning something to the images as they progressed through a class or self-study program. So just like you can see your waistline shrink or muscles develop through diet and exercise, you could see your brain develop. I mean, obviously you can ‘see’ that before a class you couldn’t program your way out of a box (for example) and afterwards you could, say, write a smartphone app. But actually seeing a difference in your brain would be really cool.