The Effects of Computer Programming on the Brain (2012)(virtuecenter.com) |
The Effects of Computer Programming on the Brain (2012)(virtuecenter.com) |
Instead, the author has a pre-determined value judgement of what is a "good" or "bad" allocation of priorities. From that premise, he works backwards to a observation that coding can be addictive. This addictiveness is then judged as "bad":
>someone who may be suffering from what I can only really describe as coding addiction, the solution may be to find healthier rewards.
For some people, the healthiest reward is the coding. For others, it's working on solving a 300-year old math problem, or struggling for hours and days to find the perfect word for a line in a poem, or a sentence in a novel. There are no "healthier" rewards than those intellectual gymnastics.
Sometimes it's true that these "addictions" don't perfectly align with business priorities and client demands. Saying that the addiction is "unhealthy" is favoring the perspective of the business. The other perspective is that the individual is in the "wrong" day job.
[0]: My personal definition of addiction is, if you were to stop doing X activity for a week cold turkey, would you experience withdrawal symptoms?
The author's scope is maybe too narrow by focusing only on programmers. Perhaps this problem can be generalized to a type of individual that requires the flow state to the extent that their other behavior is perturbed or dysfunctional. Compare Richard Feynman's explosive rage when distracted from calculus or drums...
More to the point, there aren't any other rewards than dopamine. Dopamine is literally what a reward is in the brain. Unless you're just never going to do anything rewarding, this is inescapable.
> someone who may be suffering from what I can only really describe as coding addiction, the solution may be to find healthier rewards.
If your definition of addiction is dopaminergenic action, then you're simply proposing another addiction here, because you're just proposing a different dopaminergenic action besides coding here.
Not saying I agree, but it could be the start of an interesting discussion.
Dietrich, A (2004) The cognitive neuroscience of creativity [1]
Dietrich, A (2004) Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of flow [2]
[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03196731#page-1
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810004000583Internet Screens have fundamentally changed human brain.
In contrast, when everything simply blurs together, there are no clearly delineated chunks of memory to latch linguistic markers onto, and I fail to build abstractions out of those thoughts.
Of course, this concern may be moot in the case of computer programming, since the abstractions involved are often concretely represented by the computer itself! In a way, when we program, we are outsourcing a part of our brain, relying on a smaller subset of mental capacity, and relying on the computer to amplify it back again, by handling the abstractions for us.
OTOH, this may simply be proof that going to the whiteboard before coding up a solution is a healthy alternative to hacking away at the keyboard all day without thought.
I first felt this way when I saw "addiction" applied as a label to kids who prefered playing video games to going outside. My response was "did they call it addiction before video games when kids played with blocks and action figures indoors?" They didn't. It's easy for people to reach for the term "addiction" when they want to pathologize behavior they don't like.
Fact is, the dopamine cycle is a natural part of life. The problem isn't whether something is addictive or not, it's whether the side effects of that pleasure cycle are harmful. I've had periods in my life where I've spent weeks and months at a time "heads down" in programming. It was always as controllable as it was pleasurable.
I'm not saying people aren't passionate about programming, but in the context of the startup world, the literal meanings of the words don't matter. The subtext is what's being listened for.
But I keep my skill growing anyway because I'd like to produce better software products. Development is a mess already, it will be better to prevent further complications.