Ideas flowing, coming faster than the fingers can keep up, but that’s ok because attention is not required. Nests within nests, deep-set recursive madness. Arrays, oh god, the arrays! Then clarity..everything slots in to place, you are no longer trying to code, you simply are. Welcome to the trance.
The deeper down the sometimes dauntingly long ladders of logic programmers decent while coding during this trance-like state makes me wonder in what way are these artificial constructs held together, without fragmenting and dissipating into the usual background-noise of the ever-busy cortex. What causes these constructs to fade, just as fast as they had been conceived in a sudden flash-fire of obliteration that leaves us grasping for dear life to the ideas, the concepts that we have seen appear before us. Which areas of coding cause different ‘tick-over’ speeds in the brain? These are questions I would love to ask, but dread to try and answer.
Seeking information on the run-time of the brain is no simple task, especially for a lay-man without his own EEG unit. Thanks to the guys over at OpenEEG, anyone with the time, skills and a relatively small amount of cash (~£100) can build and operate their own EEG unit, allowing the user to delve into the different states-of-mind, reflected in the patterns of brain-activity gleened via EEG. Building an EEG unit is therefor, my first goal.
What to do once I’ve got an EEG? Seeing as my goal is the study of brain-activity during what I’m calling, ‘The Coders Trance’, one route to go down would be to record one such session in its entirety, allowing myself to drift in to this Trance, while recording not only the EEG session, but also the Key Strokes in real-time of the coding session, allowing me to effectively play back both sessions in tandem, viewing the brains reaction to different problems as I skip between goals and targets within the projected Source Code.
What do I hope to learn? Now, that is a tricky question. As you may have seen in the Programming section of Othala.co.uk, I’ve got an interest in Bin-aural Beats, which was sparked when I got into the programming of my own portable alternative to the Brain Wave Generator. This PME (Portable Meditation Engine) was to be for Sony’s portable console, the PSP. Bin-aural Beats are able to induce certain states of mind and aid in meditation, concentration, sleep etc. What I would hope to learn from performing an experience as outline above, is what state of mind, at what speed the brain ‘ticks over’ when a programmer is in this trance-like state, and if the sensation can be reproduced using a Bin-aural Beat, designed to induce the same brain-state, using wave-patterns gathered and observed from the EEG.
Who knows if anything will come of this, but I thought the musings were worthy of a Blog post..my very first proper Blog post as a matter-of-fact!
Reference Links
Derek Sivers – Programming is like Songwriting