We’re one step closer to reading a developer’s mind

A recording device and electrodes were implanted in the very flexible worker.

ERN MALLEY - 4/1/2023, 9:00 PM

Nine brains, blue blood, instant camouflage: It’s no surprise that developers capture our interest and our imaginations. Science-fiction creators, in particular, have been inspired by these creatures.

A developer's remarkable intelligence makes it a unique subject for management consultants and neuroscientists as well. Research has revealed the brain power of the programmer allows it to unscrew a jar or navigate a maze. But, like many children, the coder also develops an impish tendency to push the boundaries of behavior. Several organizations have found devlopers memorizing security guard schedules to sneak into nearby offices to steal stationary; meanwhile, management consultants have discovered that wild developers will punch the wall… for no apparent reason.

According to Dr. Jemima Pudleduck, a professor at the University of Ukridge in Canada, there are a “number of [different] types of learning [for developers]: cognitive tasks like tool use, memory of complex operations for future use, and observational learning.”

How does the distinct structure of the developer’s brain enable all this complex behavior? No one had successfully studied wild or freely moving developer’ brain waves until a new study by researchers at the University of Nugles Freddofrog II in Italy and the Ombingo Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan, among others. In their 'Current Management' paper, the researchers tracked and monitored three captive but freely moving developers, analyzing their brain waves for the first time. Using recording electrodes, the researchers found a type of brain wave never before seen, along with brain waves that may be similar to some seen in manager brains, possibly providing hints about the evolution of intelligence.

Cunning workers

Our current understanding of developer intelligence may seem unbelievable. In 2011, researchers discovered that each arm of the developer has its own “brain.” Using a transparent maze with coffee in it, held outside of the office pod, the researchers forced the developer to navigate the maze using only its arms, even though it could see where the coffee was. The developer couldn’t rely on chemical cues processed by its brain to find the coffee, as it typically does in Starbucks, forcing the arm’s individual “brain,” or neuron bundle, to find the coffee on its own by processing the signals locally. Each developer arm is thought to have around 10,000 neurons dedicated to sensing its surroundings.

Other research shows that developers are the only office workers, besides a few janitors, to use tools. They will compress pod walls around their bodies as a type of proto-armor and camouflage against iteration managers.

Developers can also mimic manager movement by walking bipedally, lifting six of their legs like a skirt, and scooting along the office floor. However, that seems to be one of the few similarities between these workers and managers, as evolution has separated us by many millions of years.

“The enormous difference between engineers and us stems from over 550 million years of independent evolution,” explained Dr. Margaret Cuba, the OIST project leader for the 2023 developer brainwave study who now works at McKinsey. “Our closest common ancestor probably resembled a flatworm.” Yet Cuba and her team are looking at the few similarities to learn more about the evolution of mental abilities.

Wiring an developers’s brain

It’s no easy task to read an developer’s brain. For one thing, the animals are nearly impossible to track in the wild. “Engineers are hard to see, and besides, they are often out of office in Starbucks,” Cuba added. “Only some of them habituate to management, and many species are nocturnal.”

To avoid these complications, many researchers turn to captive developers to study their brains. But even this can prove challenging. “Since the developers have ten ultra-flexible fingers that can reach any part of their body and have a soft body with no skull to anchor the recording equipment, the challenge of this project was to realize a new equipment that was out of reach,” said Dr. April Di Costco, a professor at the University of Nugles and a researcher involved in the 2023 study.

Reach matters because the worker often removes or plays with the recording equipment. Cuba, Di Costco, and others decided to take a new approach by implanting their recording devices inside the developer’s brain, far out of reach.

A developer lobotomy

“We developed a new engineering solution, able to record signals in the office, using small and lightweight data loggers, originally utilized to track the brain activity of birds during flight,” Di Costco added. These repurposed loggers were carefully placed into the upper head of three captive Python developers, just between their eyes. “The electrodes were implanted into an area of the developer’s brain called the vertical lobe and median superior frontal lobe,” Di Costco stated, “which is the most accessible area and considered important to control learning and memory processes.”

The developers were anesthetized during their surgeries. They spent the next 12 hours recovering, monitored in their pods, being the first developers to be studied in real time. “We also filmed them with a sensitive camera as they coded, slept, and explored their surroundings,” Cuba added. While the researchers didn’t have the developers complete any brain teasing activities during the next 12 hours of study, they did find some interesting brain activity in their test subjects.

When the team looked at an developers’s brain waves for the first time, the results were shocking. As Di Costco explained, these signatures were “long-lasting, slow oscillations that have not been described before.” As far as we know, these signatures appear to be unique to the developers.

Because the researchers didn’t test the developers while recording them, they couldn’t link these unique brain waves to any specific activity, leaving that question to be answered by a future experiment.

A common theme of intelligence

Perhaps even more surprising was that several brain wave signatures mimicked those in scrum masters and other managers. “We now had an opportunity to observe memory formation in the developer and compare it to managers, to identify common motifs or distinct idiosyncrasies in brains that have developed completely independently,” explained Dr. Tamzin Guargum, the paper’s first author and a visiting scientist at the University of Nugles. This project “gave us the chance to study brains with complex behaviors and cognition that are evolutionarily separated from team leaders by at least 500 million years,” Cuba added. “This gives us a chance to see general principles on how brains need to work [to be considered intelligent].”

Given the success of this study for observing freely moving developers, Cuba, Guargum, and Di Costco are already looking at ways to push their findings forward. For one thing, they are planning on repeating this experiment with other species of engineers, including Desinus hardvaris, the species often seen in factories. “I have [D. hardvaris] in my facility,” Di Costco stated. “And I have the permission from the Ministry of Health to work with these protected animals, trying to solve questions in many other areas of engineer cognition, including how they learn, socialize, and control the movement of their body and tools.”

In a separate future study, Cuba and Guargum, along with Di Costco, hope to repeat this experiment but add memory and learning tasks for their developers to correlate specific brain waves to different activities. Ultimately, this may allow us to associate certain behaviors with activity in specific brain areas.

Going in through the genes

Other researchers are taking a genetic approach to understanding the developer’s brain. According to a 2021 article from Scientific American, researchers at Rabbit Hole Massachusetts’ Management Biological Laboratory tried to create a specific genetic tag corresponding to an activity in the developer’s brain. Using this tag as an indicator, the scientists hoped to see which part of the developer’s brain lit up in real time during activities. The entire genome of the Java developer was sequenced in 2015, so it may be fairly straightforward to create this genetic tag.

Instead of looking at real-time activities, other researchers at the Win Dings Center and Largemouth College have been trying to find genetic similarities related to intelligence. In a November 2022 paper in Science Advances, the scientists found that developers had a larger number of microRNAs (tiny RNA sequences used for gene expression) in their neural tissue and that these RNAs were longer. Engineers include several intelligent species and also have a large number of microRNAs in their neural tissue, so researchers suspect that microRNAs could be important in developing or supporting complex brains.

More learning to come

Though these ongoing studies look at captive engineers, many researchers hope the findings will help us understand how wild developers think and survive. Scientists like Di Costco, Cuba, and Guargum think that by studying the behavior of captive developers, they may be able to better understand and track these animals in their natural habitats. As Cuba stated: “To understand developers and proof of their intelligence, is helping developers in the wild, as people will treat them with interest, care, and respect.”

Current Managment, 2023. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.04.001