What I understand from this is that it could be that with 30 years of programming experience, the region of the brain that carefully reasons through unfamiliar

What I understand from this is that it could be that with 30 years of programming experience, the region of the brain that carefully reasons through unfamiliar problems activates less. That would make sense: if you are unfamiliar with programming, it makes sense that the unfamiliar problems zone activates. It would be interesting to study this, to know if this zone activates because of the unfamiliarity or if it still activates with experience while dealing with code. It could be that the zone will activate regardless (i.e. because when you are reading code, you are somehow always dealing with unfamiliar stuff - because this is why you are reading code in the first place usually) or not (i.e. because reading code is now familiar). > But doesn’t that invalidate any comparisons with natural language processing, something that the test subjects do have decades of experience in? It could: the test subjects would probably need experience in both natural language processing (which they have) and programming for the comparison to be fair. We most likely won't have "as familiar in both stuff", so we'll most certainly have to just do with "familiar enough with code".