We're getting into some of my favorite literature, so I wanted to jump in here.
And I think it is just an illusion that this parallelism is only at a low level (e.g. neurons). Read Minsky's Society Theory of Mind ( http://www.media.mit.edu/people/minsky/ ) for example.
But also consider Herb Simon's arguments in opposition -- and Simon has a lot more empirical evidence in his favor. I don't have an opinion on which is right yet, but I don't think that this is a settled point.
Here's an excerpt from "MultiLogo: A Study of Children and Concurrent Programming" ( http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/Papers/mres/MultiLogo/MultiLogo.html )
I really love Mitchel's MultiLogo work, but part of what I love about it is his honesty in how *confusing* students found all the concurrency. For example, he tells a great story about a student who kills the launching process, and can't understand why the launched process doesn't stop, too.
I think her problem is that her model of programming is sequential as a result of her year of Logo programming. And the world isn't sequential. Think of sports teams. Think of traffic. Think of the internal concurrency in walking. In games. Think about bank account transfers. The Incredible Machine. Cooking. An orchestra. And so on.
I don't find the "year of Logo programming" argument convincing. There are too many studies (most prominently the Pea and Kurland work, but even Idit Harel's and Yasmin Kafai's versions of ISDP) that shows that not much gets learned in a year of programming. That deep mindsets about the universe get changed in a single year is a stretch. (For example, Idit's and Yasmin's studies have taken more than a full year.)
The other examples (sports teams, traffic, etc.) seem more an argument that students hold a centralized, sequential model of the universe -- consider Mitchel's work with StarLogo and how hesitant the students were to release the centralized models.
It should be noted that Mitchel's StarLogo work is a dissertation about MENTAL MODELS OF CONTROL, *NOT* programming. I asked Mitchel once about the interface that students used to StarLogo, and he told me that he was it. None of his subjects actually wrote any of those programs! Rather, they told Mitchel about their ideas, and he coded them -- explaining what he was doing -- and then worked with the kids to understand the results. It's important to note that the kids didn't write the code. They might have been able to, but that hasn't been tested As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of kids programming in StarLogo -- we don't know if it would work for the average kid. So, we can't use StarLogo as an example of a concurrent programming language that works for kids.
Mark
-------------------------- Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies. Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/ (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial@cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html