Practice Rewires Brain to Enable True Multitasking — SkimNews
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- Georgetown University researchers found that extensive training physically reorganizes the brain, allowing well-practiced tasks to shift from the prefrontal cortex to the temporal cortex and run in parallel with other activities.
- The study tracked volunteers who completed more than 30,000 car-image sorting trials over 5 to 10 weeks via a smartphone app, with fMRI and EEG scans taken before and after the training period.
- Maximilian Riesenhuber and Patrick Cox reported that the more participants offloaded the task from the prefrontal cortex, the better they performed a second task simultaneously, demonstrating what Riesenhuber called 'true multitasking' rather than rapid task-switching.
- The findings offer a neural explanation for why habits resist willpower: learned behaviors migrate to circuits that bypass conscious control, undermining 'just think of something else' interventions.
- Riesenhuber said the brain's ability to transfer skills into the temporal cortex may explain why humans can continually build new abilities on top of prior learning, a flexibility current AI systems still lack.
- The study was published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience on June 4, 2026, supported by the National Science Foundation, the ARCS Foundation, and the Army Research Laboratory.
Why it matters: The study reframes multitasking as a trainable outcome of physical brain remodeling, not a hard cognitive ceiling. That gives a concrete neural target for experts like radiologists, who Cox noted can classify masses almost automatically, and explains why willpower-based strategies fail against entrenched habits now anchored outside conscious control.
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