Practice Rewires Brain to Enable True Multitasking
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- Georgetown University researchers found that extensive training physically reorganizes the brain, allowing learned tasks to bypass the prefrontal cortex and run through specialized circuits in the temporal cortex instead, challenging the long-held idea that humans can only rapidly switch between tasks.
- Senior author Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD and first author Patrick Cox, PhD (now at Lehigh University) had volunteers complete more than 30,000 car-sorting trials over 5-10 weeks using a smartphone app, scanning brains with fMRI and EEG before and after training.
- The study showed early learning activated the prefrontal cortex — the executive-function region long viewed as a multitasking bottleneck — but after weeks of practice, the same categorization task was handled mainly by the temporal cortex, a region tied to memory and object recognition.
- Patrick Cox, PhD noted the study is the first to track this shift longitudinally: 'we measure before and after training, so we can see that extensive training essentially put a category-selective area in the temporal lobe that was not there before.'
- The more the sorting task was offloaded from the prefrontal cortex, the better participants performed a second task simultaneously, with the temporal cortex routing information directly to response-producing regions and skipping the frontal bottleneck entirely.
- The findings may help explain why habits are hard to break: well-learned behaviors move into circuits less dependent on conscious control, so Riesenhuber noted that telling someone to 'think of something else' doesn't work because the behavior isn't under conscious control anymore.
- Published June 4 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the ARCS Foundation, and the Army Research Laboratory.
Why it matters: The research reframes multitasking as a trainable skill rather than a myth, with the prefrontal cortex offload-to-temporal-cortex mechanism giving neuroscientists a concrete neural target for studying habit formation, compulsive behavior, and why some skills become automatic while others never do.
