Driving with the radio on, making breakfast while chatting with family, or enjoying a sandwich while reading a book are common examples of multitasking in our daily lives. But are our brains truly doing two things at once, or are they rapidly switching between tasks?
The answer is nuanced. Scientific research indicates that for tasks requiring significant cognitive effort, the brain is actually just switching quickly between them. More information here.
However, a new study by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, suggests that some tasks can be automated to allow for a form of true multitasking.
Consider driving: initially, learning to drive demands complete mental and physical focus to coordinate the necessary actions and thoughts. But after years of experience, the brain manages these tasks with less conscious effort.
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The study discovered that with practice, the brain could reroute certain tasks away from its primary processing center, akin to a city bypass, reducing mental strain and enhancing multitasking ability.
“We have another stepping stone in our understanding of how the brain learns,” comments neuroscientist Maximilian Riesenhuber, the study’s senior author. More information here.
Humans can multitask to some extent, such as walking while talking, without tripping over words or feet. However, for more complex tasks, the brain’s prefrontal cortex, known for its strong executive functions, can only handle one task at a time, creating a ‘frontal bottleneck’. More information here.
In their research, the team at Georgetown University utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG) brain imaging on 11 subjects to observe when and where brain activity occurred.
Over several weeks, participants completed more than 30,000 mental tasks, sorting images of cars into categories. Brain scans were conducted before and after these trials.
The critical finding was that initially, the prefrontal cortex was engaged, but with training, much of the car-sorting task was transferred to the temporal cortex, which handles memory and object recognition.
As psychologist Patrick Cox, the first author of the study, notes, “Previous studies have shown that parts of the temporal cortex can be activated by particular object categories in experienced observers – birds, cars, even Pokémon – but a limitation of all of those studies is that they only looked after people became experts.” More information here.
The study concluded with a dual-task experiment where participants identified cars while handling another task. Those who had transferred more sorting work to the temporal cortex performed better in the second task.
Cox highlights the real-world implications: “This has implications for critical real-world scenarios, like when a radiologist can accurately classify masses on an X-ray as benign or malignant fairly automatically, often without extensive deliberation, thanks to years of training.” More information here.
Although the study’s scale is small, requiring replication on a larger scale, it offers significant insights into how learning occurs in the brain. On a broader scale, these findings might contribute to research on compulsive behaviors and AI development.
Related: ‘Superager’ Brains Defy Cognitive Decline. We Finally Know Their Secret.
Going forward, researchers aim to identify specific tasks or mental activities that could be offloaded to other brain areas, thus freeing the prefrontal cortex for different functions.
“What we show is that the circuitry actually changes so the brain can do two things at once,” states Riesenhuber. “This really is true multitasking.”
The research has been published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
This article was fact-checked by Michael Irving and edited by Michael Irving. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
