Your brain is capable of learning to multitask without your realizing it, according to a new study.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.It has long been thought that using your brain to work simultaneously on multiple things was impossible.
That’s because problem-solving, logical planning and abstract thinking are all carried out by a key region of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, which is notoriously inflexible.“It’s made to do one thing at a time, which is often a good thing,” said Maximilian Riesenhuber, a professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University School of Medicine and senior author of the research published Thursday in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.“You can focus on something and suppress everything else to stay on task.”Neuroscientists previously suspected that when it was forced to juggle, the overworked prefrontal cortex tried to rapidly switch back and forth between tasks.
An experiment carried out by Riesenhuber and colleagues has revealed that the brain has a workaround that can be activated over time through repetition and accumulated experience.It can rewire itself to carry out one task subconsciously, freeing up the prefrontal cortex to focus on something else.Eleven men and women ages 18 to 29 spent several hours sifting through computer-generated images of cars as part of an app-based game and learned to sort them into one of two categories based on similarities and differences in shape.
Over five to 10 weeks, they repeated the sorting more than 30,000 times.At the beginning of the experiment, imaging tools that allowed the researchers to monitor which parts of the brain were being activated showed that the prefrontal cortex was carrying out the work.But when the participants’ brains were studied again, after many weeks of sorting, it was revealed that they were using a different region, known as the temporal cortex — which is involved in e...