Brain rewires itself for true multitasking, Georgetown study finds
7 reported1 unconfirmed
Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have found evidence that the brain physically reorganizes itself as people master a skill, allowing well-practiced tasks to become automatic and enabling true multitasking. The study, published June 4 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, challenges the long-held idea that humans only switch rapidly between tasks rather than performing them simultaneously. The team asked volunteers to sort morphed images of cars into two categories over more than 30,000 trials using a smartphone app across 5 to 10 weeks. Brain scans taken before and after training showed that early in learning, the task activated the prefrontal cortex, but after extensive practice, activity shifted to the temporal cortex. The researchers found that information from the newly developed car-selective area in the temporal cortex could bypass the prefrontal cortex, freeing it for other tasks. The more the task was offloaded from the prefrontal cortex, the better participants performed a second task at the same time. The findings may also help explain compulsive behaviors and why current AI systems struggle to learn continuously without disrupting previously acquired knowledge.
What’s reported
The study was conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center and published June 4 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Volunteers sorted morphed images of cars into two categories over more than 30,000 trials using a smartphone app across 5 to 10 weeks.
Early in learning, the sorting task primarily activated the prefrontal cortex; after weeks of practice, brain activity shifted to the temporal cortex.
The more the car sorting task was offloaded from the prefrontal cortex, the better participants performed a second task at the same time.
The study challenges the long-accepted belief that people cannot truly multitask, suggesting the brain can perform certain activities simultaneously.
Senior author Maximilian Riesenhuber stated: "Experience remodels the brain to bypass that frontal bottleneck."
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the ARCS Foundation, and the Army Research Laboratory.
Open questions
The article does not specify exactly what signals move learning from one brain region to another, nor which kinds of tasks can eventually be performed in parallel.
Key figures
Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University School of Medicine and co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering (senior author)
Patrick Cox, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at Lehigh University (first author, began study as graduate student in Riesenhuber's lab)
Clara A. Scholl, Marissa L. Laws, Nelson E. Jaimes, and Xiong Jiang of Georgetown University (research team members)
Sources: ScienceDaily
