Can We Really Multitask? New Research Suggests the Brain…

Can We Really Multitask? New Research Suggests the Brain Can Rewire Itself to Make It Possible For years, neuroscientists have argued that humans don't truly multitask. Instead, the brain was believed to rapidly switch attention between tasks, creating the illusion of doing two things at once. A new study from Georgetown University Medical Center, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, challenges that long-held view. Researchers found that with extensive practice, the brain can physically reorganize its neural circuits, allowing well-learned tasks to become automatic and freeing the brain's executive control center to handle other activities simultaneously. The findings provide new insights into learning, habit formation, expertise, and brain plasticity. When learning a new skill, the brain relies heavily on the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for: Decision-making Planning Attention Problem-solving Executive control Because the prefrontal cortex has limited processing capacity, performing two demanding tasks simultaneously is difficult. This has led many scientists to conclude that humans are simply task-switching, not truly multitasking. To understand what happens after a skill becomes automatic, researchers recruited volunteers to learn a challenging visual categorization task. Participants completed more than 30,000 training trials over 5 to 10 weeks using a smartphone-based learning game. Brain activity was measured using: Functional MRI (fMRI) Electroencephalography (EEG) both before and after the training period. At the beginning of training, the visual task strongly activated the prefrontal cortex. However, after weeks of practice, research