Scientists Discover the Brain Can Rewire Itself To Truly Multitask

Extensive practice can actually change how your brain works. This allows well-learned skills to become automatic, making it possible to truly multitask.

Think about learning to drive. At first, it takes all your focus. But after years, you can drive while talking or listening to music. This happens because your brain rewires itself. It shifts practiced skills to different parts of the brain, so they need less conscious effort.

This idea challenges the old belief that people only switch quickly between tasks, rather than doing them at the same time. The research could also help create artificial intelligence systems that learn more like humans.

Maximilian Riesenhuber, a professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University, said this study helps us understand how the brain learns. He noted that people can truly learn to multitask by remodeling their brain.

Practice Changes Brain Pathways

Georgetown scientists studied how skills become automatic. They wanted to see how the brain moves from actively learning a task to doing it with less conscious effort after a lot of practice.

Riesenhuber used driving as an example. Learning to drive needs full attention. But experienced drivers can do other things while operating the car. He asked, "How does your brain do that?"

Most earlier studies looked at the start of learning. The long-term brain changes from deep practice have been harder to study and are not as well understood.

Training Frees Up Mental Work

For the study, participants learned to sort morphed car images into two groups. They did this by noticing small visual differences. Over five to ten weeks, they completed over 30,000 trials using a phone app that made the task a game. Before and after training, researchers scanned their brains using fMRI and EEG.

Initially, when participants learned the sorting task, it activated the prefrontal cortex. This brain area handles deliberate thinking and executive function. However, it can only manage a limited number of tasks at once.

After weeks of practice, brain scans showed a change. The sorting process had moved to the temporal cortex. This region is involved in memory and recognizing complex objects.

Patrick Cox, the lead author, explained that previous studies only looked at experts. This study is different because it measured brains before and after training. This showed that extensive training created a new category-selective area in the temporal lobe.

Cox noted this has implications for real-world situations. For example, a radiologist can quickly classify masses on an X-ray as benign or malignant due to years of training.

Evidence for True Multitasking

Information from the car-selective area in the temporal cortex bypassed the prefrontal cortex. It linked directly with other brain regions. Riesenhuber explained that experience remodels the brain to avoid this "frontal bottleneck." This frees up the prefrontal cortex for other tasks, increasing your capacity.

The researchers also found that participants got better at doing a second task at the same time as the car task. This happened as more of the car sorting process moved out of the prefrontal cortex.

This finding goes against the old idea that people cannot truly multitask. That view suggested the brain switches rapidly between tasks instead of doing them simultaneously.

Riesenhuber stated that the brain's circuitry actually changes, allowing it to do two things at once. He called this "true multitasking."

Learned Habits Become Harder to Change

The findings might also explain compulsive behaviors. They show that learned actions can move into brain circuits that are less under conscious control.

Riesenhuber said that understanding where a behavior happens in the brain is the first step to unlearning it. This explains why simply telling someone to think of something else doesn't always work, because they don't have conscious control over the behavior.

The results also help explain why humans are so good at continuous learning. This is the ability to build new skills on top of old ones, which is still a challenge for AI.

Riesenhuber suggested that moving a learned skill to the temporal cortex frees the prefrontal cortex. This allows the brain to use existing knowledge as a base for new learning. He noted that current AI models don't work this way yet.

The next step is to study the signals that allow learning to move between brain regions. Researchers also want to understand the limits of multitasking and which tasks can truly be done at the same time.

Cox added that it's important to know what kinds of tasks can be learned well enough to do in parallel. He gave the example of walking and chewing gum, which is possible. However, texting while driving is never safe because it takes your eyes off the road. He said it comes down to training completely separate neural circuits for two tasks to be compatible.

Deep Dive & References

Extensive Experience Remodels Neural Task Circuitry to Escape the Frontal Bottleneck and Increase Automaticity of Categorization - Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2026