Science reveals people are capable of multitasking — it just requires practice

Your brain is capable of learning to multitask without your realizing it, according to a new study.

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 encoding long-term memories — to carry out the task.

According to Riesenhuber, the findings revealed that as the prefrontal cortex learns how to do an activity, it packages that information and establishes the connections that enable it to be passed on to the temporal cortex.

“It kind of automates it, which frees up the frontal areas of the brain to do something else that demands attention,” he said.

The ability to subconsciously multitask via a different region of the brain explains a number of seemingly remarkable capabilities that most of us display every day without thinking.

While young people just learning to drive require their full concentration to be able to operate cars, experienced drivers can easily operate vehicles while they also engage in conversations or listen to music, Riesenhuber said.

Michael Schoenberg, a licensed psychologist and professor in the neurosurgery and brain repair department at the University of South Florida, who wasn’t involved in the new research, said that also explains why humans can develop highly specialized skill sets, such as analyzing brain imaging scans or performing Olympic-level gymnastics.

“I have colleagues that can look at an EEG, and I just see squiggly lines and they see a person,” Schoenberg said. “For athletes, it takes a lot of attention and concentration to learn balance beams, but as you practice for hours and hours and hours, you get the so-called muscle memory.”

It may also explain critical elements of early childhood development, such as learning to automatically recognize different objects or respond to the sound of our names and then be able to do so again and again throughout life without requiring conscious thought, Riesenhuber said.

“It’s not like we stare at this straight object and think, ‘Might this be a tree?’” he said. “You’re not born knowing what all these things are, but you learn this ability to automatically assign meaning to what you’re looking at.”

Some may have brains that are naturally more adept at carrying out the rewiring required for multitasking than others. The Georgetown experiment revealed considerable variability when it came to how quickly the participants were able to disengage their prefrontal cortexes and use their temporal cortexes to categorize the cars.

“This is unlocking a whole new set of questions,” Riesenhuber said. “What is the source of that variability? We don’t know yet.”

More optimistically, Schoenberg believes it could be possible for all of us to better use the multitasking capabilities of our brains, even if we’re in our 60s and 70s and finding we don’t learn new tasks as swiftly as we once did.

Frustration can make it harder

There are few shortcuts to smoother task juggling, other than patience and perseverance.

“In this experiment, it took four weeks or so,” he said. “The take-home message is that in order to multitask, it takes time to practice becoming more efficient. It’s not something you’re going to improve in a couple of hours. It’s going to take longer than that. You have to give yourself time to develop those new neural pathways.”

According to Dr. David T. Jones, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, there are still limits to what the brain can handle, which is why getting frustrated with yourself can actively make it harder to do multiple things.

“Emotions are a task, just like sorting numbers or identifying cars are,” Jones said. “If you’re beating yourself up, you’ve just added another task, and your performance is going to go down.”

Jones said one common hack for allowing our brains to remember and work with multiple bits of information is to break them down into manageable chunks, as we do with phone numbers.

“We don’t give ourselves a big, long string of numbers to remember. We break it up into chunks with dashes and other things,” he said. “Then three numbers become one item, and you can hold that larger chunk in your head.”

How AI could affect the brain

Schoenberg warned that too much reliance on technology to help with multitasking, such as outsourcing our writing or data analysis to generative AI, could backfire on our brains. The brain’s own multitasking capabilities kick in only once a certain amount of expertise has been acquired, the new research showed. In the long term, it may be that overusing AI means our brains become less proficient at complex skills.

“You won’t be able to master things if you’re having AI do it all the time,” Schoenberg said. “Multitasking comes through developing efficient pattern recognition so you’re able to make decisions faster and integrate something else at the same time.”