Your Brain Can Rewire Itself to Allow True Multitasking - ScienceAlert

What the report says

ScienceAlert reported on a new Georgetown University Medical Center study suggesting that intensive practice can change how the brain handles certain tasks, potentially allowing a form of “true” multitasking. The article, published July 28, 2026, describes research in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience examining whether the brain merely switches rapidly between difficult tasks or can learn to process one task more automatically while attention is used elsewhere.

According to ScienceAlert, researchers used fMRI and EEG scans to track both the location and timing of brain activity in 11 participants. Over several weeks, the participants completed more than 30,000 trials sorting images of cars into categories. Early in training, the task relied heavily on the prefrontal cortex, a region associated with executive control and often described as a bottleneck for demanding mental work. After extensive practice, more of the activity involved in the car-sorting task shifted toward the temporal cortex, which is linked to object recognition and memory-related processing.

The study then tested participants on a dual-task challenge. ScienceAlert reported that those whose brains showed more of this shift away from the prefrontal cortex performed better on the second task, suggesting that learned expertise may free executive resources for other demands. The researchers compared the finding to real-world skilled work, such as experienced driving or medical image interpretation, where some judgments can become more automatic after long training.

The report notes that the study was small and will need replication in larger groups. Still, it may help researchers better understand learning, expertise, compulsive behaviors and artificial intelligence by clarifying how practice can reorganize task processing in the brain.