- New research suggests that people can train their brains to be better at multitasking.
- While a lot of practice is required, doctors say people can try this at home, too.
Good news for people who struggle to walk and chew gum at the same time: Researchers have found that you may be able to “train” your brain to juggle multiple tasks at once.
The study, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, “trained” volunteers’ brains by having them use a game-like app. (The app asked them to sort algorithmically generated images of cars into two categories, depending on which base model the image most closely resembled.) Altogether, the participants completed more than 30,000 sorting trials over five to 10 weeks.
The researchers also captured brain MRI and electroencephalogram scans at different points in this training process. The scans revealed that, in the beginning, the sorting task mostly activated the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive function (i.e., planning, reasoning, and decision-making). But after weeks of brain training, the sorting task instead activated the temporal cortex, an area involved in memory and recognizing complex objects. In fact, the researchers found that after training, information could bypass the prefrontal cortex, instead traveling directly to the areas of the brain linked to creating responses, thereby increasing the brain’s processing capacity. And the more the car sorting task was moved from the prefrontal cortex to the temporal cortex, the better the participants were able to complete another task at the same time.
Meet the experts: Davide Cappon, Ph.D., director of neuropsychology at Tufts Medical Center; Clifford Segil, D.O., neurologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center; Patrick Cox, Ph.D., lead study author and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Lehigh University
“This frees up those frontal areas to deploy attentional processing elsewhere,” says Patrick Cox, Ph.D., lead study author and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Lehigh University. “The less the visual areas communicated with the frontal areas after training, the more participants improved on multitasking.”
So, how does this work, and what does it mean for your ability to juggle tasks at home? Here’s what experts want you to know.
Why can you “train” your brain to be better at multitasking?
The brain is great at learning to optimize through repetition, Dr. Cox says. “This might be combining the simple movements of typing or playing an instrument into quickly crafting a long email or playing a familiar tune,” he says. “Or it may be quickly recognizing and discerning between familiar objects despite similar visual appearances, like grabbing a Granny Smith apple when I want a snack and not a tennis ball, despite the fact that they are both green and round.”
By grouping complex tasks together into “neutral programs” that can be activated automatically, “it frees up mental resources for other things,” Dr. Cox adds.
“With extremely intensive practice, one task may become so automatic that it relies less on the brain’s executive-control system,” says Davide Cappon, Ph.D., director of neuropsychology at Tufts Medical Center. “That could reduce the usual bottleneck that makes multitasking difficult.”
How can you put this to use in the real world?
This study, Dr. Cappon says, “suggests the brain can reorganize how a highly practiced skill is performed, freeing attention for something else. The benefit is likely specific to the exact task that was practiced.”
This means that repeatedly practicing a specific task at work, like typing, will help you do it more efficiently in the future—and perhaps enable you to do something else at the same time.
Clifford Segil, D.O., a neurologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, points out that multitasking may support your overall cognitive health, too. “Focusing on one thing is healthy, but trying to manage two things at once may be more healthy,” he says. He suggests doing things like reading while listening to music to fine-tune your skills.
Dr. Cox says you can also fine-tune your multitasking skills simply by paying attention to your surroundings. “Any task or visual stimulus we repeatedly encounter, our brains will become more efficient at processing,” he says. “With a lot of experience with a task, our brains can change to represent that task very efficiently.”
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