Study finds the brain can rewire itself to achieve "true multitasking"

Researchers at Georgetown and Lehigh universities trained participants on a novel car-category task more than 30,000 times and tracked the brain with fMRI and EEG.

After training, category signals appeared earlier in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex than in the prefrontal cortex, suggesting a shift from top-down control to visual-processing regions.

Functional coupling with the prefrontal cortex weakened, while links to sensorimotor systems strengthened, indicating the task became more automated.

For the long-practiced classification task, performance dropped much less during multitasking, pointing to a neural basis for better dual-task handling.