Researchers found that extensive practice can reshape how the brain processes learned tasks, freeing up mental resources for other activities.
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Extensive practice can rewire the brain so a learned skill runs more automatically, making some forms of true multitasking possible.
Why does driving eventually feel effortless, while learning to drive demands total concentration? A new study from Georgetown University suggests the answer lies in the brain’s ability to rewire itself, shifting well-practiced skills into different neural circuits so they can be performed with less conscious effort.
The findings challenge a longstanding view of human learning by indicating that, under the right conditions, people may be capable of genuine multitasking rather than simply switching attention rapidly between tasks.
The research could also have implications far beyond everyday life. By revealing how the brain builds new skills on top of old ones, the work may help guide the development of artificial intelligence systems that learn and adapt more like humans.
“We have another stepping stone in our understanding of how the brain learns,” said senior author Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, a professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University School of Medicine, and one of the directors of the Center for Neuroengineering. “The encouraging part is that you really can learn to multitask. There is actually a way to remodel your brain architecture and use other parts of your brain.”
Credit: Georgetown University
Practice changes brain pathways
The study builds on many years of research into how learning changes the brain.
Georgetown scientists wanted to examine what happens as a skill becomes automatic, especially how the brain moves from actively learning a task to carrying it out with far less conscious effort after extensive practice.
Riesenhuber pointed to driving as a familiar example. At first, learning to drive demands close attention to every action. After years of experience, many drivers can hold a conversation, listen to music, or think through another issue while still operating the car.
“The question is: how does your brain do that?” Riesenhuber said.
Earlier studies have mostly examined the beginning of the learning process. The longer-term brain changes that come with deep practice have been more difficult to study and remain less well understood.
Practice changes brain pathways
The study builds on many years of research into how learning changes the brain.
Georgetown scientists wanted to examine what happens as a skill becomes automatic, especially how the brain moves from actively learning a task to carrying it out with far less conscious effort after extensive practice.
Riesenhuber pointed to driving as a familiar example. At first, learning to drive demands close attention to every action. After years of experience, many drivers can hold a conversation, listen to music, or think through another issue while still operating the car.
“The question is: how does your brain do that?” Riesenhuber said.
Earlier studies have mostly examined the beginning of the learning process. The longer-term brain changes that come with deep practice have been more difficult to study and remain less well understood.
Training offloads mental work
For the new study, participants learned to sort morphed images of cars into two groups by noticing small visual differences. Over 5 to 10 weeks, they completed more than 30,000 trials through a phone app that turned the sorting task into a game. Before and after training, the researchers scanned participants’ brains using fMRI and EEG.
At first, once participants had learned the sorting task, it activated the prefrontal cortex. That brain region supports executive function and deliberate thinking, but it is generally limited in how many tasks it can manage at once.
After weeks of practice, however, brain scans showed a shift. The sorting process had moved into the temporal cortex, a region involved in memory encoding and the recognition of complex objects.
“Previous studies have shown that parts of the temporal cortex can be activated by particular object categories in experienced observers, birds, cars, even Pokémon, but a limitation of all of those studies is that they only looked after people became experts. The strength of this study is that it is longitudinal; we measure before and after training, so we can see that extensive training essentially put a category-selective area in the temporal lobe that was not there before,” said first author Patrick Cox, PhD, who began the study as a graduate student in Riesenhuber’s lab and is now an assistant professor of psychology at Lehigh University.
“This has implications for critical real-world scenarios, like when a radiologist can accurately classify masses on an X-ray as benign or malignant fairly automatically, often without extensive deliberation, thanks to years of training,” Cox said.
Credit: Georgetown University
True multitasking gains evidence
Information from the car selective area in the temporal cortex skipped the prefrontal cortex and linked directly with output regions of the brain. “Experience remodels the brain to bypass that frontal bottleneck. The prefrontal cortex then stays free for whatever else you want to do, increasing your capacity,” Riesenhuber explained. The researchers also found that participants became better at doing another task at the same time as the car task when more of the car sorting process had been “offloaded” from the prefrontal cortex.
That result runs counter to a long-standing view that people cannot truly multitask. According to that older view, the brain does not handle two tasks at the same time, but instead switches rapidly between them.
“What we show is that the circuitry actually changes so the brain can do two things at once,” Riesenhuber said. “This really is true multitasking.”
True multitasking gains evidence
Information from the car selective area in the temporal cortex skipped the prefrontal cortex and linked directly with output regions of the brain. “Experience remodels the brain to bypass that frontal bottleneck. The prefrontal cortex then stays free for whatever else you want to do, increasing your capacity,” Riesenhuber explained. The researchers also found that participants became better at doing another task at the same time as the car task when more of the car sorting process had been “offloaded” from the prefrontal cortex.
That result runs counter to a long-standing view that people cannot truly multitask. According to that older view, the brain does not handle two tasks at the same time, but instead switches rapidly between them.
“What we show is that the circuitry actually changes so the brain can do two things at once,” Riesenhuber said. “This really is true multitasking.”
Learned habits become harder to reach
The findings may also help explain compulsive behaviors. They show that learned actions can shift into brain circuits that are less available to conscious control and executive decision-making.
“The first step to unlearning something is understanding where it is actually happening in the brain,” Riesenhuber said. “This shows why strategies like telling someone to think of something else don’t really help, because they don’t really have the behavior under conscious control.”
The results may also shed light on why people are so capable of continuous learning, meaning the ability to build new skills on top of older ones, a challenge that remains difficult for AI.
Riesenhuber said that moving a learned skill into the temporal cortex, while freeing the prefrontal cortex, may allow the brain to use established knowledge as a base for learning something new. He noted that current AI models do not yet work in the same way.
The next step is to investigate the signals or mechanisms that allow learning to move from one brain region to another. The researchers also want to understand the boundaries of multitasking and which kinds of tasks can truly be performed in parallel.
“Another really interesting question is what kinds of tasks can be learned well enough to do in parallel,” Cox said. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time, but looking at our phones to text while driving will never be safe, because we take our eyes away from the road. It comes down to being able to train fully separate neural circuits for two tasks to become compatible.”
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