Multitasking? The brain rewires to make it work

Clinical takeaway: The effortless pattern recognition experts develop reflects a learned task moving out of the prefrontal cortex. That relocation is what frees a clinician's attention for the parts of a case that still demand deliberation.

Cognitive theory has long held that humans don't truly multitask. The brain instead switches rapidly between tasks, bottlenecked by a prefrontal cortex that handles one thing at a time. A Georgetown team tested whether extensive practice could change that, tracking what happens to brain circuitry not in the first hours of learning but over weeks of repetition.

Participants completed more than 30,000 individual sorting attempts over five to ten weeks, learning to sort morphed car images into two categories by spotting subtle differences. Researchers used fMRI and EEG to scan their brains after initial learning and again after extensive training, allowing a before-and-after comparison rather than a snapshot of people who were already experts.

After initial training, sorting the images activated the prefrontal cortex, as expected for a task still under deliberate control. But after weeks of practice, the categorization had relocated. It was now handled by the temporal cortex, a region involved in memory encoding and recognizing complex objects. Category information from that area bypassed the prefrontal cortex entirely and connected directly to motor output regions.

That rerouting had a measurable payoff. The more a participant's brain offloaded the sorting task from the prefrontal cortex, the better that person performed a second task at the same time. In other words, freeing the executive bottleneck increased real parallel capacity rather than faster switching.

"Previous studies have shown that parts of the temporal cortex can be activated by particular object categories in experienced observers, birds, cars, even Pokemon, 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," said first author Patrick Cox, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at Lehigh University who began the work at Georgetown.

For clinicians, the result offers a neural account of how expertise feels automatic: the snap classification of a film or a lesion reflects a task that has physically moved out of the executive system, leaving it free for harder problems. The finding also reframes behavior change. Because entrenched behaviors migrate into circuits less accessible to conscious control, strategies that rely on deliberate redirection may have limited reach.

"The first step to unlearning something is understanding where it is actually happening in the brain," said Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, a professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University School of Medicine. "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."

Freeing executive space lets the brain build new skills on top of mastered ones. The authors note that current AI models still lack this capacity, suggesting one direction for more brain-like systems.

Source: Cox PH, et al. J Cogn Neurosci. 2026 May 20. Extensive experience remodels neural task circuitry to escape the frontal bottleneck and increase automaticity of categorization