Researchers at Georgetown University have found evidence that the brain changes its wiring as people become skilled at a task, allowing that activity to become more automatic. According to ScienceDaily, the work challenges the idea that humans can only switch quickly between tasks rather than truly multitask.
In the study, volunteers practiced sorting morphed images of cars into categories over a period of 5 to 10 weeks, completing more than 30,000 trials through a smartphone game. The scientists used fMRI and EEG scans before and after training to track how brain activity changed.
At first, the task mainly activated the prefrontal cortex, which handles planning and decision-making. After extensive practice, however, the work shifted toward the temporal cortex, a region tied to memory and recognizing complex objects, according to the researchers.
The team also found that information from the newly developed car-selective area could bypass the prefrontal cortex and move directly to regions involved in producing responses. The researchers said this may help explain how habits form, why some behaviors are hard to change, and how people can keep learning new skills throughout life.
Senior author Maximilian Riesenhuber said the findings show the brain can “remodel” its architecture to increase capacity, while first author Patrick Cox said the study’s before-and-after design helped show that the category-selective area in the temporal lobe was not there before training.
