Training the brain can increase processing speed and improve our ability to developmultitasking, as revealed by a study published in the journalNeuron.
The ability to multitask efficiently is “limited by the speed at which ourprefrontal cortexit processes information, “says Paul E. Duz, a Vanderbilt University researcher and study co-author. The good news, he adds, is that this ability can be trained.
To demonstrate this, Duz and his colleagues trained seven people daily for two weeks in two simple tasks: moving a finger in response to different images and selecting a specific syllable when listening to different sounds. The tasks were developed simultaneously and separately.
Analyzing the evolution of the volunteers’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers found that, initially, carrying out two tasks at the same time created a kind of “bottleneck” in the brain, which reduced performance. However, as the days passed the response speed increased with practice, so that after two weeks the prefrontal brain processed the information rapidly, turning the subjects into “efficient multitaskers”, at least apparently. And it is that, according to Dux, the experiments indicate that, even after a lot of practice,the brain never performs two tasks simultaneously. “We process one task at a time, but with training we do it so quickly that the illusion of multitasking is created,” he explains.
