Georgetown University Medical Center researchers report that heavy training physically relocates where a mental task is handled, and that the move is what lets people do two things at once. In the study, published June 4, 2026 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, participants ran more than 30,000 sorting trials over five to ten weeks on a smartphone app, learning to categorize cars.
Early on, the sorting leaned on the prefrontal cortex, the brain's effortful executive region. After weeks of practice, the same task had shifted to the temporal cortex, an area tied to memory and object recognition. The senior author Maximilian Riesenhuber and first author Patrick Cox found that the more the sorting was offloaded from the prefrontal cortex, the better a person performed a second task run at the same time.
The result challenges the standard view that humans only ever switch rapidly between tasks rather than truly run them in parallel. It is also narrow: one artificial categorization task, learned to the point of near-reflex, and a definition of multitasking that some will say describes practice making a thing stop counting as thought.
Grind a task long enough and your brain files it somewhere it no longer has to think about it, which is either the trick to doing two things at once or proof the second one was never really thinking.