Researchers at Georgetown University have found that the brain physically reorganizes itself with enough training, allowing people to perform certain tasks simultaneously rather than switching rapidly between them.
The study showed that after more than 30,000 trials over 5 to 10 weeks, participants' brains shifted activity from the prefrontal cortex to the temporal cortex for a visual categorization task.
Scans using fMRI and EEG confirmed that well-practiced tasks could bypass the prefrontal cortex and connect directly to response areas. This freed the brain's executive center for other activities.
"Experience remodels the brain to bypass that frontal bottleneck," said senior author Maximilian Riesenhuber. First author Patrick Cox noted that the longitudinal design allowed researchers to observe the changes before and after training.
The findings, published May 20, 2026, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, suggest implications for habit formation and artificial intelligence systems that build on prior learning.
