Overview
- The findings, reported Thursday, June 4, 2026, come from a longitudinal experiment that used fMRI and EEG before and after more than 30,000 app-based trials over 5–10 weeks in 11 adults to track where a learned sorting task was processed.
- Researchers observed that early performance activated the prefrontal cortex but weeks of repetition produced a new category-selective response in the temporal cortex that linked directly to brain output areas.
- That rerouting effectively bypassed the prefrontal bottleneck so the frontal areas stayed available, and participants who offloaded the task more fully showed better ability to do another task at the same time.
- The study has important limits: the sample was small and young, individual speed of offloading varied greatly, and authors say safety and capacity limits for real-world multitasking — for example texting while driving — still remain to be defined.
- Authors and outside experts say the results help explain automatic expert skills, why some habits are hard to unlearn, and suggest human continual learning works differently from current AI, with follow-up work planned to map the signals and limits of this neural transfer.