The evidence that the brain assigns one task to each side of the brain is "very surprising," says Rene Marois, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. That suggests that our frontal lobes "can't maintain more than two tasks," Koechlin says. Also people slowed down and made many more mistakes. They offered people rewards to do three things at once.Īnd when people started a third task, one of the original goals disappeared from their brains, Koechlin says. Illustration courtesy of Etienne Koechlin, INSERM-ENS, Paris, France, 2010 This labor division suggests that humans would struggle to carry out more than two tasks at one time. When humans pursue two goals, A and B, concurrently, the brain assigns oversight of one task to the left frontal lobe and the other to the right frontal lobe. When the researchers offered a greater reward for a task being supervised by one side of the brain, the amount of activity on that side increased accordingly. The lobe on the left side of the brain focused on the first task, while the lobe on the right focused on the second. "Each frontal lobe was pursuing its own goal," Koechlin says. That suggested that the two sides of the brain were working together to get the job done, he says.īut when people took on a second task, the lobes divided their responsibilities. When volunteers were doing just one task, there was activity in goal-oriented areas of both frontal lobes, says Etienne Koechlin, a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. The tasks involved matching letters in different ways, and for incentive, participants were paid up to a euro for doing a task perfectly. Their experiment tested people's abilities to accomplish up to three mental tasks at the same time. The researchers reached that conclusion after studying an area of the brain involved in goals and rewards. Our brains are set up to do two things at once, but not three, a French team reports in the journal Science. Researchers in France conducted tests on multitasking, which suggest the brain struggles to stay focused when fixed on more than two goals at one time.
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