Dr. Steven Novella

And what they found was in the tasks that they were studying that the temporal lobes start to light up.

The parts of the brain involved with visual spatial processing, right, lights up and learned behaviors light up and not the frontal lobes.

And those people can multitask.

They can cut a circle while answering a question or whatever.

If it's something you've done long enough that the brain has learned the behavior, that act of repetition and learning a behavior offloads

the brain activity to non-frontal lobe parts of your brain.

So it frees up the frontal lobes to do other things.

And that allows you to truly multitask.

Now you can't, it's not that you saying like we can't truly multitask was wrong, it's just that there's more, there's another layer of nuance here.

You can't multitask two things that both require your frontal lobes.

But once you've offloaded one to another part of your brain, you can multitask with that other thing.

It's subconscious.

So probably the task that I do that I have offloaded the most, I could completely do it without thinking, is typing.

Because I've been typing since I was in grade school.

I can touch type without looking at the keyboard.

And my fingers just magically go to the key I'm thinking of.

You know what I mean?

There's like no conscious or frontal lobe effort at all.

It's just I want to say the word and it's just my fingers do their thing.

It's automatic.