From: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/0907...tml?s=news_rss

Researchers in the United States have pinpointed the region of the brain that limits our ability to carry out more than one task at the same time — and have shown how, with training, the brain gets better at multitasking.

"Our brain is lousy at handling multitasking situations," says neuroscientist René Marois of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who led the work together with Paul Dux, a cognitive scientist who is now at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Even if the tasks are very simple, such as walking and chewing gum, "as soon as either needs concentration, we can't do them both without our performance suffering", says Marois.

When we try to pay attention to multiple stimuli — a red traffic light and an SMS alert on a mobile phone, for example — the stream of information flowing from sensation to action gets clogged up. Using a suite of neuroimaging and analysis techniques, Marois, Dux and their colleagues identified a region of the brain that holds up multitasking, and discovered that training gives this region a speed boost.

Has anybody found that they box better with practice?