When the brain has to solve several tasks at once, its efficiency increases.
Multitasking is a natural state for a healthy brain, neuroscientists from the University of Rochester (USA) concluded, whose article In the magazine Neuro Image. In conditions where the brain needs to simultaneously guide body movements during walking and perform complex intellectual tasks, both tasks are solved better than one by one, the researchers found.
Scientists conducted a series of experiments involving 22 healthy young people. Participants had to either walk on a treadmill or sit while doing increasingly difficult intelligence tasks, switching from one to the other. Using state-of-the-art monitoring techniques, the researchers tracked participants’ brain activity and body movements.
It turned out that while walking participants cope with tasks much better than in a sitting position.
The more difficult the task, the greater the difference in results. Moreover, the presence of an intellectual load increases the efficiency of the walking process itself. When the participants’ brains were busy solving cognitive tasks, their movements were more precise and confident than when they focused solely on walking.
This phenomenon reflects the flexibility of a healthy brain, which benefits from the extra workload, the researchers note. Most likely, this is why we instinctively go for a walk or start walking around the room when we need to think about some problem.