Scientists at the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, INSERM which is located at Paris have come up with a new research which is about what will happen when a human is asked to perform a task at the same time. For this research they used a technology called FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) which will monitor the activities that is taking place in brain. This technology was applied on 16 female & 16 male volunteers who were all aged between 19years to 32years and all were right-handed. They all were given 2 tasks to be performed simultaneously, which would earn them monetary reward. They were also given instruction that whoever made errors, the monetary reward would reduce. Their tasks were to match upper case alphabets with smaller case alphabets & have to be performed by switching back & forth between both the tasks. Based on the number of matches which was without any error, rewards were calculated seperately for each task.

The researchers had found that, when the volunteers performed only one task at a time, both halves of the medial frontal cortex (front part of the brain which is above the eyes) worked on it. But when the volunteers performed both tasks simultaneously, the left side of their frontal cortex was doing one task and the right side of the cortex did the other task. Both were performing  their tasks independently & the results started to improve as the monetary reward started to increase. Both men & women volunteers gave same performance, there was no significant difference in the results between.

Based on the above research, Professor Koechlin, a neuroscientist said that considering the results what we conclude that the brain could only effectively handle two tasks simultaneously as it has only two hemispheres. Further we took 16 volunteers to check this out with one more task added, the third task which was suppose to match the letters of the same color. We found that this new group consistently forgot one of the three jobs which we had assigned to them & were making errors which was 3 times when compared to dual-tasking. So, this explains clearly that if we try to tackle three tasks simultaneously, the frontal cortex will always neglect one of tasks.