CHICAGO, September 13, 2026 – If you’ve ever struggled to draft an email while replying to a message—or re-read the same line while a conversation unfolds nearby—your lack of focus might not be a simple distraction.
According to recent research conducted by University of Chicago neuroscientists, uncertainty leads to mixing up information that is usually segregated.
The study, published Sept. 10 in Nature Neuroscience, identifies a mechanism the researchers call “feature interference.” If the individual isn’t sure about the particular detail he needs to focus on for an activity, different visual features get entangled together within the same neural processing, complicating the process of picking the right piece of information.
This finding offers a clearer explanation for why multitasking so often fails. It isn’t that your brain forgot the facts. Instead, it’s struggling to keep competing pieces of information in their proper lanes.
“The brain is good at keeping track of a lot of different things, but it becomes a big job to make sure they don’t get in the way of each other,” said Marlene Cohen, a University of Chicago professor of neurobiology and senior author of the study. “Information gets mixed in your brain even if you know it very well.”
Project lead Cheng Xue, a postdoctoral researcher at UChicago, designed experiments involving more than 200 human participants. Subjects watched pairs of striped circles appear on a screen and reported changes in movement, rotation, or stripe frequency.
There was a catch: participants weren’t told which feature to track. They had to infer the rules on the fly, while the correct targets periodically shifted.
When uncertainty spiked, performance suffered. The subjects’ brains did not lose focus but rather were capable of holding on to visual distractions, which led to information bleeding into decisions.
“It’s not that the visual information for one feature or another isn’t there and you can’t remember,” Cohen said. “It’s that you can’t keep the different features separate anymore.”
Though the controlled visual tests do not fully capture the complexity of distractions in the workplace, they shed light on a broader process that contributes to the extremely high cognitive price of task switching.
These results may be helpful for future studies in the area of cognitive disorders; Cohen’s lab had previously discovered feature interference in Alzheimer’s animal models, regardless of high cognitive loads.
The bottom line? Complete one task before moving on to another.
“When we struggle to multitask, it isn’t a failure of willpower or discipline,” Xue said. The brain, he added, can rely on the wrong information when switching gears.
So the next time a notification derails a sentence, don’t call it laziness too quickly. Sometimes the brain hasn’t misplaced the facts; it has simply allowed them to crowd into the same room.
