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 This is Scientific Americans 60 Seconds Science. I'm Kerry Horgen. This is just take-a-minute. If you are like me, you know that multitasking does not always save time. You slow down or make mistakes that require fixing but maybe I'm just doing the wrong things. Because a new study shows that people on a stationary¹ bike pedaled faster when they simultaneously² took some sort of mental test. Even the researchers were suprised by that result. They originally set out to demostrate what other studies have shown that when people try to do two things at once, they do both more poorly. Their counterintuitive finding is in the journal plus one. In the experiment, subjects were asked to complete various cognitive³ jobs that ranged in difficulty, everything from saying go when they saw a blue star on the projection⁴ screen to remembering a long list of numbers and then repeating them back in reverse orders. They toggled these tests once while setting in a quiet room and again while on a bike, turns out cyclists drove 25 percent faster when they were distracted by some mental gymnastics, but only when the tests were relatively⁵ easy. When confronted with taugh brainteasers, their cycling speeds were about the same as when they had nothing particularlly to think about. And in case of wondering the particpants cycling neither helped nor hindered their brain fuction, the finding could point to new programs in which we get better work out simply by using our heads. Thanks for the minute for Scientific Americans 60 Seconds Science. I'm Kerry Hargen.