This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins. This will just take a minute.

If you're 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 stationary bike

peddled faster when they simultaneously tackled some sort of mental test.

Even the researchers were surprised by that result.

They'd originally set out to demonstrate 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 Ploss 1.

In the experiment, subjects were asked to complete various cognitive jobs that ranged in difficulty, everything from saying go when they saw a blue star in a projection screen, to remembering a long list of numbers and then repeating them back in reverse order. They tackle these tasks

once while sitting in a quiet room and again while on the bike. Turns out, cyclists

rode 25% faster when they were distracted by some mental gymnastics, but only when the tasks were relatively easy.

When confronted with tough brain teasers, their cycling speeds were about the same as when they had nothing in

particular to think about. And in case you're wondering, the participants cycling

neither helped nor hindered their brain function. The findings could point

toward new programs in which we get better workouts simply by using our heads.

Thanks for the minute.

For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkins.