How the human brain can pursue two goals at the same time

12 August 2026

In the natural world, an animal can blend strategies so it can advance towards several goals at the same time. An engineering approach called control theory was used to infer people’s goals while they played a simple video game, and showed how three brain regions work together to implement goal blending.

This is a summary of: Chericoni, A. et al. Neural basis of compositional control. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10896-8 (2026).

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02395-7‘Expert opinion’ is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

ReferencesPereira, T. D., Shaevitz, J. W. & Murthy, M. Nature Neurosci. 23, 1537–1549 (2020).Article