I’m the kind of person who permanently has at least 10 windows open on my computer, at the same time as I hold a conversation, listen to the radio and send texts. I insist that I can concentrate perfectly well on all these things, but looking at the evidence, to be honest, I probably can’t.

The truth is that if you think you are good at multi-tasking, the chances are you’re not. People who multi-task a lot perform less well in tests than people who don’t do it so often. In other words, practice does not make perfect. But there are some exceptions: a select group of individuals, accidentally discovered by psychologists, can cope with several tasks at a time, and can even do better the more their attention is divided. They have been dubbed the supertaskers.

David Strayer and Jason Watson, cognitive neuroscientists from the University of Utah and the University of Colorado Denver, were researching what happens when people sat at a driving simulator while chatting on a hands-free phone. Just to make it harder, as well as remaining a prescribed distance from the car in front, they had to memorise a list of words, interspersed with mental arithmetic problems.