Multitask Masters ,” by Maria Konnikova. There is generally an inverse relationship between how good people are at multitasking and how good they think they are.

In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone. Over the course of a decade, he and his colleagues had demonstrated that drivers using cell phones—even hands-free devices—were at just as high a risk of accidents as intoxicated ones. Reaction time slowed, attention decreased to the point where they’d miss more than half the things they’d otherwise see—a billboard or a child by the road, it mattered not.

Outside the lab, too, the multitasking deficit held steady. When Strayer and his colleagues observed fifty-six thousand drivers approaching an intersection, they found that those on their cell phones were more than twice as likely to fail to heed the stop signs. In 2010, the National Safety Council estimated that twenty-eight per cent of all deaths and accidents on highways were the result of drivers on their phones. “Our brain can’t handle the overload,” Strayer told me. “It’s just not made that way.”

What, then, was going on here in the London lab? The woman he was looking at—let’s call her Cassie—was an exception to what twenty-five years of research had taught him. As she took on more and more tasks, she didn’t get worse. She got better. There she was, driving, doing complex math, responding to barking prompts through a cell phone, and she wasn’t breaking a sweat. She was, in other words, what Strayer would ultimately decide to call a supertasker.

About five years ago, Strayer recalls, he and his colleagues were sorting through some data, and noticed an anomaly: a participant whose score wasn’t deteriorating with the addition of multiple tasks. “We thought, That can’t be,” he said. “So we spent about a month trying to see an error.” The data looked solid, though, and so Strayer and his colleagues decided to push farther. That’s what he was doing in London: examining individuals who seemed to be the exception to the multitasking rule. A thousand people from all over the U.K. had taken a multitasking test. Most had fared poorly, as expected; in the London lab were the six who had done the best. Four, Strayer and his colleagues found, were good—but not quite good enough. They performed admirably but failed to hit the stringent criteria that the researchers had established: performance in the top quartile on every individual measure that remained equally high no matter how many tasks were added on. Two made every cut—and Cassie in particular was the best multitasker he had ever seen. “It’s a really, really hard test,” Strayer recalls. “Some people come out woozy—I have a headache, that really kind of hurts, that sort of thing. But she solved everything. She flew through it like a hot knife through butter.” In her pre-test, Cassie had made only a single math error (even supertaskers usually make more mistakes); when she started to multitask, even that one error went away. “She made zero mistakes,” Strayer says. “And she did even better when she was driving.”

Strayer believes that there is a tiny but persistent subset of the population—about two per cent—whose performance does not deteriorate, and can even improve, when multiple demands are placed on their attention. The supertaskers are true outliers. According to Strayer, multitasking isn’t part of a normal distribution akin to birth weight, where even the lightest and heaviest babies fall within a relatively tight range around an average size. Instead, it is more like I.Q.: most people cluster in an average range, but there is a long tail where only a tiny fraction—single digits among thousands—will ever find themselves.

In the first controlled study of the supertasker phenomenon, in 2010, Strayer and Jason Watson, a cognitive neuroscientist, asked two hundred participants to complete a standard driving test that they had previously used to illustrate the perils of multitasking. In a simulator, each person would follow an intermittently braking car along a multi-lane highway, complete with on and off ramps, overpasses, and oncoming traffic. Their task was simple: keep your eyes on the road; keep a safe difference; brake as required. If they failed to do so, they’d eventually collide with their pace car.

Then came the multitasking additions. They would have to not only drive the car but follow audio instructions from a cell phone. Specifically, they would hear a series of words, ranging from two to five at a time, and be asked to recall them in the right order. And there was a twist. Interspersed with the words were math problems. If they heard one of those, the drivers had to answer “true,” if the problem was solved correctly, or “false,” if it wasn’t. They would, for instance, hear “cat” and immediately after, “is three divided by one, minus one, equal to two?” followed by “box,” another problem, and so on. Intermittently, they would hear a prompt to “recall,” at which point, they’d have to repeat back all the words they’d heard since the last prompt. The agony lasted about an hour and a half.

As expected, over ninety-seven per cent of the participants failed. They were just fine if they had to drive without worrying about math or word memorization, and they could memorize and do math all right if they didn’t also have to drive. But when the two tasks combined, their performance plummeted. Hidden in the averages, though, were five people, three men and two women, whose performance patterns didn’t change a bit, no matter how many things they were asked to take on. When they were just doing a single task, be it driving or completing the attention-span test, they were already exceptional. When they began to multitask, that exceptionality became all the more apparent. They performed as well as—and, in some cases, better than—when they’d been unitasking. By 2012, after Cassie and her other supertasking U.K. colleague had been tested, Strayer’s team had identified nineteen supertaskers in a sample of seven hundred.

What makes the supertaskers able to do what they do? Are most of us doomed to a unitasking future? Once he confirmed that the phenomenon was real and not a statistical or a laboratory fluke, Strayer, naturally, wondered exactly that. “When you see these people perform at this level, you wonder what makes them be able to behave the way they can. What can they tell us about attention?” he says. Until quite recently, that question was difficult to answer. There simply weren’t enough supertaskers around, and the cost of finding them, bringing them to the lab, and running them through expensive simulations was prohibitive. Now, however, a new test of supertasking ability—this one to be administered online—should make examining the problem much easier.