When you trying are something new, do you learn more easily from diagrams, from someone telling you how to do it, or by having a go yourself? You might be tempted to answer that it all depends on the nature of the task in question.

Learning to drive entirely from a book or from someone sitting in the kitchen telling you about it, is no substitute for having a go. Watching someone ice a cake might give you just the technique that it would take a long time by trial and error. But in general you might well have a preference for learning in a certain way, or as they say in education, a preferred learning style.

Over the years, masses of different ways of categorising learning styles have been developed - pragmatist versus theorist, concrete thinker versus abstract thinker, organiser versus innovator – and many, many more. One review found more than 30 of these dichotomies.