It seems like today, the more things you can do at once, the better.

I’m watching Netflix, while eating sushi and writing emails.

Multitasking!

But research keeps telling us that most people can’t perform two or more attention-demanding tasks at the same time, without doing one of those tasks badly.

And instead of truly multitasking, we often just switch between two or more tasks rapidly, which is known as task-switching.

Research suggests there’s a switch-cost – people tend to slow down when moving from one task to another, due to the time it takes the brain to realign to the “new” task.

Scientists and the media also point to anecdotal evidence: if we are walking, we slow down when we look at our phones; if we are driving, we turn down the radio when looking for our turn; and if we are typing an email, we often lose track of what we are saying on the phone.

It’s often claimed that we can’t multitask, unless the actions or processes are so automatic to us that they don’t require any thought: like tying a shoe while talking about the weather.

Unless, that is, you’re a supertasker.

They’re people who can actually multitask, they can perform tasks at the same time and do them well.

Take Lauren Moore, who holds the record for “The fastest time to say the first 100 digits of Pi while twisting a rubik’s cube and balancing 15 books on her head” on YouTube she just goes by booksonmyhead, or David Babcock’s record for knitting the longest scarf while running.

They’re pros at doing somewhat odd things simultaneously.

Supertaskers seem to have the perfect mix of attention, memory and concentration.

And in a 2010 study, researchers found that 2.5% of their participants were supertaskers.

On a larger scale, that could be quite a lot of people!

Or, quite a lot of you!

The dual-task n-back is a task some studies have used to measure supertasking ability.

And I want you to try it.

In the task, you have to keep track of the changing positions of a blue square and at the same time listen to a stream of letters played over headphones.

Then you have to indicate when the square’s position matches the position it was in three goes earlier, or when the letter matches the letter that was spoken three times earlier.

So in this case, try clicking or tapping on this video when you see the blue square appear in the same spot as it was three turns earlier, or when you hear the same letter said as it was three turns earlier.

You should have paused the video twice, and that's a tiny taste of what the n-back is like.

It was immediately obvious to me that I’m not a supertasker because my brain can’t even.

And supertasking aside, lots of studies have found evidence that groups of people can multitask.

In one, elderly adults were asked to cycle on a stationary bike while completing increasingly difficult tasks, like repeating a list of numbers in reverse order.

Completing those cognitive tasks actually resulted in the participants cycling faster than they were when they weren’t multitasking.

Another study found when participants were given two letter matching tasks at the same time, each hemisphere of the medial frontal cortex processed one of those tasks independently of the other.

But when a third task was added, participants behaved almost as if they forgot one of the 3 tasks, and they performed much worse overall.

The thing is, we can’t definitively say that people can or can’t multitask.

Multitasking is an ability – there’s a spectrum from people who are better at single tasks, to task-switchers, to great supertaskers.

If you try and do multiple challenging things all at once, yes, you’ll probably do worse in all of them!

But if you focus on learning a process inside and out, you could probably do it while you do something else.

Remember David Babcock?

He took up running and knitting at about the same time, so he had lots of practice doing them together.

So, how many things can you do at once?