–This online test measures your ability to multitask.
More than 97 percent of people fail.
–This is actually torture.
–It's making me feel really inadequate.
–I have an ulcer and I'm crying
–I'm going to throw the computer.
–I had of my sons try it and he described it as soul-sucking.
It is misery. It's really, really hard.
–David Strayer has spent decades studying the limits of human attention.
He says most of us are overly confident about our ability to do multiple things at the same time.
At least until we're proven otherwise.
–Well, that was terrible.
–But then there are supertaskers. The 2 to 3 percent.
Supertaskers can split their attention between two things at once
without suffering performance at either task.
They can successfully juggle work in a way that most of us find impossible.
–I'm a supertasker!
–(Reading) You are a supertasker!
–We've found two of them in our office.
Strayer has spent a decade studying supertasker brains.
He created this test to find more of them.
Now he's trying to figure out how they do it and what it suggests for the rest of us.
–Oh, dear god.
–I'm meeting people whose minds stretched the limits of human potential
and the researchers who are studying them to understand
how we can all be healthier and more productive.
This week, multitasking.
I'm Michael Tabb. This is Exceptional Humans.
When Strayer discovered the first supertasker about a decade ago,
he thought he'd screwed up.
–I was 100 percent sure we had just miscoded the data.
–He was studying what happens when people try to do a verbal task while driving.
When people multitask, it forces their brains to try and do
multiple things at the same time, which leads to interference.
It's easy enough to drive to work or talk on the phone,
but when people try to do both at the same time,
their reaction times can suffer about as much as if they were driving drunk,
at least for the vast majority of people.
Strayer discovered that a few participants didn't seem to get distracted by additional tasks.
–These individuals, when they're performing these tasks, they really look like super athletes.
Their brains are just doing things that we can't.
–Strayer's lab initially found five supertaskers.
After some additional searching, they found three more
and had them all take another multitasking test.
But this time inside a functional MRI machine.
The researchers compared the supertaskers with ordinary people
who had similar working memories,
and they discovered some major differences in the supertaskers' brains.
In particular, they had less activity in the prefrontal and the anterior cingulate cortices.
Both of these regions are important for achieving goals.
The researchers concluded that these parts of the supertaskers' brains are much more efficient.
To learn more, Strayer and his colleagues adopted their supertasker screening program
into this game and put it online in 2016.
The game works like this.
You're the bouncer at a nightclub.
First you have to remember which doors people have been entering.
Then you have to remember what passwords they've used.
"Y" "O" "P"
Finally, you have to remember both at the same time,
combining a visual task with a verbal one
"P" "O" "Y"
It's an incredibly hard test, not least because the directions are confusing
–I'm so frustrated.
–I still don't understand it.
–I don't even know what I'm doing any more.
–Strayer says more than 6,000 people have taken the test.
As if summer 2019, about 150 had passed.
From the data they've collected so far,
they've found no differences between men and women
or between people in different parts of the world.
–Hi. Nice to meet you.
–Pleasure to meet you.
–Molly Rubin, my colleague, is one of the supertaskers.
–I have been like a professional assistant for a very long time.
Staying on it and being hyper-focused has always been
kind of part of my professional responsibility.
I was wondering when I was taking it, is this 100 percent a genetic thing?
Or can you train yourself to maybe be better at supertasking?
–It's an open question, but our intuition is that it probably is genetic.
–But if you aren't a natural super tasker, can you become one?
Strayer says test is so unique and unpleasant,
he doesn't believe anyone's trained themselves to pass.
He doesn't personally believe it's possible to train yourself to supertask.
Some of his colleagues, though, have a few ideas.
–Training and brain simulation definitely can make you learn tasks faster
and improve performance generally,
but I still think the jury is still out on the best way to do that.
Paul Dux studies the neural basis for higher level brain functions like multitasking.
He's spent the last decade trying to understand why some people are better at multitasking
and he's found that people can improve through practice.
For example, a chef may become great at multitasking in their kitchen after years on the job,
but the question is whether that improvement translates
to multitasking better in other contexts.
Dux believes that it can, particularly with the assistance of brain stimulation.
Brain stimulators don't make neurons fire,
but many researchers say they use a small electrical current
to make neurons more likely to fire, which makes learning more efficient.
Making people better at multitasking would be really valuable
because multitasking isn't just important for being productive at work.
Multitasking is closely connected with executive functions in the brain,
which are important for health, particularly as we age.
–Multitasking ability is actually really predictive of things like falls in older adults.
–Dux is referring to a number of studies that suggest older adults who are worse at multitasking
are at a greater risk of falling during their daily lives.
–Cognitive decline associated separate function may be the most debilitating in older adults.
–But maybe people shouldn't necessarily have to adapt to be better multitaskers.
Maybe it should be our technology that adapts to us.
–On the one hand, well, I know that I want to have perfect control over my life,
and yet at the same time, it's quite clear to me that my brain is quite limited in certain ways.
–Ami Eidels worked with David Strayer on the supertasker test.
Over the past two years, he's worked with Airbus
to examine new visor displays for helicopter pilots operating in rescue missions.
The goal is to test how much information they can present pilots
without overwhelming them to the point where they couldn't cope.
They've done a few rounds of testing, but the project is ongoing.
–So I come from a mid-sized town and I had to go into New York City today.
And at some point in the metro, with all the people coming against me
and all the trains passing by,
I completely had lost any sense of direction.
Even with a pilot as good as they are, you'd imagine
that too much information could be quite harmful.
–When our brains get overwhelmed, we make mistakes ranging from minor to life-threatening.
We may think we're handling multiple things at once, but no one,
not even supertaskers, can actually focus on everything.
Technology often makes things worse, but Eidels thinks it could also be designed to help.
–In the longer run, as soon as you're overloaded, the computer would somehow take away
some of the information to ensure that you are in perfect control, such that at any given point in time
it provides not the most amount of information, but rather the right amount of information.
–Because at some point we all reach cognitive overload.
–Oh no.
–Even though supertaskers have extraordinary abilities, they don't have unlimited abilities.
You can push them to the point of basically failing as well.
They just can do things most mortals can't.
–Thanks for watching this Quartz member exclusive.
This video is part of our series, Exceptional Humans.
Keep watching for more stories on people whose minds stretch the limits of human potential
in everything from sleep to memory to meditation.