Perota is almost certainly one of those rare people whom cognitive psychologist David Strayer of The University of Utah calls a "supertasker": someone who can juggle two demanding tasks without pausing or making mistakes. The existence of supertaskers came as a surprise to Strayer, an attention expert. His experiments have proven that while we think we can handle several tasks at once—driving while fiddling with the radio, say—most of us can't. We slow down, trip up. The very concept of multitasking is a myth. Our brains don't do two things at once; instead, we rapidly switch between tasks, putting heavy burdens on attention, memory, and focus. In Strayer's studies, talking on a cellphone while driving (perhaps the most ubiquitous type of multitasking) leaves people as cognitively impaired as if they'd had two or three drinks.