I’ve done some mad jobs over the years. But this one is definitely on the top ten list. I’m sat in a room, in West London, already ten minutes late to pick up my kids at school, tapping at a touchscreen. That touchscreen is alternating between properly mind-blowing images, of really nasty stuff, then pictures of dull-as-ditchwater everyday items, or saucy photos.

In between all of that, pops up a tricky numbers memory quiz, and a fiddly shape-recognition challenge. It’s like I’m playing the shittest, trickiest Android game app in the world, interspersed with scenes from a horror movie, and clips from a daytime soap opera. Oh, and I’m trying to get through it as fast as possible, because I’ve got to get home through rush hour in about 20 minutes…

What gives? Well, it’s all part of a long-running science-y project by Dunlop Tyres. The point is to try and identify what makes elite athletes special – the stuff that marks them out from dull, normal folk. John McGuinness is here representing bike racing, and there are a load of other top sportspeople, from touring car racers to downhill longboarders, rock climbers, and other slim, chiselled, superfit masters of derring-do. So who are the dull, slightly lardy, ‘normal’ folk up against them? Ah. That’ll be me and a motley bunch of other jaded hacks, mooching about near the coffee and pastries. Brilliant.

So – last year Dunlop did a physical challenge, testing how elite athletes can keep up their concentration in the face of abject physical destruction. They went tonto on static exercise bikes, until they were on the point of exhaustion, then did some of the tricky video game challenges. The results were – surprise! – that the athletes maintained mental performance even when they were extremely knackered. So McGuinness can still hit the perfect entry point at Ballacrye on the last lap, despite being on his last legs physically, where the likes of you or I would probably end up in a hedge at the bottom of Bray Hill on lap two.

This year, it’s a different challenge – a more mental one. Essentially, they wanted to measure how an elite athlete’s brain copes under mental stress, rather than physical stress. How to do that? Well, they show the subjects images which are specially selected to elicit an emotional response. They’re designed to distract your brain away from the job in hand by making you a bit scared, disgusted, aroused, shocked – even scared. And inbetween these images, there’s a fiddly mental task to perform, about short-term number memory retention, and accurate shape matching. See a distracting image – match the red squares, another image, remember a series of numbers. Simple enough in theory: the hypothesis being that someone like JM is able to better separate the performance part of their brain from the emotional part. In laymen’s terms, they’ll still be able to go fast, even when they’re a bit distracted, terrified or distressed.

Now, the scientists running the gig were pretty cautious about the details. Basically, the images which they use for the test have been specially selected by the University of Florida as part of its International Affective Picture System, to provide a standard set of images to study emotion and attention. And, of course, if everyone knows what the images are, then they’ll lose their effect in terms of distraction and stimulus. So they asked us not to describe the pictures too closely. Suffice to say, the imagery is definitely the sort of stuff which will make you catch your breath, even in these days of Reddit and LiveLeak…

So – I spent the day at the GlaxoSmithKline human performance laboratory, speaking to the guys behind the experiment, including Professor Vincent Walsh of University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who had designed the experiments. And after a few hours of waiting around, nibbling on Pret sandwiches, I was up. For all the build-up, the experiment was a little underwhelming at first. You literally just sat at a touchscreen laptop, and hit the screen at the appropriate point. I was already really stressed by being so late – I’d had to have a bit of a shout at the organisers because it was all running over, and I was genuinely going to be late to collect the kids at school. And if you’ve met the headteacher there, you’d know how stressy a prospect that was (only joking Mrs Riziotis!)…

So I’m under pressure before we start. The images come thick and fast – some mundane, some disturbing. The memory task and the shape-matching were fiddly, but I reckoned I was able to adopt a decent strategy to ‘box-off’ the nasty pics from the tasks in hand. Even without any distractions though, those tasks were on the tricky side, especially as time went on, and your mind started to flag a little.

Twenty minutes later, I’m done – I run out the door, onto my Burgman 650, and make it home, just in time, after a genuine Mad Max run through peak rush hour commuting traffic…

Three weeks later, and the results are in. The academic reports take a bit of digesting, but the bottom line is that there was a distinct separation between the athletes and the journos. Overall the sporty types were 20 per cent better at the memory task, and ten per cent faster at the shape matching. McGuinness in particular was singled out as being super-fast, and very accurate – and he actually got better in the face of negative stimulus. So, based on the experiments, his brain improves its performance when it encounters stuff that would throw a ‘normal’ brain off-course. Does that mean a bit of a wobble through Barregarrow could actually make him go better through Rhencullen? That’s arguably the real-world implications of this experiment.

What about me? Well, I’m pretty pleased! I get mentioned in despatches for being unaffected by the negative stimulus, and also winning on accuracy. Does that make me a gimlet-eyed, cold-hearted man of steel? Or have I spent too much time in the darker recesses of the internet and have become inured to distressing imagery? Could it simply mean I was in a rush to get home to pick up the kids? Who knows! What I do know is that the madcap ride home was far more stressful than the experiment. And maybe that’s part of the reason. The experiment organisers seemed to think that the journalists were all beige, desk-bound pen-pushers. And while I do spend most of my working time like that, I do also ride bikes quite a lot. And the (modest) associated skills there – a bit of track riding, riding for photographs, practicing shit wheelies, and riding like a loon round London – perhaps those have given me a tiny microscopic bit of the mind skills that someone like John McGuinness has finessed to such an incredible, world-class level…