Researchers decipher ‘selective hearing’
By David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle
Anyone who’s ever tried to hear someone speaking in a roomful of jabbering voices and clinking glasses knows the “cocktail party effect” – the ability to tune out all the noise and tune in only to the one whose conversation is important in the moment.
A neurosurgeon and an electrical engineer, both at UCSF, say they now understand how the cocktail party effect works, a finding that resolves a mystery that has plagued psychologists for more than a century.
In 1890, eminent psychologist William James puzzled over the mental problem he called “concentration of consciousness,” and neuroscientists have explored what they call “selective hearing” ever since.
The answer lies in the auditory cortex, the area of the brain that processes sound and contributes to our ability to hear, the UCSF researchers said.
Dr. Edward F. Chang, the neurosurgeon, and Nima Mesgarani, the electrical engineer, describe how they made their discovery in a report published Thursday in the journal Nature.
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This is not new. I am a local and have been working with this for more than 20 years. I used a simple but very effective training called Auditory Integration Training, which stimulates the auditory cortex, which improves our ability to filter out unwanted sounds, which improves our processing which improves our listening skills. This helps children who battle to focus in noisy classroom situations as well as adults who battle in noisy work and social settings.