Cocktail Chatter

I really thought today was Thursday, or yesterday wasn’t. Either way, apologies for not posting yesterday.

I mentioned in the beginning that I hoped this blog would give fodder for cocktail parties. Well, have you ever wondered that at those cocktail parties, you have the ability to zero in on the voice of the person you’re talking to? Maybe you haven’t. But think about it. It’s a really loud room, and your brain is picking out the voice of just one person.

Okay, you may not be impressed, but if you have ever had to wear a hearing aid, you may have found out that our ears are a lot more complex than our man-made acoustic devices. Originally, scientists thought that we heard from directional cues. However, put in that hearing aid and all you get, though, is an increase in the background and you have an incredibly hard time picking out that one person in front of you.

Scientists led by Holger Schulze at the Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, Germany found a mechanism in the brain that solves this task. Their findings are published in PLoS ONE. Apparently, each speaker has a different “fine structure” acoustically, and each is represented in different areas of the brain, specifically the auditory cortex.

The brain uses an algorithm to pick out the voice you are concentrating on that gains control of all the others and so your brain can actually follow it and push the rest out of the way. They describe this, by the way, by using “functional neurophysiological, pharmacological and anatomical methods.” I couldn’t figure out how to translate that part, but really wanted to put that in (to impress upon you how complex this is). These findings may help improve hearing aids in the future so that it won’t just wash out conversations.

So tonight, while you’re at that cocktail party, pay attention to how you can pick out those voices so well. It’s not as simple a thing as you might have thought.