Brain activity at a party

Focusing on one voice requires both listening and ignoring

To the point

• The challenge of listening to one speaker when several people are talking at the same time is known as the cocktail party problem.
• Stronger neural tracking by the brain of the target speaker was associated with better comprehension.
• Surprisingly, some tracking of the ignored speaker’s sounds (but not their words) correlated with better performance, suggesting that some low-level awareness of irrelevant voices may help segregate auditory streams. However, if the brain started to track the meaning or words of the distractor, comprehension of the target speech decreased.

In a study with 43 participants, Vivien Barchet and Gesa Hartwigsen presented two spoken sentences at the same time - one to focus on, the other to ignore - and recorded participants’ brain activity via EEG. They analyzed how strongly the brain synchronized with both the acoustic patterns and the linguistic patterns of each voice.

Enhancing the relevant information

The findings suggest that successful listening in noisy environments relies on enhancing the relevant sound stream, while suppressing the distractor before it gains semantic processing. However, initial acoustic analysis of the distractor streams seems to improve the segmentation of the target and distractor streams.

This means that, when you’re chatting at a busy party, your brain doesn’t just tune out everyone else. It still picks up some sounds from other speakers to keep track of who’s talking, but if you start understanding their words, you’ll likely lose focus on your friend.