The Trick the Brain Plays So We Can Hear in Noisy Places

28 Jan The Trick the Brain Plays So We Can Hear in Noisy Places

Alec Waugh, brother of Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh, claims to have invented the cocktail party–or at least for having established it in his London set. Whether or not Waugh should take the credit, the cocktail party was a thing in the 1920s, and so widespread that by the 1960s man had evolved the ability to attend a gathering of many loudly and simultaneously chattering people and hear only the person he himself was talking to. (Did women evolve that ability as well, or did they already have it?) So rapid was the adaptation to this social phenomenon that psychologists named the ability the “cocktail party effect.” (or more apropos- the “Super Bowl Effect”)

Okay, that part isn’t true. Humans had the ability long before they had cocktails. It’s an amazing thing, that a person can carry on a private conversation in a noisy room, almost as if the other sounds were muted. Even babies have the ability. Something that technology can’t do, at least not yet.

Neurologists are beginning to understand how it’s done. See here for a look at the architecture of sound, simply because it’s cool.