I was reading some interesting blogs on Psyblog.com and came across The Cocktail Party Effect. It was something I had heard of, but forgotten how it worked, so I clicked and read over it. I forgot how interesting this theory was!
To summarize, it basically said that if you're interested in a conversation around you (and not interested in the conversation you're supposed to be engaged in) the brain and ears together are able to pick up on that interesting conversation and distinguish it from a multitude of voices! This is amazing because it takes a lot of hard work for the brain to pick one voice from many, both male and female, loud and soft, etc.
The author of the blog talked about a study where volunteers wore headphones and were asked to "shadow" or follow, one of two conversations coming through the speakers. This was a hard task because the two voices were from the same person! Somehow, most volunteers were able to trail one of the conversations but, in result, had no idea when the language changed to German etc. because they were focused so much on the voice they were trying to follow. This holds true in day to day scenarios when your brain is focusing on someone or something other than the rpesent conversation. Often, one's name can be dropped in conversation without the distracted person even noticing because the brain is so intent on listening or processing something else!
I think we can all think of a time when we've been caught in our "own little world."
This was a great article- go read it!
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Hmmm interesting... I was never really familiar with the cocktail party effect, but this article taught me what it really was. It's very intriguing how a person tends to pick up on others conversations and half the time I don't even realize I'm doing it myself!
ReplyDeleteI think this article is really cool and funny at the same time. It's really interesting how we can pick out certain people's voices from a BIG group of people. It's funny because like when you said that when the people were asked to try and listen to one voice they said that could pick it out and could understand it, when really they couldn't because the people talking switched to German. Obviously they weren't listening that well.
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