Jason Arunn Murugesu in New Scientist:
We now have a good explanation for how our brain keeps track of a conversation while we are in a loud, crowded room, a discovery that could improve hearing aids.
The general idea for speech perception is that only the voice of the person you are paying attention to gets processed by the brain, says Vinay Raghavan at Columbia University in New York. “But my issue with that idea is that when someone shouts in a crowded place, we don’t ignore it because we’re focused on the person we’re talking to, we still pick it up.”
To better understand how we process multiple voices, Raghavan and his colleagues implanted electrodes into the brains of seven people to monitor the organ’s activity while they underwent surgery for epilepsy. The participants, who were awake throughout the surgery, listened to a 30-minute audio clip of two voices.
More here.