Selective Listening
Ever heard of the cocktail party phenomenon (or, if you prefer, the Kool-Aid party phenomenon)?
Or maybe you’ve been told that you have a terrible condition called “selective hearing.”
The summary of the concept is that people hear what they want to hear better than they hear things that are of no value to them. The cocktail party phenomenon gives, as the name denotes, the example of a person at a cocktail party. That person in the example is totally immersed in a conversation that is of little to no interest to them but is happening in close proximity when suddenly, someone across the room says that person’s name. They say it at a normal volume in the context of the conversation, and it probably should not even be audible, but the person across the room now has the focused auditory attention of the person whose name he or she said.
People do things like this all the time, and they are often thought to be rude or nosy for listening in on conversations they were not invited to. Furthermore, they are considered rude and inconsiderate for ignoring the people who were trying to talk to them and clearly did not have their attention. But I am here to tell you, science says it’s not your fault. In fact, attention and awareness studies are becoming more and more common as we attempt to understand exactly how this works. To get extremely detailed information about this in a practical experiment example, you can access the article “Extensive Tonotopic Mapping across Auditory Cortex Is Recapitulated by Spectrally Directed Attention and Systematically Related to Cortical Myeloarchitecture” in the Cited Articles section of this site or via the citation at the bottom of this post. In summary, the study suggests that the auditory pathway is not only tonotopically organized (which we already knew, and I will explain why high frequency hearing loss happens first in a later article), but the tonotopic organization is attentionally driven. That is, the brain is programmed to prefer certain frequencies over others. And to put that as simply as possible, it means that without you even realizing it, your brain decides what it will and will not pay attention to within all the sounds your ears are picking up on. So next time you are in trouble for not listening, blame it on the subconscious activity of your brain.
That is not to say that there is no way to override your brain’s selectiveness, because it seems pretty clear that there is. But the exact process and extent of your control is still unclear at this point. There is a lot more research to do and a lot more technology to be developed before we can really understand this. Until then, use this research as an excuse keep being nosy and ignoring people who don’t have interesting things to talk about.
Or, you could also use this research as a reminder to be aware of yourself and what you’re hearing. You can always use your other senses to compensate for what you may be missing with your ears (and I’m not just saying that because my ears aren’t very good). Just remember that the world around isn’t always as simple as the information your ear is processing, so be mindful of other perceptions, and be willing to try to expand your own.
Frederic K. Dick, Matt I. Lehet, Martina F. Callaghan, Tim A. Keller, Martin I. Sereno and Lori L. Holt. Extensive tonotopic mapping across auditory cortex is recapitulated by spectrally-directed attention, and systematically related to cortical myeloarchitecture. Journal of Neuroscience, 6 November 2017 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1436-17.2017
Or maybe you’ve been told that you have a terrible condition called “selective hearing.”
The summary of the concept is that people hear what they want to hear better than they hear things that are of no value to them. The cocktail party phenomenon gives, as the name denotes, the example of a person at a cocktail party. That person in the example is totally immersed in a conversation that is of little to no interest to them but is happening in close proximity when suddenly, someone across the room says that person’s name. They say it at a normal volume in the context of the conversation, and it probably should not even be audible, but the person across the room now has the focused auditory attention of the person whose name he or she said.
People do things like this all the time, and they are often thought to be rude or nosy for listening in on conversations they were not invited to. Furthermore, they are considered rude and inconsiderate for ignoring the people who were trying to talk to them and clearly did not have their attention. But I am here to tell you, science says it’s not your fault. In fact, attention and awareness studies are becoming more and more common as we attempt to understand exactly how this works. To get extremely detailed information about this in a practical experiment example, you can access the article “Extensive Tonotopic Mapping across Auditory Cortex Is Recapitulated by Spectrally Directed Attention and Systematically Related to Cortical Myeloarchitecture” in the Cited Articles section of this site or via the citation at the bottom of this post. In summary, the study suggests that the auditory pathway is not only tonotopically organized (which we already knew, and I will explain why high frequency hearing loss happens first in a later article), but the tonotopic organization is attentionally driven. That is, the brain is programmed to prefer certain frequencies over others. And to put that as simply as possible, it means that without you even realizing it, your brain decides what it will and will not pay attention to within all the sounds your ears are picking up on. So next time you are in trouble for not listening, blame it on the subconscious activity of your brain.
That is not to say that there is no way to override your brain’s selectiveness, because it seems pretty clear that there is. But the exact process and extent of your control is still unclear at this point. There is a lot more research to do and a lot more technology to be developed before we can really understand this. Until then, use this research as an excuse keep being nosy and ignoring people who don’t have interesting things to talk about.
Or, you could also use this research as a reminder to be aware of yourself and what you’re hearing. You can always use your other senses to compensate for what you may be missing with your ears (and I’m not just saying that because my ears aren’t very good). Just remember that the world around isn’t always as simple as the information your ear is processing, so be mindful of other perceptions, and be willing to try to expand your own.
Frederic K. Dick, Matt I. Lehet, Martina F. Callaghan, Tim A. Keller, Martin I. Sereno and Lori L. Holt. Extensive tonotopic mapping across auditory cortex is recapitulated by spectrally-directed attention, and systematically related to cortical myeloarchitecture. Journal of Neuroscience, 6 November 2017 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1436-17.2017
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