MIT neuroscientists have figured out how the brain is able to focus on a single voice among a cacophony of many voices, shedding light on a longstanding neuroscientific phenomenon known as the cocktail party problem. This attentional focus becomes necessary when you're in any crowded environment, such as a cocktail party, with many conversations going on at once. Somehow, your brain is able to follow the voice of the person you're talking to, despite all the other voices that you're hearing in the background. Using a computational model of the auditory system, the MIT team found that amplifying the activity of the neural processing units that respond to features of a target voice, such as its pitch, allows that voice to be boosted to the forefront of attention. 'That simple motif is enough to cause much of the phenotype of human auditory attention to emerge, and the model ends up reproducing a very wide range of human attentional behaviors for sound,' says Josh McDermott, a...
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