Have you ever had a conversation with someone in a noisy room with a lots of other people? Although it is generally easier to do so in a quiet area. people are surprisingly good at focusing only on what one individual is saying in such situations.
Researchers have called this ability the "cocktail party effect"
It allows us to tune into things we want to hear and tune out irrelevant auditory information. That means we can ignore conversations theat we do not find very engaging, too.
In the 1950's, a British cognitive scientist named Colin Cherry conducted experiments that showed how apt people aare to use selective hearing.
A. First, participants listened to and tried to distingguish between two different messages played from a single speaker at the same time.
B. They could do so, but they had to close their eyes and concentrate.
C. When they wore a headset thet played a defferent messages into each ear simultaneously, though, it was much easier for then to tune into just one of the messages.
D. It is important to remember that when we focus on just one auditory source, it becomes easy for us to miss out on everything else.
Cherry discovered that participants who were tuned into the message being played into one ear often did not notice when the message played into the other started to play backward or even when it switched from English to German. Interestingly, however, studies by Cherry and many others have foucnd that people do tend to notice when their name is mentioned in tuned-out speech. Still, be careful not to tune out from a conversation, however boring it is. You might get caught!