Can You Hear Me Now? The "Cocktail Party" Effect: Brain-wise
Category: Health, Science & Technology
Via: broliver-thesquirrel-stagnasty • 12 years ago • 12 comments
When I was 14 I had a severe stroke that paralyzed the right side of my body and disrupted the speech centers (I had then what is known as speech aphasia ) in my brain. I recovered basic motor skills and language rapidly, but to this day, I have lingering signs of it that I can notice but are not immediately apparent to anyone else.
One lingering effect is the difficulty distinguishing between sounds when there are multiple sounds present, specifically when I am paying attention to one sound and another sound raises itself to a level needing attention. (I.E., Listening to one person and another person comes up and starts saying something that is more important. I lock onto both people and therefore do not hear much but the sounds of both people talking.)
So, I found these two articles on the NPR website that were interesting (to at least me).
Photo credit Getty Images
The First:
Birds don't spend much time at cocktail parties, but they do face a similar auditory challenge, says Frederic Theunissen of the University of California, Berkeley. "Take a walk in the forest," Theunissen says. "It's clear that these animals are very vocal, and sometimes when there are large groups of them it becomes a cacophony of sounds just like when there's large groups of humans. link
And the second:
Scientists are beginning to understand how people tune in to a single voice in a crowded, noisy room.This ability, known as the "cocktail party effect," appears to rely on areas of the brain that have completely filtered out unwanted sounds, researchers report in the journalNeuron.So when a person decides to focus on a particular speaker, other speakers "have no representation in those [brain] areas," says Elana Zion Golumbic of Columbia University . link
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The second and later story is perhaps more pertinent to my particular auditory oddity.
It may be in my case that I cannot detach from the one sound and instead open another channel of equal strength, thereby creating the conflict in my brain.
I know that if I were driving my car listening to the radio and my now ex-wife started talking to me, I would try to pay attention to her and could not seem to disengage from the radio.
Or, It could be that I was just so annoyed by her refusal to wait the ten or twenty seconds the news story I was listening to had left to play I peferred instead to focus on the annoyance and lose the conversation.....
I would believe this!
I have dyscalculia-- a form of dyslexia in dealing with math, numbers, etc. As a side effect, if the fan is running in the bathroom, I honestly can't roll my hair-- I can't concentrate on what goes next. Or cook with the vent fan roaring... Crowd noises drive me up the wall-- which is why I hate to watch sports on TV-- all the crowd noises give me a headache. It probably explains why I can't seem to figure out the words to songs on the radio, too. And this is a problem of long standing. I honestly thought Nat King Cole was singing Rabbit and Rose, not "Rambling Rose"! LOL!
So, yeah, I believe this to be true!
I can't, Bob. All I hear is the waterfall... I would sleep VERY well, but would not be able to hear over the noise of the falls, no matter how long I stayed there.
I run a fan at night-- it blots out all the other noises in the house. Otherwise, I'm waking up every few minutes, every time the dog snores, or my husband snores, or the wind blows, or Peep turns over in bed...
I have that problem when more than one person is speaking. I hate it. I don't know if it's because of some hearing damage in one ear or old age but it sucks.
One time I asked an Engineering manager to repeat something because I did not hear it due to someone walking up and talking to others nearby. He replied that he was talking and I needed to listen to him. I wanted to slap him...arrogant ass. I tried to explain why I had not heard him and he started arguing with me about it.
I tune a lot of it out. I give up. I don't care. I hate people that constantly interrupt and talk all at once in meetings. I used to have another engineering manager that used to shove a talking stick in front of me every time I said anything. He was also the first one to interrupt and talk over others when they were speaking.
I've so given up on the idea of civil conversation that I almost never want to participate in discussions unless they are purely social. This is bad because older people need that interaction. Maybe I'll get through it somehow. Sometimes I wish I was just deaf.
Sorry about your situation Broliver. It must be really hard to go through much of your life that way. I hope you have found some good skills to cope.
It's why I don't like the beach. The wind and the waves bug me. Too much noise.
Absolutely! I can understand, too...
Yes, I'm a VERY light sleeper, unless I take all my meds, at the right time, on a fairly empty stomach, and time everything-- with the fan running. Ugh...
One of the reasons that I find it interesting living with aphasia is it makes one slow down and listen to people more, especially ones who speak slowly. There was this gentleman who came into my fathers antique shop who spoke with a quite noticeable degree of hesitation. When he started talking to me, I realized that he also had speech aphasia, and so adjusted my tempo to his. We had quite a wonderful conversation.
I know what you mean by not being able to say what you think. It was really bad when I was in speech therapy right after the stroke. They had these flash cards and would flip them up and I was supposed to say what was on them. Simple, right? I can recall them flashing up a picture of a sailboat, I would think sailboat, and then, some where between the thought and my speaking messages got crossed, and the word cat emerged from my mouth. How incredibly frustrating!
It is still a problem today in that I have to think of what I am going to say and make sure that the thoughts make it out of my mouth making sense, ushering them through the mechanical processes of speaking. By the time I get the sentence all lined up and ready to come out of my mouth, people have moved on...(and that is when I get the whole thought lined up before it runs away). So often, I just give up, sit back, listen and think, because I can't get my points across in a cogent manner.
Luckily, I can still write!
Thank you so very much for sharing.
Sometimes they do substitute a word, but I think that they just like seeing me flounder!
I really have difficulty, because some of the ideas that I have are paragraph length and I am lucky to get one complex sentence out of my mouth, let alone an idea that requires more to fully comprehend the meaning.
I was joking