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‘Cocktail party problem’

London: Known as the “cocktail party problem,” the ability of our brain to pick up the speech of a person we want to listen to in the noisy gathering has long been a mystery. But, no more.

A team of researchers in Europe has found that humans are gifted at listening to someone speaking while many other people are talking loudly at the same time, the PLoS medical journal reported.

In fact, the team has discovered a neuronal mechanism in the auditory system that is able to solve the task based on the analysis of the temporal fine structure of the acoustic scene.

According to the researchers, different speakers have different temporal fine structure in their voiced speech and such signals are represented in different areas of the auditory cortex as per this different time structure.

“By means of a so-called winner-take-all algorithm, one of these representations gains control over all other representations. This means that only the voice of the speaker to whom you wish to listen is still represented in the auditory cortex and can thus be followed over time,” according to lead scientist Holger Schulze of the Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg. — PTI

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