How the brain concentrates on conversation in a noisy room

There’s a good explanation for how the brain tracks speech when you’re in a noisy, crowded room, and this finding could improve hearing aids.

The general idea of ​​speech recognition is that only the voice of the person who is paying attention is processed by the brain. Vinay Ragavan at Columbia University in New York. “But my problem with that idea is that when someone shouts in a crowded place, we don’t ignore it because we’re focused on who we’re talking to, and we still pick it up.”

To better understand how we process multiple voices, Ragavan and his colleagues implanted electrodes in the body. brain Seven people participated to monitor organ activity while undergoing epilepsy surgery. Participants who remained awake throughout the procedure listened to a 30-minute audio clip of two voices.

During 30 minutes, participants were repeatedly asked to shift focus between two voices, one male and one female. The voices were talking to each other and were about the same volume, but one was louder than the other at various points in the clip, mimicking the changing volume of background dialogue in a crowded space.

The team then used this brain activity data to create a model that predicted what would happen. The brain processes softer and louder voices, and you can see how it differs depending on which voice the participants were asked to focus on.

The researchers found that the louder of the two voices was the primary auditory cortex and thought to be involved in the conscious perception of soundsecondary auditory cortex, Responsible for more complex sound processingEven if participants were told not to concentrate on loud voices.

“This is the first neuroscience study to show that the brain encodes speech that we don’t pay attention to,” Raghavan said. “This opens the door to understanding how the brain processes things we don’t pay attention to.”

The researchers found that when participants were asked to focus on the voice, quieter voices were processed only by the brain in the primary and secondary cortices. It took about 95 milliseconds longer for the brain to process this voice as speech than if the participants were asked to focus on the louder voice.

“Our findings suggest that the brain may use different mechanisms to encode and represent these two different levels of speech when a background conversation is ongoing. We are doing it,” Raghavan said.

By targeting the mechanism of perceiving soft voices, hearing Assistive devices could be more effective, says Ragavan. “If you can make a hearing aid that knows who you’re paying attention to, you can turn up the volume of just that person’s voice.”

The researchers plan to repeat the experiment using a less invasive method for recording speech processing in the brain. “Ideally, you don’t want anything implanted in the brain to get enough brain recordings to decipher attention,” says Raghavan.

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