Andreea Saraev Psiholog-Psihoterapeut Cluj-Napoca

17/03/2026

17/03/2026

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 professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and the senior author of the study.
The findings are consistent with previous studies showing that when people or animals focus on a specific auditory input, neurons in the auditory cortex that respond to features of the target stimulus amplify their activity. This is the first study to show that an extra boost is enough to explain how the brain solves the cocktail party problem.
Ian Griffith, a graduate student in the Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Biosciences and Technology, who is advised by McDermott, is the lead author of the paper. MIT graduate student R. Preston Hess is also an author of the paper, which appeared in Nature Human Behavior.

Using a computational model, neuroscientists showed how the brain can selectively focus attention on one voice among others in a noisy environment.

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