Thursday, February 09, 2006


The Cocktail Party Effect

Today, I shall introduce a phenomena which, despite its name, has little to do with alcoholic drinks. In fact this phenomena plays an important role in medical education.

Quoting from Wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect):

"The cocktail party effect describes the ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations (Arons, 1992; "The cocktail"). This effect reveals one of the surprising abilities of our auditory system, which enables us to talk in a noisy place."

So as you can see, this ability of our auditory system is extremely crucial in medical lectures, where medical students attempt to mimick the incessant nocturnal buzzing of crickets daily.

posted by nwxiang at 8:18 PM |


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