Party Line

The Tower of Babel had nothing on the modern cocktail party, whose disparate clatter and chatter has long fascinated linguists, novelists, sociologists and sound engineers--as well as the imbibers. Unconsciously, every cocktail-partygoer performs an unusual feat as he sips his gin amid the din: while carrying on his own dazzling conversation, he is able simultaneously to monitor the surrounding babble for such important items as the sound of his own name or a verbal pass at a lady friend. How does the human organism perform these intellectual gymnastics? Fascinated by what they call "the cocktail-party problem," two British scientists have come up with some explanations that few partygoers are aware of--but that almost everyone will recognize as what he has been doing for years.

Sonar for Boredom. Dr. Colin Cherry, 48, professor of telecommunication at London's Imperial College of Science and Technology, and Psychologist Neville Moray of Sheffield University got interested in the cocktail-party problem through their studies on the directional nature of human hearing. They kept their eyes and ears open at cocktail parties, but did their actual sound research in the laboratory--the cocktail parties were too noisy. They discovered that the seasoned partygoer does not face the person he is listening to, but turns only one ear toward him, while using the other ear as if it were sonar to pick up and sort all the other party noises.

Since the brain is primed to pick up certain "emotionally important words" out of the din coming into one ear--such as a reference to the partygoer or his interests--it may switch its attention back and forth between the two ears as frequently as three times a second. "You don't actually listen to both at once," says Dr. Moray. "You make up gaps in the conversations by drawing on your past experience of language. This is particularly easy when a conversation is dull and repetitious. In the same way, if the listener is bored with the person to whom he is speaking, he may let his other ear range round other conversations in the room, waiting for an opportune moment to swing around and join another conversation."

Easy Cliches. To help his brain make the switch from one conversation to another, the partygoer unconsciously does some lip reading of his companion's chatter from the corner of his eye while one ear is ranging around. Even if three conversations are being fired at his brain at once, say the scientists, the listener can still select the most interesting one by turning his head to varying angles, thus subtly altering the relative time delays of each source as it reaches his ear. One reason the brain can work so efficiently at cocktail parties, says Dr. Cherry, is that most of the conversations are a mixture of basic cliches that do not tax the intelligence. "Once the brain perceives that something is part of a cliche" he says, "it switches off and starts groping for another message." When is it hardest for the partying human brain to function? Says Dr. Moray: "When one is bending over double, talking to a short girl."

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