Your brain can track two voices at the same time

When you zero in on a single voice in a crowded room—the classic 'cocktail party' problem—your brain makes it look seamless. Boing Boing reports on a new PLOS Biology study that finds the reality is messier. Researchers discovered that when you shift attention from one speaker to another, your brain doesn't hand off the focus cleanly; instead, it tracks both voices momentarily at once. It's a brief overlap that reveals our attention is less precise than we tend to think.

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