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Boing Boing

Your brain can track two voices at the same time

Ellsworth Toohey
Jul 17, 2026
∙ Paid
After William Hogarth, Wellcome Collection / CC BY 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

You know the trick of picking one voice out of a crowded room — the “cocktail party” problem. A new study in PLOS Biology looks at the messier moment when you switch your attention from one talker to another, and finds the brain doesn’t hand off cleanly: for a beat, it tracks both…

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