It's a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind by David A. Rosenbaum

help being pulled there. Likewise for your attention when your name sounds.
    If your name pops out this way, you couldn’t have really shut out the auditory input containing it, could you? Instead, your name and, by implication, other sounds must have been subject to some sort of scrutiny. Cognitive imps in your head must have been listening all the time, and the cognitive imps linked to your name must have been pushier than others. When your name came in, those little demons must have jumped up and down feverishly, yelling “That’s me! That’s me! That’s me!” (metaphorically, of course).
    The tendency to respond to your name even when it’s presented to an ostensibly unattended channel is called the
cocktail party
effect. 6 The term harks back to a time when people sipped cocktails at parties.
    Is the cocktail party a reliable phenomenon, or does it only arise around martinis, whiskey sours, and Southern Comforts? It’s very reliable, as I show in a classroom demonstration in which I invite a student volunteer to come to the front of the class. I stand to one side of the student, read out loud from a book, and ask the student to repeat each word I say. This task is called
auditory shadowing
. With just a bit of practice—a minute at most—the student can perform the auditory shadowing task very well, provided the words he or she hears are familiar and the rate is comparable to his or her natural speech rate. 7
    In the second part of the demonstration, I ask another student to stand on the shadower’s other side and read from another book. The shadower is now asked to repeat what the student reader reads and to pay no attention to what I say—something I figure the student has experience with, having sat through my lectures. In a matter of seconds, the shadower can do this. He or she can repeat what the other student says and is able to tune out what I say, or at least that’s what appears to happen. When I ask the shadower after the shadowing event what I read, he or she shrugs.
    Then I demonstrate the cocktail party effect. In the midst of my reading, being careful not to raise my voice or do anything else to attract special attention, I utter the student’s name. If the student’s name is Ernesto, I say “Ernesto” as discretely as I can, as if the name were part of the text I’m reading.
    When I say the student’s name, a remarkable thing often happens. The student immediately turns and looks at me, and says, “What?” or something similar. The effect is so dramatic that when the demonstration works, it gets gales of laughter from the students in the audience. 8
    What does this demonstration reveal about the brain? It shows that it’s a jungle in there. In a jungle, there are dominance hierarchies. Similarly, when it comes to auditory perception, some representations (the dominant ones) need very little input to get highly activated whereas other representations (the less dominant ones) need more. Other representations are less dominant because their inputs fail to seize attention so reliably.
Attention and Action Selection
    The way you can tell your name has special status is that you do something special when your name comes along. If you’re at a cocktail party, you stop listening to the person you’ve been listening to and look at the person who just mentioned you. If you’re standing in front of a class engaged in a shadowy demonstration with your cognitive psychology professor, you stop in your tracks and look at him or her when s/he refers to you. The fact that you stop what you’re doing and do something else suggests that attention permits action selection.
    This view of attention as a vehicle for selecting actions was anticipated by the late-nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist, William James, often called the dean of American psychology. In his encyclopedic work,
Principles of Psychology
, James wrote, “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession of the