The Cocktail Party in Your Head

When your brain feels crowded, focus on the wisest voice

Bare oak branches by the Mississippi River in January, by the author, Emily P.G. Erickson

One Sunday afternoon, while walking along the river path near where I live in Saint Paul, I wandered off the pavement to a clearing where the bluffs swing out over the Mississippi. I watched the wind push a pocket of snow from its perch in an oak to the cold ground below. During its ethereal descent through a slant of sunlight, the snow sparkled.

In the wintertime, a serene stillness settles over the land. My brain, however, doesn’t get the memo. When everything outside of me is quiet, inside, my mind’s chatter revs up.

The voices berate me and repeat themselves incessantly. Frankly, they’re downright rude. The details are boring. They feature my personal bugaboos — namely, that I’m a failure, with all the ubiquitous castigation that implies. It can get uncomfortably crowded in my head.

But if my head were a room, and there really were a crowd in it, it might not be quite so bad. Why? The cocktail party effect. The cocktail party effect is the psychological phenomenon whereby we can selectively attend to particular auditory stimuli and ignore others, just as we do at the eponymous party. (Remember those?) It’s like a biological mute button.