Imagine you are at a cocktail party. The room is crowded, people are coming and going, and you can barely hear your friend as they tell you some juicy gossip about the date they went on last week.

The fact you can still follow what their saying is down to your brain performing some very complex operations amid all the noise. Out of all the sound waves reaching your ears, it is successfully isolating the one of interest while filtering out the rest.

Trying to understand how the brain does this has kept auditory neuroscientists occupied since the 1950s, when British cognitive scientist Colin Cherry first coined the term “the cocktail party problem”.

This was initially studied in experiments that asked volunteers to listen to two speeches simultaneously – but only repeat one of them aloud afterwards. Cherry found that listeners could follow and repeat the pre-selected message remarkably well, despite both speeches being played simultaneously, one in each ear. In contrast, they recalled very little of the other message.

These experiments laid the foundation for decades of selective attention research. But it is only in the past 15 years that scientists have studied this phenomenon in experiments that more closely resemble the complicated, multi-layered way we listen in the real world – using technology that accurately tracks the brain’s activity as speech unfolds.

The most common non-invasive option, electroencephalography (EEG), uses what looks like a swimming cap fitted with small sensors. These measure very fast changes in the electrical activity of populations of neurons (the brain’s nerve cells) with millisecond precision.

In a 2014 study, neuroscientists found that, within 200 milliseconds of hearing someone speak, the brain favours the conversation someone is focusing on over all other noise. This prioritised attention shows up most markedly in secondary brain areas such as the superior temporal gyrus, which are responsible for piecing together the sounds we hear into meaningful speech.

This suggests that our attentive brain is not just enhancing the voice of who we are listening to, but helping us make sense of their words while filtering out all other conversations and background noise.

Attention switching

The original cocktail party problem did not investigate the full range of people’s listening experiences, which are often much less static. In everyday life, we repeatedly switch and reorient our auditory attention – for example, when hearing our name called across a crowded room, or when a door slams.

But what happens in that brief moment when we stop listening to one person and turn our attention to another? Can the brain switch from one voice to another instantly, or does it briefly have to process both? These were questions we investigated in our latest study with colleagues from the Eriksholm Research Centre in Denmark, which is funded by Danish hearing aid manufacturer Oticon.

Clarifying how the brain manages these rapid shifts in attention can help explain why some conversations are easy to follow while others become difficult, especially in noisy environments.

Coming back to the cocktail party: here you are, focused on your friend’s voice as they reveal the identity of their recent date. But then another familiar voice suddenly reaches your awareness. Your partner is (secretly) telling a friend about the surprise birthday gift they are planning for you. Your attention immediately shifts to your partner’s voice, while still giving the appearance of listening to your friend.

When we tested such a scenario in our laboratory, we found something striking. During this attention reorienting, the brain does not simply drop one voice and turn to the other. Rather, for a short period of between one and two seconds, the neural signals associated with the two voices overlap. In other words, the brain starts tuning into the new speaker before it has completely let go of the old one.

This mechanism may help explain how we navigate the constantly changing soundscape around us, moving our attention from one voice or sound to another while maintaining enough information about the previous speaker to make that transition seamless. This efficient processing strategy could be described as the brain maintaining a smooth “attention continuum”.

Improved hearing aid design?

These insights have some important real-world applications. For example, traditional hearing aids are often designed to favour sounds coming from in front of the listener, which is obviously limiting in many situations.

But using enhanced these attention decoding techniques, hearing aids could be neurally steered not only to enhance the speaker that is currently attended to, but to switch between different speakers, almost in real time, as the listener’s attention is dynamically reoriented.

More generally, understanding how the brain shifts, maintains and combines information from different speakers can give us a clearer picture of how attention shapes what we ultimately hear, understand and remember.

The approach introduced in our study could be particularly useful for studying how individuals vary in their attentional strategies, particularly in noisy environments – and for relating these differences to the mental effort they use to follow and understand speech.

Ultimately, this brings us closer to understanding how the brain makes successful communication possible – at cocktail parties and everywhere else.

Sara Carta received funding from the William Demant Fonden and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland.

Giovanni Di Liberto receives funding from William Demant Fonden and Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland. He is also supported by Research Ireland at ADAPT, the Research Ireland Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology at Trinity College Dublin.

In a world where trust in institutions is mostly in decline, levels of trust in science remain relatively high. Yet at the same time, belief in scientific conspiracy theories, such as hushed-up effects of vaccines or aeroplane “chemtrails”, is also widespread.

What explains this apparent contradiction? Our work suggests we need to ask a different question – not how much people trust science, but which sources inform their understanding of what science is and how it works.

In our recent study of 843 US residents, we found that people who picture scientific progress as the work of lone geniuses, and who learn about science mainly from podcasts and documentaries, are markedly more drawn to conspiracy theories – whatever their level of education.

This fits the bigger picture very well. In a 16-country survey, 70% of respondents believed at least one false or unproven health claim. High trust in science and widespread conspiracy beliefs appear to coexist in the same populations.

We fear that trust in science is compatible with believing almost anything, so long as it is expressed in plausibly scientific terms. This can lead to some people refusing vaccines, trusting miracle cures or dismissing climate warnings – all while remaining convinced that science is on their side.

The ‘lone genius’ trope

At school, science is almost always presented as a linear sequence of achievements, or in the form of impersonal theories. The human side of discovery is largely stripped out.

In contrast, most science-focused films and documentaries build their narratives around biographies of exceptional individuals.

These often yield a familiar plot. Society is facing an intractable problem. A genius arrives with the exact solution – but is ignored and mocked until, after much personal pain, everyone realises he (for it is invariably a man) was right all along.

From the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance friar burned at the stake partly for defending an infinite universe, to A Beautiful Mind, the Oscar-winning portrait of the mathematician John Nash, this lone-genius arc has permeated popular depictions of science for centuries.

Many conspiracy theorists seek to exploit this trope – in part to suggest that those who recognise it must be unusually smart too, living in a world where everyone else is “naive” or “brainwashed”.

Yet these lone genius plots leave out nearly everything that makes science work. Namely, the rather boring and complex processes of accumulation and evaluation, from peer review to replication and endless disagreements, through which reliable knowledge emerges from a crowd of people and institutions.

Research also shows that people presented with academic research “in the making”, without definitive conclusions, often read any hesitations or equivocations as scientific weakness, rather than honesty.

Most people trust science without understanding its technicalities. This means trust can easily be attached to shared cultural markers of “scientificity”: technical vocabulary, charts, credentials, fancy equipment, numbers quoted to impressive precision. In other words, whoever displays the right cues sounds plausibly scientific.

Consider the example of Corrado Malanga, an Italian chemist who developed an elaborate theory of aliens harvesting human souls, and his collaborator Filippo Biondi, a radar researcher. Using satellite radar, the pair claimed in March 2025 to have discovered an elaborate hidden city up to two kilometres beneath the Khafre pyramid in Egypt.

Archaeologists quickly and widely dismissed these claims, in part because this kind of radar cannot see more than a few metres underground. Yet Biondi went on to present their “discovery” at length on The Joe Rogan Experience, one of the world’s most popular podcasts, in January 2026 – attracting many millions of views and listens to this widely disputed “scientific account”.

A recent analysis examined 8.7 million Twitter (now X) posts that shared supposedly fact-checked news stories. It found that references to scientific entities – through use of terms such as scientist, university or study – were associated with an increase in sharing. However, this was especially true of “low-veracity content, and when users lean politically to the right”.

More likely to endorse conspiracy theories

There are two threads intertwining here: a story about how science progresses, and the informal media where it mostly lives.

In our recent study, published in Current Psychology, we measured participants’ “genius mentality” (the propensity to believe that progress comes from exceptional individuals overturning consensus through intuition) and also their science media preference (whether they favoured podcasts and documentaries over expert-vetted sources).

We found people who scored higher on either metric were more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. These correlative effects were stronger than either education or political orientation, factors usually considered major drivers of such beliefs.

We also observed an interesting moderation effect: among people with little or even moderate trust in scientists, a high belief in the genius mentality markedly increased conspiracy belief. Among those who trusted scientists most, it made almost no difference.

From our research, we believe standard remedies, fact-checks and appeals to “trust the science” miss a deeper problem. They may correct claims one at a time, but leave untouched core beliefs (and misunderstandings) about how science works.

A more durable approach is to make the collective machinery visible: to explain why debate, peer review and the slow building of consensus, rather than individual intuition, are what make science reliable.

Some science education researchers argue that the goal should not be to turn everyone into a scientist, but a “competent outsider” – people who can correctly evaluate where knowledge comes from and how it has been produced.

We believe a school science education should not only introduce theories, but explain how the scientific community works on a daily basis. Children need to learn how knowledge emerges from many people cooperating and challenging each other within shared criteria – and that any consensus which survives this process is a strength, not groupthink.

Our ambition is to protect against future conspiracy theories before they emerge, rather than simply trying to correct the last one.

Michele d'Errico receives funding from the Irish Research Council.

Taha Yasseri receives funding from Research Ireland and Workday Inc.

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