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

hypothesis is factually flawed, as shown by a couple of undergraduates who broadsided Broadbent’s hypothesis with a simple experiment. 3
    The two students who disproved their teacher’s hypothesis carried out a variation of the simultaneous listening task. They noted that the version of the task that Broadbent used had subjects listening to two messages that were equally sensible if recalled by either ear. The student experimenters asked what would happen if people listened instead to two messages that made more sense if the listeners
switched
attention from ear to ear. The messages they presented were similar to those appearing below. Each row represents a moment in time. Each column represents an input coming to the left ear (left column) or right ear (right column).
                                    
Pay Attention!
Dear
8
2
Aunt
Sally
5
7
How
Are
9
3
You
    To read these words in a meaningful way, you can shunt your attention back and forth while going from top to bottom. The students who conducted this study reasoned that if their listening subjects did this, they would not behave as Broadbent predicted, which would be to say “Dear 2 Sally 7 are 3” or “8 Aunt 5 how 9 you.” Instead, the students hypothesized, their subjects would say, “Dear Aunt Sally, how are you?” or “8 2 5 7 9 3.” Many participants did just this, suggesting that they tracked what made
sense
, not what entered one ear or the other. 4
    If this result vitiates the claim of Broadbent, does it fit with
Darwin
’s theory? Can the result be explained by appealing to an inner jungle?
    If you attend to what makes sense rather than to what strikes one eardrum or the other, the signals coming through your ears must be analyzed sufficiently to let you know what the signals mean. This implies that cognitive demons for analyzing meaning aren’t kept out by other demons blocking input to one of your ears.
    Donald Broadbent was a professor at Oxford University (hardly a fly-by-night academy), so it’s a bit disquieting to think that an Oxford don could be dinged by anyone, let alone a couple of undergrads. 5 Even Oxford profs can be wrong, however, though being wrong isn’t quite so shameful as you might think. In science, being wrong but being enduringly stimulating is better than being right and quickly forgotten. One mark of the impact of a scientific theory is how long people dwell on it, even if only, in the end, to disprove it. Aristotle’s theory of motion was accepted for centuries before Newton supplanted it with something better. Newton’s theory of motion held for hundreds of years before it was overturned by Einstein. The fact that Aristotle was wrong and that Newton was also incorrect (at least beyond the range of everyday experience) doesn’t mean Aristotle and Newton are now derided. They’re both revered for the durability of their claims.
    Should Broadbent’s model be rejected just because data from a particular experiment went against it? Maybe that experiment created an unusual situation, one that tapped into some unusual ability. Consider the following scenario, however.
    Imagine that you’re at a crowded party, standing in the middle of a room, conversing with someone who strikes your fancy. What this person says captures your attention. You don’t have to try hard to focus hard on what he or she is saying. The other sounds in the room—the conversations, the laughter, the loud music—dissolve as you speak with this new acquaintance.
    Then an odd thing happens. Out of the background, you hear your name. It isn’t yelled. It isn’t amplified through a megaphone. No one grabs your arm, tugs on you, and exclaims, “Ernesto, I’m talking to
you
!” Your name grabs you even though it’s mentioned quietly. Despite its low volume, it directs you to it. Though emanating from the background, the name attracts your attention the way a moth is drawn to a light in the darkness. The moth can’t