Explaining the cocktail effect's neurology

You know how you can manage to home in on a particular conversation in a room of conversations? (All other things being equal). Well, it looks like they have cracked the neural dimension of that.

This is the approach the Zador lab has taken to explain “selective attention,” or what Dr. Zador calls “the cocktail party problem.” Half of the neurons measured in the reported experiments showed no reaction at all to incoming stimuli. The researchers hypothesize that each neuron in the auditory cortex may have an “optimal stimulus” to which it is particularly sensitized.
“Your entire sensory apparatus is there to make successful representations of the outside world,” said Dr. Zador, who is director of the CSHL Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. “Sparse representations may make sensory stimuli easier to recognize and remember.” Recognizing the brain’s ability to distinguish “optimal stimuli” could help scientists find ways to improve how sounds are learned.

It just show that perception is more an active process than naive 'representation' models (such as that undergirding the kind of knee-jerk positivism that Dawkins seems to slip into a lot). It further indicates that an active part in interpretative processing is played by human subjects. Perhaps no surprise to hermeneuts but more solid brain data to back it up helps us to think about the correlations. Such as some further evidence that flows with a constructivist approach to learning and relating theologically to the naming the animals motif.
How Does The Brain Attend To One Voice In A Noisy Room? New Findings On Selectively Interpreting Sound