Renovating & Reinventing Our Law Library

Talking Points

Colin Cherry!  Read on to find out why…

You know what it’s like — you’re at a party trying to concentrate on your friend’s conversation when suddenly you “pick up” from the din of the crowd a mention of your name, or a topic that interests you.  How can you do that?

The cocktail party effect is the name of this phenomenon of filtering out other noise — but still being able to hear some other distinctive message when it is mentioned in the midst of this cacophony.  Filtering info — selective attention — is a way of life for all of us these days.

Cocktail party circa 1965

How do we do this?

In the early 1950s much of the early work in this area can be traced to problems faced by air traffic controllers. At that time, controllers received messages from pilots over loudspeakers in the control tower. Hearing the intermixed voices of many pilots over a single loudspeaker made the controller’s task very difficult. Colin Cherry conducted experiments in which subjects were asked to listen to two different messages from a single loudspeaker at the same time and try to separate them. His work reveals that our ability to separate sounds from background noise is affected by many variables, such as the gender of the speaker, the direction from which the sound is coming. It is like your brain is like a radio receiver and it can choose which sounds to pay attention to, and which to filter out.

We have to do that at cocktail parties — and at libraries.  The law library staff members are your filtering agents in the midst of the cacophany of the extraneous noises of irrelevant legal information.  We think we do a pretty good job at this.  Come on in and find out for yourself!

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Thank you to all the donors and friends helping to make the renovation possible. We will be updating this section with our newest donors and friends, so come back often. Thanks again for all your support! more