The Cocktail Party The Cocktail Party The Cocktail Party is a play by T. S. Eliot. Elements of the play are based on "Alcestis", by the Ancient Greek playwright Euripides. The play was the most popular of Eliot's seven plays in his lifetime, although his 1935 play, "Murder in the Cathedral", is better remembered today. It was written while Eliot was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948. "The Cocktail Party" was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949. In 1950 the play had successful runs in London and New York theaters (the Broadway production received the 1950
Cocktail party effect Cocktail party effect The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of the brain's ability to focus one's auditory attention (an effect of selective attention in the brain) on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. Listeners have the ability to both segregate different stimuli into different streams, and subsequently decide which streams are most pertinent to them. Thus, it has been proposed that one's sensory memory subconsciously parses all stimuli, identifying discrete pieces of information and classifying them by salience. This effect