Your Name Is a Wake Word (Part 1 - The Science)

Just imagine you’re in danger. What single word would be most likely to seize your attention and avert tragedy?

Do you have any smart devices in your life? You know, the ones where you just call out “Alexa” or “Siri” and it signals your always-alert device to wake up and pay attention?

The tech term for that is a wake word. And guess what?

You too have a wake word, one that’s personal just to you – and science shows that you are always on alert for it. Thanks to some dedicated neural wiring and the so-called Cocktail Party Effect, your name is essentially a pilot light, constantly on and waiting to spark your attention.

Researchers began documenting this as far back as the 1950s. That’s when the term Cocktail Party Problem was first used to describe the brain’s capacity to filter out environmental noise. Researcher Colin Cherry proved in 1953 that such filtering occurs both consciously and unconsciously, and Neville Moray built on this concept in 1959 to demonstrate that names often broke through those filters. Noelle Wood and Nelson Cowan’s complementary studies in 1995 indicated that the effect was reliable and not limited to certain phonetic sounds – which suggests the impact would be similar across cultures and languages.

More recently, neuroscience has targeted the same question by monitoring physiological changes resulting from hearing one’s name. Brain imaging, such as an fMRI study by Knut Kampe and colleagues in 2003 and subsequent work by Carmody and Lewis in 2006, has identified specific brain areas that light up when we hear our own name, including the medial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal cortex - regions actively involved in our sense of self recognition and social identity. In 2006, Fabien Perrin et al. found that hearing one’s own name elicits P3 brain responses linked to attention and self-processing. And in 2023, Yihui Zhang et al showed that hearing one’s name increases the intensity with which the brain responds to the heartbeat, suggesting that our heartbeat also plays a role in processing hearing our names.

Furthermore, productivity research by Kosuke Kaida and Sunao Iwaki in 2018 demonstrated that instead of being a distraction from other tasks, hearing one’s own name can heighten attention and productivity, suggesting that names are wired to produce arousal and readiness—just like a wake word.

In fact, infants as young as 4½ months old show signs of recognizing their own names and paying more attention to them than to other sounds (Denise Mandel et al., 1995). And once that wiring is in place, it doesn’t go dormant. Even people in minimally conscious states exhibit more neural activity when their own names are spoken aloud then when hearing other emotionally significant words (Fabien Perrin et al., 2006).

All this goes to show that just as your electronic device is waiting to hear “Siri” or “Hey Google” or “Alexa” (or one of these preferable alternatives), we humans are programmed with our own personal wake words – biologically tuned to awaken our awareness, focus, and attention superpowers. Turns out selective monitoring with voice-activation isn't just for devices.

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What might our constant name radar mean for how we navigate daily life today? Read more in Your Name Is a Wake Word: Part Two.

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