Dr. Christian Brodbeck, along with Drs. Jonathan Simon and L. Elliot Hong,  recently published an article, Rapid Transformation from Auditory to Linguistic Representations of Continuous Speech, in the journal, Current Biology, presenting research that we struggle to listen to more than one conversation at a time.

The article also caught the attention of the UK Daily Mail, Why you can't listen to two people speak at once, as well as Ed Lalor's lab  in a Current Biology commentary punningly titled, Great Expectations at the Speech–Language Interface.