Humans can focus on one speaker's voice in a noisy environment, but how the brain processes this is unclear. A study using brain recordings from patients with epilepsy shows that the non-primary auditory cortex encodes key features of the attended speaker. When subjects listened to two speakers, the brain activity reflected the attended speaker's speech, even when the voices were mixed. A classifier trained on single speakers could decode both the words and speaker identity from the mixed speech. The study found that attention significantly enhances neural selectivity, improving speech perception. The results suggest that the brain creates a perceptual representation of the attended speaker, not just the external sounds. This has implications for understanding how the brain processes speech in complex environments and could inform future technologies for speech recognition. The study also highlights the role of attention in speech perception and how errors in this process can lead to mishearing. The findings demonstrate that the brain's auditory system can extract and represent speech in a way that is relevant to the listener's goals, even in challenging listening conditions.Humans can focus on one speaker's voice in a noisy environment, but how the brain processes this is unclear. A study using brain recordings from patients with epilepsy shows that the non-primary auditory cortex encodes key features of the attended speaker. When subjects listened to two speakers, the brain activity reflected the attended speaker's speech, even when the voices were mixed. A classifier trained on single speakers could decode both the words and speaker identity from the mixed speech. The study found that attention significantly enhances neural selectivity, improving speech perception. The results suggest that the brain creates a perceptual representation of the attended speaker, not just the external sounds. This has implications for understanding how the brain processes speech in complex environments and could inform future technologies for speech recognition. The study also highlights the role of attention in speech perception and how errors in this process can lead to mishearing. The findings demonstrate that the brain's auditory system can extract and represent speech in a way that is relevant to the listener's goals, even in challenging listening conditions.