You Are Listening, But Are You Really Processing? States of Attention During Language

Someone is speaking to you.

The sound reaches your ears.

The words keep coming.

You remain seated, looking in the same direction.

But at some point, your attention is no longer fully there.

Can we still say that you are listening?

Probably.

But that does not mean you are processing the language in the same way.

This apparently simple distinction lies at the center of an interesting 2026 study by Megan Boudewyn and colleagues, who combined behavioral measures and EEG to investigate different states of attention while participants listened to spoken stories.

Main Reference

The study “Distinct Attentional Control Profiles during Language Comprehension in Major Mental Health Disorders,” by Boudewyn, Erickson, Winsler, Barch, Frank, Gold, Luck, MacDonald, Ragland, Silverstein, Yonelinas, and Carter, was published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

The authors’ initiative deserves recognition for an important reason.

Instead of investigating attention using flashes, isolated tones, or highly artificial tasks, the group placed the question inside an everyday activity:

listening to a story.

Participants included people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and controls without psychiatric diagnoses. During the narrative, they were periodically interrupted and asked to report the state of their attention at that moment.

The researchers distinguished three situations:

on-task attention, when the person was following the narrative;

divided attention, when part of the attention remained on the story while another part was directed toward competing thoughts or stimuli;

and complete attentional lapse, when attention had moved entirely away from the narrative.

This may sound purely subjective.

The EEG suggested otherwise.

Different Ways of “Listening”

The study found both behavioral and neurophysiological differences across these attentional states.

All clinical groups reported spending less time fully attentive to the story than controls. Different profiles also emerged: participants with schizophrenia showed proportionally more complete lapses of attention, whereas participants with major depression more frequently reported divided-attention states.

EEG added the particularly interesting dimension.

Periodic power in the alpha band, approximately 8–13 Hz, varied according to attentional state. Divided attention and complete lapses showed neural signatures distinguishable from on-task attention, although differences among diagnostic groups were also observed.

In other words:

the participant remained physically present;

the sound continued to arrive;

the story continued to unfold;

but the brain was not necessarily treating that information in the same way.

Boudewyn and colleagues’ broader research program uses active EEG systems from Brain Products to investigate attentional control, language, and psychiatric conditions. Related work from the same experimental program describes recordings using actiCHamp and active Brain Products electrodes.

The importance, however, is not merely technological.

It is the possibility of making measurable something we experience every day:

being exposed to a message does not necessarily mean being available to it.

Listening Is Not Downloading a Copy of Speech

It is tempting to imagine communication in a simple sequence:

one person produces a message;

the message travels through the air;

another person receives it.

But language does not work like file transfer.

Between what is said and what will later be remembered, interpreted, or used, there is attention.

There is memory.

There is expectation.

There is context.

There is an organism in a particular state.

Latin American neuroscientist Agustín Ibáñez, in The Mind’s Golden Cage and Cognition in the Wild (2022), argues that understanding everyday cognition requires moving beyond excessively compartmentalized models and studying cognitive processes within the real situations in which body, environment, and competing demands occur simultaneously.

Boudewyn et al. approach a similar problem experimentally.

They do not ask only:

“Did the person hear the words?”

They ask:

“Where was the person’s attention while those words were happening?”

Anthropology Also Asks: How Are We Listening?

There is an especially interesting convergence with Latin American research outside neuroscience.

Mexican anthropologist Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas, whose work includes ethnographic research in Buenos Aires, has developed the concept of different “genres of listening.” In her 2022 book Genres of Listening, she examines how people do not listen in exactly the same way across all contexts.

Where they are, who is speaking, how they have learned to listen, and what they expect from the interaction participate in what becomes relevant.

In a 2025 review, Marsilli-Vargas further approaches listening simultaneously as an everyday sensory experience and as a specialized form of attention, shaped by social and cultural practices that influence how people attend, interpret, and respond to speech and sound.

Anthropology is not measuring alpha activity on EEG.

Boudewyn is not studying cultures of listening.

These are different scales.

Yet both make it difficult to maintain the simplistic assumption that:

same sound = same experience.

Two People Can Hear the Same News

This conclusion has consequences beyond the laboratory.

Imagine two people watching the same news report.

The same words appear.

The same images are shown.

The duration is identical.

But one person follows closely.

Another is thinking about a family problem.

Another notices mainly what appears threatening.

Another divides attention between television and a phone.

Physically, they were all “exposed” to the same content.

Cognitively, they may not have encountered the same event.

We therefore need to distinguish:

information available

from

information processed.

This distinction will become particularly important later when we discuss social networks, repetition, and infinite feeds.

Information may exist in front of a person without becoming sufficiently processed to participate in the next decision.

At the same time, another piece of information may repeatedly capture attention and become increasingly available.

What We Know Also Depends on What We Can Attend To

Latin American archaeology adds another useful question.

Argentine archaeologist Alejandro Haber, in his 2022 work on Catamarcan gnosiology, challenges the idea of knowledge as something completely independent from the relationships through which something becomes knowable.

For Haber, knowing also involves the relationships and conditions through which something comes to be recognized as knowledge.

His archaeological proposal should not be turned into a theory of neural attention.

But it allows an important approximation:

not everything that is present participates equally in what we later call knowledge.

Before information can be remembered, it has to find some way in.

Before an argument can be used, it has to be available.

Before a message can influence a choice, some part of it has to be processed.

In this sense, attention is not merely a detail between perception and memory.

It participates in selecting the part of the world that may continue with us.

There Is More Than Attention or Inattention

Perhaps one of the most useful contributions of Boudewyn et al. is precisely their move beyond a simple binary:

paying attention / not paying attention.

The intermediate state matters.

We can be partially present.

We can continue following words while another narrative unfolds internally.

We can remain connected enough to recognize the topic while failing to integrate details.

This is far closer to everyday life.

In digital environments, for example, we may watch a video while comments move across the screen, messages arrive, and the next piece of content is already waiting.

We are listening.

But how much of that material is actually being integrated?

Boudewyn’s study did not investigate social media, and this conclusion should not be attributed to the authors.

What it provides is something more fundamental:

evidence that different subjective attentional states during continuous language correspond to distinct behavioral and neurophysiological profiles.

You Are Listening. But Where Is Your Attention?

This is why the initiative of Megan Boudewyn and colleagues deserves particular attention.

The study brings EEG closer to a deeply ordinary experience.

Someone speaks.

We listen.

But our cognitive presence can change while language continues.

That forces us to abandon one simple assumption:

Receiving the same information does not mean processing the same information.

And perhaps we should add another:

Being in front of a message does not guarantee that the knowledge needed to understand it is participating at that moment.

This distinction will become central in the next article.

Because if attention participates in what enters and remains available, a larger question emerges:

What happens to the futures we are able to imagine when certain information, experiences, or forms of knowledge are no longer being recruited?

It is precisely here that attention begins to meet Planning — and where our Religare reading can take its next step.

Main Reference

Boudewyn, M. A., Erickson, M. A., Winsler, K., Barch, D. M., Frank, M. J., Gold, J. M., Luck, S. J., MacDonald, A. W., III, Ragland, J. D., Silverstein, S. M., Yonelinas, A., & Carter, C. S. (2026). Distinct Attentional Control Profiles during Language Comprehension in Major Mental Health Disorders. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2026.06.015.

Complementary References

Haber, A. (2022). O conhecimento é o relacionamento: cenas de gnosiologia catamarcana. Revista de Arqueologia, 35(1), 39–52. DOI: 10.24885/sab.v35i1.957.

Ibáñez, A. (2022). The Mind’s Golden Cage and Cognition in the Wild. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(12), 1031–1034. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2022.07.008.

Marsilli-Vargas, X. (2022). Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.1215/9781478023159.

Marsilli-Vargas, X. (2025). Listening. Annual Review of Anthropology, 54, 237–251. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-010925-021151.