Researchers at Columbia demonstrated the first real-time brain-controlled hearing system that can identify which speaker a listener is focusing on in a noisy environment and automatically amplify that voice while suppressing others. "This breakthrough addresses the 'cocktail party effect,' a major limitation of conventional hearing aids, which often struggle to distinguish between overlapping conversations in noisy settings," reports Neuroscience News. From the report: In the new study, Columbia researchers teamed up with surgeons and their epilepsy patients who were undergoing brain surgery to better pinpoint the sources of their seizures. The hospital patients, who volunteered to be part of this study, already had electrodes implanted in their brains. [senior author Nima Mesgarani's] system used the electrodes to measure the brain activity of the patients as they focused on one of two overlapping conversations played simultaneously.…