Current Biology 25, R439–R447, June 1, 2015© 2015 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved R443 moment to moment. This, in turn, led me to studies of ‘scene analysis’(how we parse the acoustic signals reaching the ears into distinct auditory events corresponding to different acoustic sources) and selective auditory attention (how we focus on one sound source and perceptually filter out competing sources). About five years ago, we noticed that ordinary listeners show great variation in how well they can focus selective auditory attention, especially in realistic, reverberant settings. These differences correlate with differences in the strength of neurophysiological responses in the brainstem and are likely a reflection of ‘hidden hearing loss’, a loss of auditory nerve fibres in listeners who have clinically normal hearing thresholds. It is a lot of fun, quite honestly, because we meandered into this topic just as interest in it started exploding. The field is undergoing a transformation with the realization that such supra-threshold hearing loss is likely very common, and may underlie communication problems that have seemed mysterious before now.