 The personal-level consequences of this early selection theory are that we can recognize what things are and what they mean only if we are paying attention to them, but can detect the simple physical properties of things even when paying no attention to them. The theory can be thought of as a communication-theoretic rendering of two intuitive ideas, which Broadbent’s own research had put on an empirically sound footing. The first is that one has no immediate control over one’s awareness of simple features of one’s environment, such as the fact that there are people talking in the next room. Whatever one is paying attention to, one will continue to hear some chatter to be going on, if any is. The second idea is that the details of things—such as the semantic content of that chatter—can be detected only for the one or two things to which one is paying attention: If one wants to know what the chatter is about, one has to listen, and this involves disengaging one’s attention from other things that might be happening.