The ability to allocate ears from the noise certain sounds - a "cocktail party effect"

Cocktail party effect is the ability to catch our ear, for example, in a crowded room of any one conversation. This term suggested Dr. Steven Colburn of Hearing Research Center at Boston University. If you enable audio recording party, where many people are talking at the same time, you can not catch a single conversation. But in fact, you are able to single out even one word of the many streams of speech. When recording obtained a sort of cacophony - another thing to our ears. In the cochlea sound is first separated in frequency. The delay between the signals from the right and left ear (inter aural phase shift) is one of the parameters of the acoustic signal, on which the person localizes sound sources in space. Brain cells actively react when they receive the signals substantially simultaneously. According to Dr. Colburn, many groups in the brain neurons that function as "coincidence detectors". Each of them focuses on the characteristic delay time and a certain frequency. When all neurons act together, they pass into the brain a wide range of time and frequency relationships.

Source: Stephen Juan, «The odd body»

via factroom.ru