How are we able to focus on a particular person’s words and almost “drown out” other people around us?
In: Biology
Hearing scientist here.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans are ridiculously good at working out where sounds come from. We’re not totally sure why were so good at it, but we’re very good at it.
This allows us to do something called spatial release from masking. Basically, if we can work out where two different sounds are coming from, we can choose which we want to focus on.
How we work out where sounds come from is something [that comes up fairly often](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ldzj17/ELI5%3A_In_8D_audio%2C_how_is_the_audio_able_to_sound_like_it%27s_behind_or_in_front_of_you_even_though_there_are_only_left_or_right_outputs%3F/gm8vmzd/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3). But if you have two microphones, for example, you can do some clever maths to add the two signals together and focus on different regions of space. This is basically what our ears do all the time.
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