Does your brain run out of hearing capability when it’s overloaded or something?
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Are you talking about if the earbud is playing music, or just placed there?
If playing music, it should be obvious that it would be harder to hear someone over music playing.
If you just there, you are still blocking 1/2 of how you normally hear, so again it should make sense that it isn’t as easy. Your 2 ears work together to figure out where a sound is coming from for instance (can still do with 1 ear, just not as accurate and only on that side).
One of the ways we pick out sounds in noisy environments is by working out where different sounds are coming from and tuning into the direction we want to listen to (roughly speaking), called *spatial release from masking*. If you’ve only got one ear open, it’s a lot harder to work out the direction of sounds, meaning it’s harder to ignore background sounds and therefore harder to listen to the “signal”.
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