Why is it always that when you zone out or don’t pay attention you can’t hear anything, but as soon as someone says your name you hear it all clearly. Why is that?
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First, the very much non-ELI5 version: hearing your name (probably) triggers a [P300](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_(neuroscience)) response in your brain (or some other response that’s functionally similar).
Now for ELI5: the human brain *isn’t* nearly as powerful as we’d like to think. At any one time, it can only use a fraction of what your senses and memories are telling you to make decisions without overheating, so to save energy it uses a wide variety of different “cheats” one of which is your attention system.
One function of the attention system is to match up patterns in the last 4 seconds or so of what your ears heard and send an electric jolt through the rest of your brain if something potentially important happen, so the decision making parts can make decisions. Hearing your name is considered important, so while everything else will be ignored your name won’t.
Bonus fact: P300s also happen if an expected sound *doesn’t* occur, like a missing beat or wrong note in a piece of music or the bird behind you suddenly going silent because it spotted a lion. This is why hearing someone really bad at playing music can be so exhausting: it literally is.
Edit: full link if it doesn’t work: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_(neuroscience)
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