The cocktail party effect is an amazing feature of our auditory system. We can hang out at loud places, like cocktail parties, where a lot of people talk very loud and still very successfully filter out unwanted noise while talking with a person we are interested in. However, if someone across the room mentions our name, we hear it.
The cocktail party effect is the built in spam filter of the human auditory system just the other way round. Instead of filtering out all the messages that contain certain unwanted keywords such as “V.II @ 6Ra”, “P3N15 Extension” or “Paris Hilton” it lets pass everything that include wanted keywords.
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