Your brain can pick your own name out of a room full of noise

In 1953 Colin Cherry played two different spoken messages into each ear at once and asked listeners to repeat back just one. They followed the chosen message easily and were almost deaf to the other — unless it said their own name, which jumped out instantly. The finding launched decades of research into how attention filters sound.

— E. Colin Cherry, Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears — Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1953