In a noisy restaurant, music plays, glasses clink, and servers discuss the specials. All of these sounds hit the eardrum at the same time, yet conversation continues easily because of a process that allows humans to isolate, identify, and prioritize overlapping sounds.
Sometimes called the cocktail party effect, the ability to tune out a noisy room to focus on one conversation, or auditory stream segregation, part of the larger field of auditory scene analysis, is apparently universal to all animals and serves as a critical survival mechanism.
