It has always been an interesting topic to figure out how our brains not only receive but also process information amid the booming noise in parties. With the booze, the blinking lights, and the ridiculously loud music, it is a wonder how our brains keep up with conversations with too much to process.
In a study reported by BBC, researchers gave respondents snippets of distorted sounds. At first, they were unrecognizable and sounded like robots conversing with each other. None of the respondents understood what the conversation was about.
However, the respondents were given another set of snippets, but this time with intact and understandable sentences. As it turns out, after the respondents listened to the intact sentences, they also recognized the first recording as the same conversation, but only with much more noise.
The answer now in everyone's minds is clear. It is the ability of the brain to recognize patterns that allow us to process and understand spoken information despite the noise. We could usually associate the "patterned" sounds with familiar words in our head. According to ZME Science, this is how our brains function when out on parties.
A paper from Science News explained that the mammalian brain can usually distinguish signals from noise. It is a part of the brain known as the primary auditory cortex that could tune out noise and make out familiar signals and sound patterns from a conversation.
What is interesting is that this activity of the brain is how certain modern devices have been developed, such as hearing aids and Apple's Siri. This ability of the brain to "tune out" noise is used to cancel out unwanted sounds and refocus them for people who have difficulty with hearing. And this has also been reported how Siri recognizes a user's voice when out on a buzzing place.