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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Classic conditioning. Like Pavlov’s dog gets fucking happy about hearing his feeding time bell, you subconsciously react to the sound of your name.
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)
This answer is probably not quite right, but I remember learning the answer to this in a psychology class I took. It is something to do with the way perception works – and the idea that whilst you technically perceive quite a lot of what goes on around you, there are multiple stages to perception. Basically, your brain will filter out anything it doesn’t think is important, so you won’t consciously realise you heard/saw/perceived it. If something your brain recognises as important comes up, it will allow it to ‘pass through’ the filter.
I’m not sure the reason why one’s name has particular significance, but I’m sure you can imagine why. If we hear our name it means that something is happening that potentially involves us, therefore our brain flags that as important to our overall functioning and survival.
Your brain is used, since it’s barely formed, to hearing your name and react to it. For at least 10 years, you needed to react to it’s stimulis. So obviously, hearing it is immediately recognised.
And when you hear your name, it can’t be a background sound that you don’t need to hear and can ignore. You need to react
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