The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of the brain's ability to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, such as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. Listeners have the ability to both segregate different stimuli into different streams, and subsequently decide which streams are most pertinent to them. It has been proposed that one's sensory memory subconsciously parses all stimuli and identifies discrete pieces of information by classifying them by salience. This effect is what allows most people to "tune into" a single voice and "tune out" all others. This phenomenon is often described in terms of "selective attention" or "selective hearing". It may also describe a similar phenomenon that occurs when one may immediately detect words of importance originating from unattended stimuli, for instance hearing one's name among a wide range of auditory input. An inability to segregate stimuli in this way is sometimes referred to as the cocktail party problem or cocktail party deafness. Neurological basis (and binaural processing) Auditory attention in regards to the cocktail party effect primarily occurs in the left hemisphere of the superior temporal gyrus, a non-primary region of auditory cortex; a fronto-parietal network involving the inferior frontal gyrus, superior parietal sulcus, and intraparietal sulcus also accounts for the acts of attention-shifting, speech processing, and attention control. Both the target stream (the more important information being attended to) and competing/interfering streams are processed in the same pathway within the left hemisphere, but fMRI scans show that target streams are treated with more attention than competing streams. Furthermore, we see that activity in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) toward the target stream is decreased/interfered with when competing stimuli streams (that typically hold significant value) arise. The "cocktail party effect" - the ability to detect significant stimuli in multitalker situations - has also been labeled the "cocktail party problem" because our ability to selectively attend simultaneously interferes with the effectiveness of attention at a neurological level. The cocktail party effect works best as a binaural effect, which requires hearing with both ears. People with only one functioning ear seem much more distracted by interfering noise than people with two typical ears. The benefit of using two ears may be partially related to the localization of sound sources. The auditory system is able to localize at least two sound sources