The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of the brain's ability to focus one's auditory attention (an effect of selective attention in the brain) on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room.[1][2][3] Listeners have the ability to both segregate different stimuli into different streams, and subsequently decide which streams are most pertinent to them.[4] Thus, it has been proposed that one's sensory memory subconsciously parses all stimuli and identifies discrete pieces of information by classifying them by salience.[5] This effect is what allows most people to "tune into" a single voice and "tune out" all others.