The ability for the human ears to direction-find white noise is extremely similar to the way cell phones can decode spread-spectrum signals, especially when there's reflections (known as multi-path interference). e.g. WCDMA is spread-spectrum pseudo-random noise. When it reflects, the phone "hears" multiple copies of the signal at different time delays, which normally would massively damage the signal, but because WCDMA pseudo-random sequence has extremely low self-correlation but high correlation to the idealized "pn generator" sequence, the phone can locate and isolate all the simultaneous echos, and then combine them to make a stronger signal (called a "rake receiver"). in fact, in LTE, there's a thing called MIMO (multiple in / multiple out) which DEPENDS on multi-path interference to increase throughput / decrease power needs -- MIMO doesn't even work unless there's multi-path interference, which is counter-intuitive.