A team of Japanese, German, and Canadian researchers recently found out that our left ear is the one responsible for picking up desired sounds whenever confronted with a cacophony of competing noises.

This fits well with the already accepted fact that speech signals are processed in the left hemisphere of our brain. Despite that, however, scientists are quite unaware as to how we are able to keep up a conversation, for example, in the middle of a loud party or gathering.

Japan's National Institute for Physiological Sciences researcher Ryusuke Kakigi explained:

In daily life, we are always exposed to several noises at the same time and we have to pick up important signals, for example, speech sounds, from the background noises. We found that the left hemisphere is generally dominant for auditory processing in noisy environments.

Test sounds were played either to the left or to the right ear, while the competing noise was presented either to the same or to the opposite ear. By monitoring the brain's response to these different sound combinations, the team observed that the left hemisphere was the site of most neural activity associated with processing sounds in a noisy environment.