Is selective hearing a real medical condition?

When we utter the words ‘selective hearing’, it is often in jest, as we tend to associate the concept with someone ignoring us because we are saying something they don’t particularly want to hear. However, many of us practise selective hearing on a daily basis. When we have a conversation with someone in a loud environment, the ability to fi lter out other voices and sounds around us is selective hearing in practice. Scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, discovered the auditory cortex in the brain enables us to do this, as it cleverly copes with conflicting sounds.

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