You’ve been there: Trying to carry on a conversation in a room so noisy that the background chatter threatens to drown out the words you hear. Yet somehow your auditory system is able to home in on the message being conveyed by the person you’re talking with. The secret to rising above the noise—a dilemma known in the world of sound science as “the cocktail party problem”—turns out to lie in its ability to discern patterns in the background noise and selectively ignore such patterns, according to a new study published in Current Biology earlier this month.