While it’s still a mystery how the brain hones into specific sounds in noisy environments, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a hearing aid algorithm that replicates how we processes sound. Neuroscientist Frederic Theunissen describes what he calls the “auditory spotlight”.

"If you're listening to the orchestra with your eyes closed, you can listen to the violin, and then you decide, "Oh, I'm going to listen to the flute," and then, "I'm going to, you know, listen to the cello" and so forth, and you can basically jump from one instrument to the other one so that you can just see your auditory spotlight going from one instrument to the other one. And when you focus on one of them, you don’t hear the other ones anymore."

To replicate this process, Thuenissen’s team studied songbird brain imagery and identified the exact neurons that tune into auditory signals.

"The idea is let’s make a set of these detectors, which are kind of like auditory neurons, that are specialized for different features, and then let’s see if we can use the response of these detectors to amplify the signal at the right time."