system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Why when someone's not listening to a conversation and their name is used, they can usually remember the two or three words that came before?
gpt
Every sound reaches your ear, whether you are aware of it or not. All of it is also processed in a way such that if you hear something of interest (e.g. Your name, a loud noise, your favourite game etc.), your attention shifts there. You suddenly become aware that the background noise are spoken words and actively pay attention and listen. Additionally, our brain kind of keeps a log of the last couple of seconds. This is important for stuff like predicting where someone walks, to understand a full sentence etc.

Now, since everything reaches our ears and is processed, and our brain basically keeps a log of the last couple seconds of information it got, when your attention shifts this log belonging to the conversation becomes active and the sound is identified as speech. The speech is then turned to single words and recognised. So you can hear a few words before the trigger that drew your attention.

  


This turned out more like a ELI10-15..