At least for me, my brain distinguishes between the two situations. If two people are sitting next to each talking I have the ability to easily tune them out.

At least for me, my brain distinguishes between the two situations. If two people are sitting next to each talking I have the ability to easily tune them out. If one person is talking to a phone I can't. There's a study about it here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0058579 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... "one-sided conversations still impacted participants’ self-reported distractibility and memory, thus showing people are more attentive to cell phone conversations than two-sided conversations"