It’s called the cocktail-party effect: you’re engrossed in conversation in the midst of a noisy room when suddenly your attention is snagged by someone on the other side of the crowd mentioning your name. How does that happen? It’s thanks to the fact you are deeply in love with your moniker.

Your brain loves your name so much it even considers the letters that appear in it to be more attractive than other ones, say psychologists at Western Ontario University. We even prefer brand names with these golden letters, says the study in the European Journal of Social Psychology. The scientists called the effect, simply, narcissism.

You can even hear your name in a coma. Doctors at the Neurological Hospital in Lyon, France, reported in the journal Brain Research this year how they wired up 15 people in a deep sleep and found that hearing our name, particularly from a familiar voice, stimulates significant electrical activity in the cortex.

Our love of our name even defeats “attentional blink”. This is temporary amnesia caused by the fact that human beings are not good at looking out for two things at once. So if you ask the viewer to watch for a “target” number in a row of figures going past on a screen, they’ll spot it, but fail to notice what comes afterwards. The amnesiac effect works with words too — unless you put someone’s name after their target word. They’ll spot it every time, report Calgary University scientists in the Journal of Experimental Psychology and Human Perceptual Performance.

And we are even prepared to like someone more if they have the same first name. In a study published in the Psychological Record in July 2003, 50 students at the University of Bretagne-Sud in France were sent an e-mail from a fictional fellow student asking them to fill out a survey on dietary habits. In half of the cases, the sender’s forename was the same as the recipient’s. The researcher, Nicolas Gueguen, found that people were about 30 per cent more likely to reply if the sender had the same name.

You can harness this knowledge to influence people by using their name a lot. A study of students’ compliance found that when tutors called them by name, they were more likely to return projects on time. The psychologists speculate in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality that there are two reasons: people feel complimented by being remembered — and are also more likely to fear retribution if they foul up.

Hence police officers’ habit of addressing people by their first names a lot. It sounds patronising, but it works.

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