Is listening to podcasts good to your mind?

Essentially the most embarrassing factor occurred to me just lately. It was twilight, and I used to be strolling my canine across the quiet Brooklyn neighborhood the place I’ve been residing for a few yr. Then I heard a sound that I couldn’t place at first. I ended in my tracks after which realized: Crickets have been chirping.

It was my first time listening to crickets in my new neighborhood as a result of it was one of many first occasions I’d walked by it with out AirPods jammed into my ears.

This occurred for a cause. Earlier this yr, I had the sudden realization that I used to be listening to too many podcasts and had been for years. What began out as a solution to distract myself on lengthy subway rides grew to become a compulsion on lengthy walks in the course of the pandemic. The subsequent factor I knew I’d be catching up on The Each day whereas washing dishes or listening to 5 minutes of Radiolab as I took out the trash. Quickly, all of my quiet moments have been full of different individuals’s voices, and I felt like I couldn’t suppose my very own ideas, even once I sat in silence. So I made a decision to give up podcasts for a month.

It’s outstanding what quitting one thing you take pleasure in can do to your worldview. However quitting podcasts additionally did one thing to my mind. As days stretched into weeks, I began to acknowledge some order returning to my ideas. Whereas podcasts saved my thoughts occupied always, the absence of them created area for me to deal with one factor. My consideration span improved. I learn a few books. I smiled at my neighbors. I observed the crickets.

You possibly can chalk all this as much as a placebo impact. I made a decision to be extra current and so I used to be. It’s like in case you resolve to cease consuming for Dry January and really feel more healthy the very subsequent day. However suspecting there was extra happening upstairs, I reached out to psychologists, neuroscientists, and different researchers who research cognition. They defined the science behind the mind’s default mode community, which controls your prepare of thought, and processes like notion, which helps us filter data to grasp the world round us, in addition to govt operate, which refers to your means to plan and to focus. Certainly, by turning off one relentless stream of stimulus, I used to be liberating up bandwidth in my mind. By not listening to different individuals’s tales, I may higher narrate my very own.

That conclusion sounds a bit apparent. What was much less apparent to me was that listening to podcasts whereas doing actually the rest quantities to multitasking, which is unattainable. The human mind works like an analog pc, processing packets of data one after the other, and our minds are very restricted in bandwidth, in accordance with Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT.

“While you suppose you’re multitasking, what you’re doing is activity switching,” Miller advised me. “Your mind is quickly switching from one activity to a different on a regular basis, and also you don’t discover it. Nevertheless it comes at a cognitive value.”

Thanks largely to smartphones, we’ve turn into a society of meandering multitaskers. With screens continuously in our peripheral imaginative and prescient — or in my case, earbuds all the time in my head — we’re switching backwards and forwards between the actual and the digital world. In the meantime, a few of the hottest apps on these gadgets are designed to carry as a lot of our consideration for so long as doable. Podcasts invite you to take heed to the following episode. Instagram impels you to maintain you scrolling. TikTok desires you to maintain watching.

As we more and more break up our consideration, we find yourself residing in the actual world in a diminished capability. Our brains didn’t evolve to dwell like this.

It might be useful guilty smartphones for all my distractions, however the issue dates again to the ’90s when the Walkman dominated my youth. My household ran a restaurant in Tennessee, the place I used to be accountable for washing dishes, a whole bunch of them, a number of nights every week. In pursuit of just a bit little bit of distraction, I spent these hours listening to mixtapes.

Then I went to varsity within the early 2000s and received my first iPod, the machine for which podcasts are named. With 10,000 songs in my pocket, I’d stroll round campus hooked up to my earbuds. It was round this time that I discovered how music may really assist me focus — however provided that it was acquainted and often lyric-free. Then got here life with an iPhone in New York, using the subway with AirPods, and an itch to eat increasingly data in my free time.

It wasn’t simply me, both. Between 2015 and 2025, the period of time Individuals spent listening to podcasts elevated by 355 %. A couple of quarter of these listeners spend greater than 10 hours every week with their podcasts. Writing in New York Journal a couple of years in the past, journalist Sirena Bergman admitted to spending 35 hours every week listening to podcasts and questioned the identical factor as me: What’s all this content material doing to my mind?

Listening to a piece week’s price of podcasts deprives your mind of loads of silence. And it seems silence is basically good for you.

There’s a mountain of scientific proof for this. In 2005, medical researcher Luciano Bernardi studied the physiological results of listening to totally different kinds of music. A lot to his shock, his topics have been most relaxed — their blood stress dropped, their coronary heart charge slowed — in the course of the random two minutes of silence between the songs. Ten years later, neurobiologist Imke Kirste uncovered totally different teams of mice to sure sounds, all the things from Mozart to white noise to nothing in any respect, for 2 hours a day. Publicity to sound led to neurogenesis in all the mice, however these new cells became functioning neurons solely within the mice uncovered to silence. In different phrases, an absence of enter really made their brains develop.

Silence additionally permits your mind to create an inner narrative. Neuroscientist Marcus Raichle and a group of Washington College researchers known as the baseline state of an unstimulated mind the “default mode” — and it’s really fairly lively even when at relaxation. Self-reflection occurs when your mind’s on this default mode community. It’s then that we assemble our autobiographical narrative, and that we daydream.

The areas of the mind that gentle up in default mode additionally deactivate when your mind is doing different issues. While you’re listening to a podcast, for instance, it’s harder to your thoughts to wander. As Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist on the College of California Berkeley, defined to me, the exterior narrative takes over your inner narrative.

Podcasts particularly make it arduous to suppose your individual ideas, since you’re specializing in another person’s story. Huth and his colleagues used an MRI machine to document individuals’s mind exercise whereas they listened to exhibits, like “The Moth Radio Hour.” This allowed them to make a map of individuals’s sensory, emotional, and reminiscence networks. Notably, Huth advised me, “all of the default mode community areas observe the content material of a narrative,” whether or not you’re listening to it in a podcast or round a campfire.

“When someone is telling you a narrative you continue to have this working prepare of thought occurring, however it’s not your internally generated one,” Huth mentioned. “You’re following someone else’s working prepare of thought.”

You possibly can change backwards and forwards between the podcast and your inner dialogue. However task-switching comes with a cognitive value. As I’d observed on my distracted subway rides, your thoughts can’t wander far when it’s being pulled in one other route.

Self-reflection, by the best way, is tremendous vital. It improves all the things from your efficiency at work to your resilience to emphasize. Constructive pondering when your mind is in default mode may simply make you are feeling happier.

The crickets incident occurred within the second week of my experiment, and it didn’t take a neuroscience lesson for me to grasp why. As soon as I ended listening to podcasts, I began listening to the world. I heard birds singing, leaves rustling, and horns honking. What occurred within the area between — my thoughts wandered, I believed in regards to the day, I made plans — did have a extra refined scientific rationalization. With my mind left in default mode longer, my capability for self-reflection rebounded.

If I’m being trustworthy, I received bored, too. This was an excellent factor, for probably the most half. I did miss being distracted from chores, although. My subway rides felt longer, and driving appeared much less enjoyable. Podcasts, I noticed, have been how I stuffed the idle however barely annoying minutes of my days. It didn’t really feel like lacking out on a lot if I have been listening to a historical past podcast whereas washing dishes or folding laundry. Fairly the opposite: I used to be studying about how the Medici household formed the banking system of the Center Ages or why the swing dancing craze of the Nineteen Nineties fizzled out so quick. However I might additionally discover myself barely distracted and needing to rewind the episode to relisten to one thing I missed.

Once more, the issue with doing two issues directly is that you just usually can’t. Not all duties are created equal, in fact. Studying medieval historical past is cognitively demanding, partially, as a result of your mind is taking in loads of new data. Washing dishes just isn’t, because you’ve accomplished it so many occasions the duty has turn into computerized.

“These computerized behaviors don’t depend on the identical neural community that’s vital for consideration and cognitive management,” mentioned René Marois, a neuroscience professor at Vanderbilt. “However even throughout these computerized behaviors, one thing can occur that may require consideration and cognitive management and that’s when issues can go awry.”

This is the reason, when my experiment ended, I didn’t return to my outdated behavior of driving and listening to podcasts. Driving is computerized sufficient that it’s not arduous to comply with a podcast, however paying shut consideration to an excellent episode is distracting sufficient that I’d miss a flip, or worse.

Human evolution is guilty right here. Our brains developed on a savannah, in an information-poor setting the place there wasn’t quite a bit to concentrate to, defined Miller, the MIT professor. That’s why we now have mechanisms to focus intently on one factor at a time. On the identical time, we developed a thirst for brand spanking new data, like rustling bushes, since that might point out a risk, like a tiger able to assault.

“Again when our brains first developed, that was effective,” mentioned Miller. “However now, on this new world we’re residing in with all these screens and sources of data obtainable to us, it’s an ideal storm of cognitive confusion that our brains haven’t developed to cope with.”

That mentioned, there’s proof that pairing sure duties can enhance consideration and focus. For a 2005 research, researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam confirmed topics two targets on a display screen, a break up second aside. Most individuals couldn’t spot the second resulting from a so-called attentional blink. The researchers theorized that individuals have been overinvesting their consideration within the activity. Once they performed some background music, nevertheless, they received higher at recognizing the second goal. The slight distraction provided by music put them in a subtle state of consideration, barely enhancing their focus.

This would possibly assist clarify why I can write whereas listening to minimal techno however to not folks music. The digital beats take the sting off, whereas the woodsy lyrics have interaction the elements of my mind that course of language. Or, if I’m again in my ancestral savannah, the grass rustling within the breeze is calming, whereas a shocking snarl is trigger for alarm.

It’s actually arduous to cease multitasking within the twenty first century. Even throughout my podcast experiment, which ended with me being somewhat obsessive about quiet time, I’d discover myself reaching for my telephone throughout conversations or chatting in Slack whereas ending up a draft. However figuring out what I now find out about how our brains work, I’ve a brand new reverence for break time.

That is outdated recommendation: When you end up caught on one thing, put it down and are available again later with recent eyes. However to construct on that, if you take a break, don’t change out of your laptop computer to TikTok. Go exterior and take a look at a tree.

“Probably the greatest issues that individuals can do is to take a break, go exterior in nature,” mentioned Gloria Mark, professor of informatics on the College of California San Diego and writer of Consideration Span. “Simply being away from media and utilizing our full vary of senses may help restore our cognitive assets.”

Your mind runs on cognitive assets, and specializing in duties drains these assets because the day goes on. Doing a tough math downside prices you cognitive assets. So does having an intense dialogue. Listening to podcasts, enjoyable as it might appear, depletes your cognitive assets, too. In case you’re attempting to do two issues directly, you’re activity switching, forcing your mind to retrieve particular data for every activity, and carrying your self out. Consequently, it takes longer to do every activity, and also you’ll most likely make extra errors. You’ll even be extra confused alongside the best way.

Listening to podcasts whereas doing at the least one different factor was my break time. I wouldn’t essentially care what the podcast was about or take in the knowledge therein. I’d simply let the media wash over me like a river over stones.

This was, looking back, a awful solution to unwind. As of late, I put on my headphones much less. I really take a look at my telephone much less, if solely as a result of I’m not continuously pulling up a recent podcast. Once I stroll my canine, I stroll to the park and take heed to the swaying grass and take heed to the timber. The one factor sweeter than the sound of crickets there’s the occasional sigh of silence.