Is listening to podcasts good in your mind?

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Probably the most embarrassing factor occurred to me lately. It was twilight, and I used to be strolling my canine across the quiet Brooklyn neighborhood the place I’ve been dwelling 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 had been chirping.

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

This occurred for a motive. 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 technique to distract myself on lengthy subway rides turned a compulsion on lengthy walks throughout the pandemic. The following 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 had been stuffed with different individuals’s voices, and I felt like I couldn’t assume my very own ideas, even once I sat in silence. So I made a decision to give up podcasts for a month.

It’s exceptional what quitting one thing you get pleasure from 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 stored my thoughts occupied always, the absence of them created house for me to deal with one factor. My consideration span improved. I learn a few books. I smiled at my neighbors. I seen the crickets.

You could possibly 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 for those who determine to cease consuming for Dry January and really feel more healthy the very subsequent day. However suspecting there was extra occurring 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 practice of thought, and processes like notion, which helps us filter info to grasp the world round us, in addition to government operate, which refers to your potential to plan and to focus. Certainly, by turning off one relentless stream of stimulus, I used to be releasing up bandwidth in my mind. By not listening to different individuals’s tales, I might higher narrate my very own.

The human mind is incapable of multitasking. Any time you assume you’re multitasking, you’re truly switching duties quickly, and that comes at a cognitive value. Silence prompts the mind’s “default mode” — and that’s good. Quiet time makes house for self-reflection, planning, and daydreaming. Easy sensory experiences, like strolling outdoors with out headphones, restore cognitive sources much better than utilizing podcasts as background throughout breaks. 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 inconceivable. The human mind works like an analog laptop, processing packets of knowledge one by one, and our minds are very restricted in bandwidth, in accordance with Earl Miller , a professor of neuroscience at MIT.

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

Thanks largely to smartphones, we’ve change into a society of meandering multitaskers. With screens continually 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 units are designed to carry as a lot of our consideration for so long as attainable. Podcasts invite you to hearken to the following episode. Instagram impels you to maintain you scrolling. TikTok desires you to maintain watching.

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

It might be useful accountable 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 lot 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 school within the early 2000s and bought my first iPod, the gadget 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 might truly assist me focus — however provided that it was acquainted and normally lyric-free. Then got here life with an iPhone in New York, using the subway with AirPods, and an itch to eat increasingly info in my free time.

It seems silence is absolutely good for you.

It wasn’t simply me, both. Between 2015 and 2025, the period of time People spent listening to podcasts increased by 355 percent . A few quarter of these listeners spend more than 10 hours a week with their podcasts. Writing in New York Journal a number of years in the past, journalist Sirena Bergman admitted to spending 35 hours a week listening to podcasts and puzzled 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 absolutely 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 different styles of music . A lot to his shock, his topics had been most relaxed — their blood stress dropped, their coronary heart fee slowed — throughout the random two minutes of silence between the songs. Ten years later, neurobiologist Imke Kirste uncovered totally different teams of mice to sure sounds, every part 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 those new cells turned into functioning neurons solely within the mice uncovered to silence. In different phrases, an absence of enter truly made their brains develop.

Silence additionally permits your mind to create an inside narrative. Neuroscientist Marcus Raichle and a workforce of Washington College researchers called the baseline state of an unstimulated brain the “default mode” — and it’s truly fairly energetic even when at relaxation. Self-reflection happens 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 mild up in default mode additionally deactivate when your brain is doing other things . While you’re listening to a podcast, for instance, it’s harder in your thoughts to wander. As Alexander Huth , a neuroscientist on the College of California Berkeley, defined to me, the exterior narrative takes over your inside narrative.

Podcasts particularly make it exhausting to assume your individual ideas, since you’re specializing in another person’s story. Huth and his colleagues used an MRI machine to record people’s brain activity while they listened to shows , like “The Moth Radio Hour.” This allowed them to make a map of individuals’s sensory, emotional, and reminiscence networks. Notably, Huth instructed me, “all of the default mode community areas monitor the content material of a narrative,” whether or not you’re listening to it in a podcast or round a campfire.

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

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

Self-reflection, by the way in which, is tremendous essential. It improves every part from your performance at work to your resilience to stress . Constructive considering when your mind is in default mode can even just make you feel 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 house between — my thoughts wandered, I assumed in regards to the day, I made plans — did have a extra subtle scientific rationalization. With my mind left in default mode longer, my capability for self-reflection rebounded.

If I’m being trustworthy, I bought bored, too. This was 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, had 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 had 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 family shaped the banking system of the Middle Ages or why the swing dancing craze of the 1990s fizzled out so fast . However I'd additionally discover myself barely distracted and needing to rewind the episode to relisten to one thing I missed.

The issue with doing two issues directly is that you simply sometimes can’t.

Once more, the issue with doing two issues directly is that you simply sometimes can’t. Not all duties are created equal, after all. Studying medieval historical past is cognitively demanding, partially, as a result of your mind is taking in loads of new info. Washing dishes isn't, because you’ve executed it so many instances the duty has change into computerized.

“These computerized behaviors don't depend on the identical neural community that's essential for consideration and cognitive management,” stated 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.”

For this 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 exhausting to observe a podcast, however paying shut consideration to episode is distracting sufficient that I would miss a flip, or worse.

Human evolution is accountable right here. Our brains advanced on a savannah, in an information-poor surroundings 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 new info, like rustling bushes, since that would point out a risk, like a tiger able to assault.

“Again when our brains first advanced, that was fantastic,” stated Miller. “However now, on this new world we’re dwelling in with all these screens and sources of knowledge accessible to us, it’s an ideal storm of cognitive confusion that our brains haven't advanced to take care of.”

That stated, there may be proof that pairing sure duties can enhance consideration and focus. For a 2005 research, researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam showed subjects two targets on a screen , a cut up second aside. Most individuals couldn’t spot the second resulting from a so-called attentional blink. The researchers theorized that folks had been overinvesting their consideration within the job. Once they performed some background music, nonetheless, they bought higher at recognizing the second goal. The slight distraction supplied by music put them in a subtle state of consideration, barely bettering their focus.

This may 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 interact the components 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 exhausting to cease multitasking within the twenty first century. Even throughout my podcast experiment, which ended with me being slightly obsessive about quiet time, I’d discover myself reaching for my cellphone throughout conversations or chatting in Slack whereas ending up a draft. However figuring out what I now learn 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 contemporary eyes. However to construct on that, whenever you take a break, don’t swap out of your laptop computer to TikTok. Go outdoors and take a look at a tree.

Listening to podcasts, enjoyable as it might appear, depletes your cognitive sources.

“The most effective issues that folks can do is to take a break, go outdoors in nature,” stated Gloria Mark , professor of informatics on the College of California Irvine and writer of Attention Span . “Simply being away from media and utilizing our full vary of senses may help restore our cognitive sources.”

Your mind runs on cognitive sources, and specializing in duties drains these sources because the day goes on. Doing a tough math drawback prices you cognitive sources. So does having an intense dialogue. Listening to podcasts, enjoyable as it might appear, depletes your cognitive sources, too. When you’re making an attempt to do two issues directly, you’re job switching, forcing your mind to retrieve particular info for every job, and sporting your self out. Consequently, it takes longer to do every job, and also you’ll in all probability make extra errors. You’ll even be extra pressured alongside the way in which.

Listening to podcasts whereas doing no less than one different factor was once my break time. I wouldn’t essentially care what the podcast was about or soak up the knowledge therein. I’d simply let the media wash over me like a river over stones.

This was, on reflection, a awful technique to unwind. Nowadays, I put on my headphones much less. I truly take a look at my cellphone much less, if solely as a result of I’m not continually pulling up a contemporary podcast. Once I stroll my canine, I stroll to the park and hearken to the swaying grass and hearken to the timber. The one factor sweeter than the sound of crickets there may be the occasional sigh of silence.