Essentially 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 residing for a couple of 12 months. 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 by it with out AirPods jammed into my ears.
This occurred for a motive. Earlier this 12 months, 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 method to distract myself on lengthy subway rides grew to become a compulsion on lengthy walks through 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 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 stop podcasts for a month.
It’s exceptional 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 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 may 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 if you happen to resolve to cease ingesting 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 examine 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 know the world round us, in addition to government perform, which refers to your capacity 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 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 anything quantities to multitasking, which is unattainable. The human mind works like an analog pc, processing packets of knowledge separately, and our minds are very restricted in bandwidth, in keeping with Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT.
“If you assume you’re multitasking, what you’re doing is activity switching,” Miller instructed me. “Your mind is quickly switching from one activity 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 at all times in my head — we’re switching forwards and backwards between the true and the digital world. In the meantime, among the hottest apps on these gadgets are designed to carry as a lot of our consideration for so long as potential. 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 true world in a diminished capability. Our brains didn’t evolve to dwell like this.
It might be helpful responsible 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 answerable for washing dishes, lots of 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 obtained 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 might truly assist me focus — however provided that it was acquainted and often lyric-free. Then got here life with an iPhone in New York, driving the subway with AirPods, and an itch to devour an increasing number of info in my free time.
It seems silence is admittedly good for you.
It wasn’t simply me, both. Between 2015 and 2025, the period of time Individuals spent listening to podcasts elevated by 355 %. A few quarter of these listeners spend greater than 10 hours every week with their podcasts. Writing in New York Journal just a few 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 value of podcasts deprives your mind of quite a lot of silence. And it seems silence is admittedly 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 had been most relaxed — their blood strain dropped, their coronary heart charge slowed — through the random two minutes of silence between the songs. Ten years later, neurobiologist Imke Kirste uncovered totally different teams of mice to sure sounds, the whole lot from Mozart to white noise to nothing in any respect, for 2 hours a day. Publicity to sound led to neurogenesis in the entire mice, however these new cells changed 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 group of Washington College researchers referred to as the baseline state of an unstimulated mind the “default mode” — and it’s truly fairly energetic 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 mild up in default mode additionally deactivate when your mind is doing different issues. If you’re listening to a podcast, for instance, it’s tougher 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 inside narrative.
Podcasts particularly make it exhausting to assume your personal ideas, since you’re specializing in another person’s story. Huth and his colleagues used an MRI machine to report 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 instructed 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 operating practice of thought occurring, but it surely’s not your internally generated one,” Huth mentioned. “You’re following someone else’s operating practice of thought.”
You possibly can change forwards and backwards 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 route.
Self-reflection, by the way in which, is tremendous necessary. It improves the whole lot from your efficiency at work to your resilience to emphasize. Optimistic pondering when your mind is in default mode can even simply make you’re feeling happier.
The crickets incident occurred within the second week of my experiment, and it didn’t take a neuroscience lesson for me to know 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 concerning 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 sincere, I obtained bored, too. This was a very good 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 crammed 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 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.
The issue with doing two issues directly is that you simply usually can’t.
Once more, the issue with doing two issues directly is that you simply usually can’t. Not all duties are created equal, after all. Studying medieval historical past is cognitively demanding, partly, as a result of your mind is taking in quite a lot of new info. Washing dishes isn’t, because you’ve completed it so many instances the duty has change into computerized.
“These computerized behaviors don’t depend on the identical neural community that’s necessary for consideration and cognitive management,” mentioned René Marois, a neuroscience professor at Vanderbilt. “However even throughout these computerized behaviors, one thing can occur that can 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 previous behavior of driving and listening to podcasts. Driving is computerized sufficient that it’s not exhausting to comply with a podcast, however paying shut consideration to a very good episode is distracting sufficient that I would miss a flip, or worse.
Human evolution is responsible right here. Our brains developed on a savannah, in an information-poor surroundings the place there wasn’t loads 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 info, like rustling bushes, since that would point out a menace, like a tiger able to assault.
“Again when our brains first developed, that was tremendous,” mentioned Miller. “However now, on this new world we’re residing 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 developed to take care of.”
That mentioned, there’s proof that pairing sure duties can enhance consideration and focus. For a 2005 examine, researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam confirmed topics two targets on a display, a break up second aside. Most individuals couldn’t spot the second attributable to a so-called attentional blink. The researchers theorized that individuals had been overinvesting their consideration within the activity. After they performed some background music, nonetheless, they obtained higher at recognizing the second goal. The slight distraction provided by music put them in a subtle state of consideration, barely bettering 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 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 moderately 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 previous 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, if you take a break, don’t change out of your laptop computer to TikTok. Go outdoors and have a look at a tree.
Listening to podcasts, enjoyable as it could appear, depletes your cognitive sources.
“Probably the greatest issues that individuals can do is to take a break, go outdoors 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 will 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 downside prices you cognitive sources. So does having an intense dialogue. Listening to podcasts, enjoyable as it could appear, depletes your cognitive sources, too. If you happen to’re attempting to do two issues directly, you’re activity switching, forcing your mind to retrieve particular info for every activity, and carrying your self out. In consequence, it takes longer to do every activity, 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 at the very least one different factor was once 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 method to unwind. Today, I put on my headphones much less. I truly have a look at my cellphone much less, if solely as a result of I’m not continually pulling up a contemporary podcast. After 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.
