This story was initially revealed in The Spotlight, Vox’s member-exclusive journal. To get early entry to member-exclusive tales each month, be a part of the Vox Membership program at the moment.
Essentially the most embarrassing factor occurred to me not too long ago. 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 12 months. Then I heard a sound that I couldn’t place at first. I finished 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 via it with out AirPods jammed into my ears.
This occurred for a purpose. 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 throughout 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 folks’s voices, and I felt like I couldn’t assume my very own ideas, even after I sat in silence. So I made a decision to give up podcasts for a month.
It’s outstanding 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 saved my thoughts occupied always, the absence of them created area for me to concentrate on 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 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 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 info to grasp the world round us, in addition to govt perform, 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 folks’s tales, I might 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 anything quantities to multitasking, which is not possible. The human mind works like an analog pc, processing packets of data one by one, and our minds are very restricted in bandwidth, based on Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT.
“While you assume you’re multitasking, what you’re doing is job switching,” Miller advised 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 turn into a society of meandering multitaskers. With screens always in our peripheral imaginative and prescient — or in my case, earbuds all the time in my head — we’re switching forwards and backwards between the true and the digital world. In the meantime, a number of the hottest apps on these gadgets 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 true world in a diminished capability. Our brains didn’t evolve to reside like this.
It might be helpful 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 in command of washing dishes, a whole lot of them, a number of nights per 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 gadget for which podcasts are named. With 10,000 songs in my pocket, I’d stroll round campus connected to my earbuds. It was round this time that I realized 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 more 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 People spent listening to podcasts elevated by 355 %. A few quarter of these listeners spend greater than 10 hours per week with their podcasts. Writing in New York Journal just a few years in the past, journalist Sirena Bergman admitted to spending 35 hours per 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 numerous 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 have been most relaxed — their blood strain dropped, their coronary heart charge 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, 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 was 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 inner narrative. Neuroscientist Marcus Raichle and a workforce of Washington College researchers known 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. While you’re listening to a podcast, for instance, it’s tougher on 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 exhausting to assume your individual ideas, since you’re specializing in another person’s story. Huth and his colleagues used an MRI machine to report folks’s mind exercise whereas they listened to reveals, 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 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 prepare of thought occurring, however it’s not your internally generated one,” Huth mentioned. “You’re following any individual else’s working prepare of thought.”
You’ll be able to change forwards and backwards 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 path.
Self-reflection, by the way in which, is tremendous necessary. It improves the whole lot out of your efficiency at work to your resilience to emphasize. Optimistic pondering when your mind is in default mode can even 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 finished 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 assumed in regards to the day, I made plans — did have a extra subtle scientific clarification. 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 great 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 crammed 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.
The issue with doing two issues without delay is that you just usually can’t.
Once more, the issue with doing two issues without delay is that you just usually 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 numerous new info. Washing dishes will not be, because you’ve finished it so many occasions the duty has turn 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 may require consideration and cognitive management and that’s when issues can go awry.”
Because of this, 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 observe a podcast, however paying shut consideration to a great episode is distracting sufficient that I would miss a flip, or worse.
Human evolution is guilty right here. Our brains developed on a savannah, in an information-poor atmosphere 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 similar time, we developed a thirst for brand 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 high-quality,” mentioned Miller. “However now, on this new world we’re dwelling 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 take care of.”
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, a cut up second aside. Most individuals couldn’t spot the second attributable to a so-called attentional blink. The researchers theorized that folks have been overinvesting their consideration within the job. Once they performed some background music, nonetheless, they obtained 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 would possibly assist clarify why I can write whereas listening to minimal techno however to not people music. The digital beats take the sting off, whereas the woodsy lyrics interact 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 stunning 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 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 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, once you take a break, don’t change 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.
“Among the finest issues that folks can do is to take a break, go outdoors in nature,” mentioned Gloria Mark, professor of informatics on the College of California Irvine 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 might appear, depletes your cognitive sources, too. If you happen to’re attempting to do two issues without delay, 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 harassed alongside the way in which.
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 soak up the data therein. I’d simply let the media wash over me like a river over stones.
This was, looking back, a awful method to unwind. Nowadays, I put on my headphones much less. I truly take a look at my telephone much less, if solely as a result of I’m not always pulling up a contemporary podcast. After 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’s the occasional sigh of silence.
Correction, December 3, 5 pm ET: A earlier model of this publish misstated the college the place Gloria Mark works.
