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 dwelling for a few 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 means of 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 turned a compulsion on lengthy walks in the course of the pandemic. The subsequent factor I knew I’d be catching up on The Every 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 crammed with different individuals’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 stored 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 seen 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 when you resolve to cease ingesting 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 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 data to know 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 liberating up bandwidth in my mind. By not listening to different individuals’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 the rest quantities to multitasking, which is unattainable. The human mind works like an analog laptop, processing packets of data separately, and our minds are very restricted in bandwidth, in keeping with Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT.

“While you assume you’re multitasking, what you’re doing is process switching,” Miller informed me. “Your mind is quickly switching from one process 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 change 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 few 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 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 dwelling in the true world in a diminished capability. Our brains didn’t evolve to dwell like this.

It could be useful 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 in control 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 often lyric-free. Then got here life with an iPhone in New York, using the subway with AirPods, and an itch to devour 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 increased by 355 percent. A couple of quarter of these listeners spend more than 10 hours a week with their podcasts. Writing in New York Journal just a few 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 lots 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 different styles of music. A lot to his shock, his topics had been most relaxed — their blood stress dropped, their coronary heart price 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, every little thing 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 inner narrative. Neuroscientist Marcus Raichle and a group 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 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 exhausting to assume your personal 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 informed 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 taking place, but it surely’s not your internally generated one,” Huth stated. “You’re following any individual else’s working practice of thought.”

You’ll be able to swap forwards and backwards between the podcast and your inner 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 vital. It improves every little thing from your performance at work to your resilience to stress. Constructive considering when your mind is in default mode may 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 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 area between — my thoughts wandered, I assumed concerning 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 obtained 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 spotted, 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.

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 lots of new data. Washing dishes isn’t, because you’ve performed it so many instances the duty has change into computerized.

“These computerized behaviors don’t depend on the identical neural community that’s vital for consideration and cognitive management,” stated 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 outdated 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 an excellent episode is distracting sufficient that I’d miss a flip, or worse.

Human evolution is responsible right here. Our brains developed on a savannah, in an information-poor setting 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 data, like rustling bushes, since that might point out a menace, like a tiger able to assault.

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

That stated, there may be proof that pairing sure duties can enhance consideration and focus. For a 2005 examine, researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam showed subjects two targets on a screen, a break 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 process. After they performed some background music, nevertheless, 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 fairly obsessive about quiet time, I’d discover myself reaching for my cellphone throughout conversations or chatting in Slack whereas ending up a draft. However realizing 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, whenever you take a break, don’t swap out of your laptop computer to TikTok. Go outdoors and take a look at a tree.

“Probably the greatest 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 San Diego and creator of Attention Span. “Simply being away from media and utilizing our full vary of senses can assist 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, stress-free as it might appear, depletes your cognitive assets, too. In case you’re making an attempt to do two issues without delay, you’re process switching, forcing your mind to retrieve particular data for every process, and carrying your self out. In consequence, it takes longer to do every process, and also you’ll most likely 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 take up 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 take a look at my cellphone much less, if solely as a result of I’m not always pulling up a recent 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 may be the occasional sigh of silence.