The most embarrassing thing happened to me recently. It was twilight, and I was walking my dog around the quiet Brooklyn neighborhood where I’ve been living for about a year. Then I heard a sound that I couldn’t place at first. I stopped in my tracks and then realized: Crickets were chirping.
It was my first time hearing crickets in my new neighborhood because it was one of the first times I’d walked through it without AirPods jammed into my ears.
This happened for a reason. Earlier this year, I had the sudden realization that I was listening to too many podcasts and had been for years. What started out as a way to distract myself on long subway rides became a compulsion on long walks during the pandemic. The next thing I knew I’d be catching up on The Daily while washing dishes or listening to five minutes of Radiolab as I took out the trash. Soon, all of my quiet moments were filled with other people’s voices, and I felt like I couldn’t think my own thoughts, even when I sat in silence. So I decided to quit podcasts for a month.
It’s remarkable what quitting something you enjoy can do to your worldview. But quitting podcasts also did something to my brain. As days stretched into weeks, I started to recognize some order returning to my thoughts. Whereas podcasts kept my mind occupied at all times, the absence of them created space for me to focus on one thing. My attention span improved. I read a couple of books. I smiled at my neighbors. I noticed the crickets.
You could chalk all this up to a placebo effect. I decided to be more present and so I was. It’s like if you decide to stop drinking for Dry January and feel healthier the very next day. But suspecting there was more going on upstairs, I reached out to psychologists, neuroscientists, and other researchers who study cognition. They explained the science behind the brain’s default mode network, which controls your train of thought, and processes like perception, which helps us filter information to understand the world around us, as well as executive function, which refers to your ability to plan and to focus. Indeed, by turning off one relentless stream of stimulus, I was freeing up bandwidth in my brain. By not listening to other people’s stories, I could better narrate my own.
Key takeaways
- The human brain is incapable of multitasking. Any time you think you’re multitasking, you’re actually switching tasks rapidly, and that comes at a cognitive cost.
- Silence activates the brain’s “default mode” — and that’s good. Quiet time makes space for self-reflection, planning, and daydreaming.
- Simple sensory experiences, like walking outside without headphones, restore cognitive resources far better than using podcasts as background during breaks.
That conclusion sounds a bit obvious. What was less obvious to me was that listening to podcasts while doing literally anything else amounts to multitasking, which is impossible. The human brain works like an analog computer, processing packets of information one at a time, and our minds are very limited in bandwidth, according to Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT.
“When you think you’re multitasking, what you’re doing is task switching,” Miller told me. “Your brain is rapidly switching from one task to another all the time, and you don’t notice it. But it comes at a cognitive cost.”
Thanks largely to smartphones, we’ve become a society of meandering multitaskers. With screens constantly in our peripheral vision — or in my case, earbuds always in my head — we’re switching back and forth between the real and the virtual world. Meanwhile, some of the most popular apps on those devices are designed to hold as much of our attention for as long as possible. Podcasts invite you to listen to the next episode. Instagram impels you to keep you scrolling. TikTok wants you to keep watching.
As we increasingly split our attention, we end up living in the real world in a diminished capacity. Our brains didn’t evolve to live like this.
Losing track of silence
It would be handy to blame smartphones for all my distractions, but the problem dates back to the ’90s when the Walkman ruled my youth. My family ran a restaurant in Tennessee, where I was in charge of washing dishes, hundreds of them, several nights a week. In pursuit of just a little bit of distraction, I spent those hours listening to mixtapes.
Then I went to college in the early 2000s and got my first iPod, the device for which podcasts are named. With 10,000 songs in my pocket, I’d walk around campus attached to my earbuds. It was around this time that I learned how music could actually help me focus — but only if it was familiar and usually lyric-free. Then came life with an iPhone in New York, riding the subway with AirPods, and an itch to consume more and more information in my free time.
It turns out silence is really good for you.
It wasn’t just me, either. Between 2015 and 2025, the amount of time Americans spent listening to podcasts increased by 355 percent. About a quarter of those listeners spend more than 10 hours a week with their podcasts. Writing in New York Magazine a few years ago, journalist Sirena Bergman admitted to spending 35 hours a week listening to podcasts and wondered the same thing as me: What is all this content doing to my brain?
Listening to a work week’s worth of podcasts deprives your brain of a lot of silence. And it turns out silence is really good for you.
There’s a mountain of scientific evidence for this. In 2005, medical researcher Luciano Bernardi studied the physiological effects of listening to different styles of music. Much to his surprise, his subjects were most relaxed — their blood pressure dropped, their heart rate slowed — during the random two minutes of silence between the songs. Ten years later, neurobiologist Imke Kirste exposed different groups of mice to certain sounds, everything from Mozart to white noise to nothing at all, for two hours a day. Exposure to sound led to neurogenesis in all of the mice, but those new cells turned into functioning neurons only in the mice exposed to silence. In other words, an absence of input actually made their brains grow.
Silence also allows your brain to create an internal narrative. Neuroscientist Marcus Raichle and a team of Washington University researchers called the baseline state of an unstimulated brain the “default mode” — and it’s actually quite active even when at rest. Self-reflection happens when your brain’s in this default mode network. It’s then that we construct our autobiographical narrative, and that we daydream.
The regions of the brain that light up in default mode also deactivate when your brain is doing other things. When you’re listening to a podcast, for example, it’s more difficult for your mind to wander. As Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of California Berkeley, explained to me, the external narrative takes over your internal narrative.
Podcasts specifically make it hard to think your own thoughts, because you’re focusing on someone else’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 people’s sensory, emotional, and memory networks. Notably, Huth told me, “all the default mode network areas track the content of a story,” whether you’re listening to it in a podcast or around a campfire.
“When somebody is telling you a story you still have this running train of thought happening, but it’s not your internally generated one,” Huth said. “You’re following somebody else’s running train of thought.”
You can switch back and forth between the podcast and your internal dialogue. But task-switching comes with a cognitive cost. As I’d noticed on my distracted subway rides, your mind can’t wander far when it’s being pulled in another direction.
Self-reflection, by the way, is super important. It improves everything from your performance at work to your resilience to stress. Positive thinking when your brain is in default mode can also just make you feel happier.
The multitasking dilemma
The crickets incident happened in the second week of my experiment, and it didn’t take a neuroscience lesson for me to understand why. Once I stopped listening to podcasts, I started listening to the world. I heard birds singing, leaves rustling, and horns honking. What happened in the space between — my mind wandered, I thought about the day, I made plans — did have a more sophisticated scientific explanation. With my brain left in default mode longer, my capacity for self-reflection rebounded.
If I’m being honest, I got bored, too. This was a good thing, for the most part. I did miss being distracted from chores, though. My subway rides felt longer, and driving seemed less fun. Podcasts, I realized, were how I filled the idle but slightly annoying minutes of my days. It didn’t feel like missing out on much if I were listening to a history podcast while washing dishes or folding laundry. Quite the contrary: I was learning 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. But I would also find myself slightly distracted and needing to rewind the episode to relisten to something I missed.
The problem with doing two things at once is that you typically can’t.
Again, the problem with doing two things at once is that you typically can’t. Not all tasks are created equal, of course. Learning medieval history is cognitively demanding, in part, because your brain is taking in a lot of new information. Washing dishes is not, since you’ve done it so many times the task has become automatic.
“These automatic behaviors do not rely on the same neural network that is important for attention and cognitive control,” said René Marois, a neuroscience professor at Vanderbilt. “But even during these automatic behaviors, something can happen that will require attention and cognitive control and that’s when things can go awry.”
This is why, when my experiment ended, I did not return to my old habit of driving and listening to podcasts. Driving is automatic enough that it’s not hard to follow a podcast, but paying close attention to a good episode is distracting enough that I might miss a turn, or worse.
Human evolution is to blame here. Our brains evolved on a savannah, in an information-poor environment where there wasn’t a lot to pay attention to, explained Miller, the MIT professor. That’s why we now have mechanisms to focus intently on one thing at a time. At the same time, we developed a thirst for new information, like rustling bushes, since that could indicate a threat, like a tiger ready to attack.
“Back when our brains first evolved, that was fine,” said Miller. “But now, in this new world we’re living in with all these screens and sources of information available to us, it’s a perfect storm of cognitive confusion that our brains have not evolved to deal with.”
That said, there is evidence that pairing certain tasks can improve attention and focus. For a 2005 study, researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam showed subjects two targets on a screen, a split second apart. Most people couldn’t spot the second due to a so-called attentional blink. The researchers theorized that people were overinvesting their attention in the task. When they played some background music, however, they got better at spotting the second target. The slight distraction offered by music put them in a diffused state of attention, slightly improving their focus.
This might help explain why I can write while listening to minimal techno but not to folk music. The electronic beats take the edge off, while the woodsy lyrics engage the parts of my brain that process language. Or, if I’m back in my ancestral savannah, the grass rustling in the breeze is calming, while a surprising snarl is cause for alarm.
Listening with intent
It’s really hard to stop multitasking in the 21st century. Even during my podcast experiment, which ended with me being rather obsessed with quiet time, I’d find myself reaching for my phone during conversations or chatting in Slack while finishing up a draft. But knowing what I now know about how our brains work, I have a new reverence for break time.
This is old advice: When you find yourself stuck on something, put it down and come back later with fresh eyes. But to build on that, when you take a break, don’t switch from your laptop to TikTok. Go outside and look at a tree.
Listening to podcasts, relaxing as it may seem, depletes your cognitive resources.
“One of the best things that people can do is to take a break, go outside in nature,” said Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California San Diego and author of Attention Span. “Just being away from media and using our full range of senses can help restore our cognitive resources.”
Your brain runs on cognitive resources, and focusing on tasks drains those resources as the day goes on. Doing a hard math problem costs you cognitive resources. So does having an intense discussion. Listening to podcasts, relaxing as it may seem, depletes your cognitive resources, too. If you’re trying to do two things at once, you’re task switching, forcing your brain to retrieve specific information for each task, and wearing yourself out. As a result, it takes longer to do each task, and you’ll probably make more mistakes. You’ll also be more stressed along the way.
Listening to podcasts while doing at least one other thing used to be my break time. I wouldn’t necessarily care what the podcast was about or absorb the information therein. I’d just let the media wash over me like a river over stones.
This was, in retrospect, a lousy way to unwind. These days, I wear my headphones less. I actually look at my phone less, if only because I’m not constantly pulling up a fresh podcast. When I walk my dog, I walk to the park and listen to the swaying grass and listen to the trees. The only thing sweeter than the sound of crickets there is the occasional sigh of silence.
