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........

© Vox