Photo: Guilherme Marques/Getty Images/EyeEm A few weeks ago, I caught the bus, and before I even sat down, I started rummaging in my backpack for my earbuds. After tipping the bag’s contents out on my lap in an increasingly frantic state, I realized: I must have left them behind. I had a 50-minute bus ride ahead of me, plus a 20-minute walk home, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent that long in idle silence, without the dulcet tones of a favorite podcast to entertain me.
In other words, podcasts haven’t taken the place of other media consumption habits. Instead, they fill up the space in between, when I used to listen to music, or even simply let my mind wander in silence. I’ve even got my boyfriend into the habit of listening with me, and these days our quality time usually comes with a third wheel: a podcaster in the background, joking about politics or rambling on about some obscure historical facts.
Because even though it feels like I’m making the most of my time by cleaning the house or commuting to a soundtrack of, say, heartfelt stories about the human experience via This American Life, it’s possible that I’m doing my brain a disservice by allowing it such little free time, explains Michael Grabowski, a professor of communication at Manhattan College in New York, who specializes in neuroscience and the human brain.
“One of the problems you have in MRI experiments is oftentimes they are very boring,” Gallant said on Freakonomics. “If you put somebody in an MRI scanner, which is a very uncomfortable place to be, and then you flash a word at them every five seconds for an hour, they get bored out of their skull.” The Moth’s stories, in contrast, are much more engaging. “You get lost in the stories,” he said.