What Do Podcasts Do for Your Brain?

In 2016, Freakonomics host Steven Dubner took a deep dive into the neuroscience behind why podcast listening is a unique experience. While listening to a story, different areas of the brain light up all at once, and your brain gets a semantic coding workout. Eight years later, this story still sparks my curiosity. It’s not simply semantic coding, however. Podcasts do a lot more for the human brain: a balance between rest and activity, a sense of closeness, and turning humdrum activities into special rituals.

How can we harness these findings to make podcasts more exciting?

Neuroaesthetics: How Art Affects The Brain

Neuroaesthetics is the study of how and why sensory experiences (such as images or textures) affect our brains.

To examine how this works in the auditory realm, we might have someone listen to a piece of spoken word audio while lying in an MRI machine, and see how the audio content affects them.

Natural Speech and The Human Cerebral Cortex, or Talking and Brains

This was, in fact, the subject of Freakonomics episode 262, from October 2016. Dubner interviewed Jack Gallant, a psychology professor and computational and cognitive neuroscientist at The University of California, Berkeley. Gallant and his coauthors showed how spoken audio in the form of a story stimulates the parts of the brain where we make sense of language. 

“We’re measuring changes in blood flow and blood oxygen at 50,000 or so different locations across the cerebral cortex while they listen to these stories,” Gallant told Dubner, “to figure out, for each location in the brain that we measured, what information in the stories is driving activity at that location in the brain.”  Gallant said that the most surprising finding is that “semantic information, the meaning of the stories, is represented broadly across much of the brain. All of those various areas of the brain represent different aspects of semantic information, in these really complicated maps that are very, very rich but fairly consistent across different individuals.” 

Gallant and his team learned that when we listen to a story, different parts of our brains that handle different kinds of meaning go to work. Words aren’t solely one-to-one signifiers. When we hear a word, our feelings about its meaning come along to clarify the significance. In a story, metaphor endows a word with multiple meanings, in the context of the story and the listener’s context. So, this activates different areas of the brain simultaneously.

Not all podcasts are stories, however. And podcasts can do a lot more for us than match words with meaning. Listening to an audio story affects your whole body and mind, even though we barely notice these effects. This article will look at a range of other ways podcasts energize our neural functioning.

Sound, Context, and Emotion

Kinda Studios is “a creative science studio using neuroscience to prove the power of art on human connection and wellbeing.” They study more than what words mean when we hear them; they also study the effect of light, sound, color, and more. This company uses neuroaesthetics to create audiovisual installations and immersive experiences for brands like KIA or Diageo. In a series of interviews for the podcast Fresh Ears, Robin Landau and Catherine Templar Lewis, the team behind Kinda Studios, discussed what long-form audio does for people, and why. 

Long-Form Audio Uniquely Commands Attention

Most people enjoy listening to podcasts while doing other activities, such as chores or exercise. Why is this experience satisfying instead of distracting? 

Podcasts Help You Focus

Podcasts let parts of your brain relax while the audio-processing parts of your brain do the work.  When we hear the phrase “pay attention,” we often imagine focusing on something, like a flashlight on a target. However, recent research indicates that when the brain pays attention to something, it spends more energy filtering out distractions than it does focusing on stimuli. As the team from Kinda Studios said, podcast listening lets you “take a lot of the attention you’d be just putting on things that might catch your eye, and you get to filter them out.”  

Podcasts Prompt or Trigger Mental Imagery

Most people make mental pictures while listening to stories with visual detail. Even when we hear a nonverbal sound (such as glass breaking), an image can pop up in our minds. These mental pictures provide clues about what to expect. If I hear a glass fall on my kitchen floor and break, the picture in my head tells me to grab a broom and make sure I’m wearing shoes. If I hear a window pane breaking late at night, the mental image makes me grab my phone and get ready to swipe for an emergency call. Both images, though different, help me stay safe. 

When we conjure these mental images, our personal context colors them in. For example, if I say the phrase “a handsome prince,” you might think of The Prince of Wales, Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid, or Prince Rogers Nelson of “Purple Rain” fame. If you said ”handsome prince”  to people from different countries or generations, the images would change. The words “handsome prince” would carry different emotions and memories along with them in different contexts. 

Since we construct mental pictures through our memories and lived experiences, the mental movies we unintentionally create feel personally meaningful to us. As the Kinda Studios team said, “You’ve put more of yourself into (the podcast) because you’re actually making your own creative choices to choose what that character looks like.” This context makes the spoken words more memorable. 

Podcasts Encourage Relationships

If I told you that it was possible to have the person of your choice enlighten and validate you, any time you want, you might say that kind of relationship was an impossible dream. But podcasts encourage relationships in three ways: 

• Simulating an intimate conversation
• Accessibility and control by the audience
• Breaking down and clarifying information to enhance the audience’s understanding

These elements work together to make us feel more related to the podcaster and the (unseen) rest of the podcast’s audience. 

Conversation and Connection or Parasocial Relationships

When you listen to a podcast, you may feel that the conversation is just for you. The podcast listening experience feels like being in a bubble with a smart companion, particularly when you use headphones. 

A 2022 study by Stephanie Tobin of the University of Queensland shows that podcasts make people feel less lonely. Tobin and her authors hypothesized that podcast listeners may have “a need to belong” or show signs of neuroses. This wasn’t the case. Study participants came to podcasts out of “openness to experience, interest-based curiosity, and need for cognition.” Over time, the study participants’ feelings about the podcasts changed. The more hours of podcasts the participants consumed, the more they felt connected to the podcast hosts. 

Podcast audiences don’t consciously seek out “a simulated conversation with friends,” but over time, they experience the benefits of such a conversation.

Podcast Availability and Audience Choice

A second way that podcasts make audiences feel connected to the podcaster is recurring availability. Podcasts have been called “audio on demand.” The foundation of the relationship is the audience’s choice to download and listen. The Kinda Studios team said, “We use the word intimacy a lot around podcasts… because when you choose to listen it’s an active process.” The podcast listener makes an active choice to consume the show in a particular time and environment. The relationship between the listener and the podcast episode is secure. And, if the podcast doesn’t deliver new episodes, the listener is free to move on. 

Podcasts Can Explain at the Audience’s Pace

Podcasts tackle complicated topics, break them into parts, and examine them closely from different angles. This measured examination aids understanding, which supports and validates the audience’s learning process. Some writers call this “hand-holding.” Podcasts don’t have to adhere to the strict time constraints that radio does. So, podcasters can use pacing, music, and sound effects to illuminate ideas. As the audience fills in mental pictures with their own context, the podcaster-audience relationship builds a sense of cooperative exploration, further encouraging an emotional bond. 

In Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution, by Martin Spinelli and Lance Dann, the authors wrote, “Hand-holding has been a fairly common criticism of a number of American projects (particularly This American Life) for some time now….it unconsciously links two often-disparaged aspects of an American audio production style: an affinity for personal closeness and a very strong attachment to clear narrative structures.” 

In short, the services that are simplest for a friend to provide, are now done in part by podcasts. 

Podcasts Can Become Rituals Via Habit Stacking

Every day, we have to do things that we don’t feel like doing. Whether it’s the washing up or driving from place to place, everyone has chores they’d prefer to avoid. Podcasts make those habitual tasks special by activating our brains’ reward chemicals. 

When we listen to podcasts, our brains go through a neurochemical ballet as we follow the structure we’ve come to expect. Podcasts that rely on structure can be satisfying because the audience knows what mental ritual they’ll go through. 

Robin Landau and Catherine Templar Lewis of Kinda Studios said, “[Dopamine is] the reward chemical that we give ourselves to reward ourselves often for learning something new… our brains love the pattern of it, and they release all this dopamine, which tells us that we’ve worked this story out…and that dopamine actually can be part of the reason it spurs us to action because it motivates us to act on what we’ve heard.”  

When we add a podcast, our run-of-the-mill daily activities become more exciting. Washing dishes or walking the dog becomes an adventure, and we feel energized as a result. 

Podcasts’ Big Risk: Audio Quality

Another way podcasts affect the brain is by making listeners less tolerant of unclear audio. Gen X and older may be used to listening to news through radio static. The cracks and pops of a treasured vinyl record may make a song more nostalgic. Digital audio, though, doesn’t compete with electronic activity or scratches.

As we’ve learned so far, listening to a podcast is like inviting a guest into your home. We relax and open up to a new experience presented in a familiar way. This takes a lot of trust. When that guest comes with baggage, we feel drained. 

Is it any wonder that poor audio quality can kill a podcast?  

According to a 2018 study by USC and the Australian National University, the quality of audio influences whether you believe what you hear. Program director Norbert Schwarz summarized, “When you make it difficult for people to process information, it becomes less credible.”

Study participants listened to two-to-three-minute interviews from NPR’s Science Friday with altered sound quality. Co-author Eryn Newman said, “As soon as we reduced the audio quality, all of a sudden, the scientists and their research lost credibility.” Newman and Schwarz found that as soon as material required extra effort on the part of the participants, they trusted it less. Respondents rated clear information as more reliable. 

Remember, the brain wants to preserve energy and spends more effort filtering out contradictory stimuli. So, when the audio medium presents the smallest obstacle, audiences are more likely to reject it. 

Okay, Hotshot, What About Video?

Despite claims that video podcasts are the way of the future, user data indicates that video podcasts aren’t replacing audio, and are unlikely to. 

A study by University College London, sponsored by Audible UK, found that our bodies react more to audio alone than video and audio together. Researchers made study participants watch part of a movie or television version of a well-known story and listen to an audiobook version of the same part of that story. Study participants said they felt video had more impact. But their physiological responses told a different tale. 

While watching video or listening to audio, the study participants wore wrist sensors to measure their heart rates, electrodermal activity, and body temperature. All these physiological responses rose while the participants listened solely to audio. But, the responses weren’t significant while watching and listening at the same time. 

According to the abstract, “We interpret these findings as evidence that the stories were more cognitively and emotionally engaging at a physiological level when presented in an auditory format. This may be because listening to a story, rather than watching a video, is a more active process of co-creation.” Recall the “handsome prince” example mentioned earlier, and how memory and experience provide context. 

In sum, consuming video and audio together is a more passive experience. Audio alone is more active. 

3D Audio: The Immersion of Binaural Sound

Read article called: 3D Audio: The Immersion of Binaural Sound

How You Can Make Your Podcast More Stimulating

What do podcasts do for your brain? To recap, podcasts can:

• aid focus by allowing part of the brain to take a little break
• encourage co-creation: the podcast’s text provides shapes for the audience to fill with their context
• provide ritual
• stave off loneliness 
• build engagement

4 Tips to Create More Compelling Podcasts

1. Don’t worry about video, unless cinematography is your calling. Let your audience give part of their brain a rest.

2. Prompt mental imagery with metaphor and different kinds of sound. Use music to set a mood, tell a story with distinct people, places, and events, and describe them in sensory detail to spark your audience’s imagination and bring your podcast’s topic to life. If you enjoy sound design, sound effects can add magic to the stories in your show.  

3. Be consistent. Consistency helps people associate your podcast with other habits. If you need to take a break, let your audience know. Fill in your release schedule gaps with gems from your back catalog, or swap episodes with a like-minded podcast. Your podcast could be the ritual that helps your audience relax at the end of a long day, or get excited about something new. If your show keeps coming back, the audience will.

4. Take your audio seriously. This doesn’t mean spending a fortune on an expensive mic and pro-level studio. Your audio can sound first-class even on a very tight budget. Check out our podcast recording guide for a load of tips, tactics, and tools on that front.

Make Your Podcast Magnetic

When his 2016 UC Berkeley study recruited participants, Jack Gallant said, “This is the only MRI experiment we’ve ever done where we didn’t have to pay people to be in the study. They were just happy to lie there and listen to the stories.” 

Humans all want stories, particularly when they can fill in the blanks with their own experiences and context. Consistency, clarity, and compassion can make your podcast reverberate worldwide.