Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about something that I suspect a lot of our listeners have experienced but maybe never put into words. He's noticed that listening to audio has this strange intimacy to it. Even when the same content is available with video, the audio-only version somehow feels more direct, more personal. He was listening to Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech the other evening, just sitting with a beer, no screen, and it got him thinking about the whole ritual of audio consumption. But his real question — the one he actually wants us to dig into — is about retention. When you're listening to something while doing the dishes or folding laundry, are you actually retaining the information? Or is that split attention costing you? And has anyone looked at this from a clinical perspective, because he's got a hunch that the divided attention might paradoxically help rather than hurt.
It's a great question, and the short answer is yes, people have looked at this — but the findings are messier and more interesting than most people assume. The first thing to know is that the research doesn't treat "listening" as one thing. There's focused listening, ambient listening, what researchers call "divided attention" listening, and they produce very different retention outcomes. A team at UC Berkeley published a paper in late twenty twenty-four that looked specifically at podcast comprehension versus reading transcripts of the same content, and they found that for narrative content, audio comprehension was within about seven percent of reading comprehension. Not identical, but close enough that for most practical purposes, you're not losing much.
That's basically a rounding error for anything that isn't a medical licensing exam.
That gap narrowed to about three percent when they tested people who self-identified as regular podcast listeners. So there's a training effect. Your brain gets better at processing audio information the more you do it.
Which makes intuitive sense. You develop the muscle. But that's focused listening, right? What about the folding-laundry scenario?
That's where it gets genuinely interesting. There was a study out of the University of Wisconsin in twenty twenty-three that looked at what they called "low-cognitive-load concurrent activity" during audio learning — researcher-speak for doing the dishes while listening to a podcast. They found that for certain types of content, retention was actually slightly higher during light physical activity compared to sitting still and focusing exclusively on the audio.
Not just not worse, but actually better?
About eight to twelve percent better on delayed recall tests given forty-eight hours later. The hypothesis — and I want to emphasize this is still a hypothesis — is that light physical activity keeps your arousal level in an optimal zone for encoding. Sitting still and trying to focus can paradoxically lead to mind-wandering. But when your hands are occupied with something routine, the motor activity acts as a stabilizer for attention. It occupies just enough neural bandwidth to prevent drift but not enough to interfere with processing.
The folding isn't competing with the listening — it's preventing the part of your brain that would otherwise check your phone or think about your grocery list from hijacking the show.
That's the theory. And it aligns with the Yerkes-Dodson law, which goes back to nineteen oh eight — optimal performance happens at moderate arousal, not low arousal and not high arousal. Sitting in a dark room doing nothing but listening might actually be under-arousing for some people. Doing something with your hands bumps you into the sweet spot.
The Yerkes-Dodson law. Named after two psychologists who I'm going to guess were not folding laundry when they figured this out.
They were studying mice and electric shocks, actually. But the principle transferred.
Of course it did. So Daniel's intuition — that the split attention might paradoxically help — has some basis. But I'm guessing there's a ceiling. Folding laundry, fine. Doing your taxes while listening, probably not.
Right, and the research draws a sharp line here. The Wisconsin study specifically tested what they called "automatized motor tasks" — things you can do without conscious deliberation. Folding laundry, washing dishes, walking on a familiar route, basic gardening. Once the secondary task requires cognitive engagement — reading, writing, having a conversation, anything involving language processing — retention drops off a cliff. Your auditory processing and your language processing are competing for the same neural resources.
Which is why you can listen to a podcast while driving on a highway you know, but the moment you hit a complicated intersection, you realize you haven't heard the last three minutes.
You have to skip back. There's neuroimaging work from McGill that showed why. When you're doing a language-based secondary task while listening to speech, your brain's phonological loop — the part of working memory that processes verbal information — gets double-booked. It's not that you're multitasking. You're rapidly switching between two verbal tasks, and both suffer.
The phonological loop. Sounds like a prog rock band. Herman Poppleberry and the Phonological Loop.
I would absolutely join that band. But the point is, the type of secondary activity matters enormously. Motor tasks, fine. Verbal tasks, disaster. Visual tasks — this is the other interesting category. If you're doing something visually demanding but non-verbal, like a jigsaw puzzle or organizing photos, the research suggests retention is roughly equivalent to focused listening. Not better, not worse.
We've got a hierarchy. Light motor activity might actually boost retention slightly. Pure visual activity is neutral. Anything involving language tanks it. And anything involving screens introduces a whole separate problem — the attentional fragmentation of notifications and the impulse to switch apps.
The screen problem is enormous, and it connects to the other part of what Daniel mentioned — the evening listening ritual, specifically avoiding screens before bed. The mechanism is well understood. Melatonin suppression from blue-spectrum light peaks at around four hundred eighty nanometers, and it's dose-dependent. A twenty twenty-one meta-analysis in Sleep Medicine Reviews looked at forty-two studies and found that screen use within two hours of bedtime delayed melatonin onset by an average of thirty-seven minutes and reduced total melatonin production by about twenty-three percent.
Thirty-seven minutes is not trivial. That's the difference between falling asleep at ten thirty and lying there until eleven.
The effect is cumulative. Do it every night, and you're essentially giving yourself a low-grade case of jet lag, permanently. What's interesting is that audio doesn't do any of this. You can listen in a dark room, no photons hitting your retina, melatonin production proceeding exactly as evolution intended. And anecdotally, a lot of people report that audio content helps them fall asleep — which is a whole separate retention question.
Right, because if you're falling asleep to it, you're definitely not retaining it. That's audio as sleep aid, not audio as information delivery.
There's research on that too. A twenty twenty-two study from the University of York looked at "sleep onset auditory processing" — what your brain does with speech sounds as you're drifting off. They found that comprehension drops essentially to zero within about two to three minutes of stage one sleep onset. You might have the subjective experience of still following along, but your brain has stopped encoding. So if you're listening to something you actually want to remember, you need to be fully awake.
Let me pull on a thread here. Daniel mentioned listening to a political speech in full rather than getting the dissected version from media coverage. And he noted something about the intimacy of audio, that it feels like those old scenes of people gathered around the radio during the war. Is there any research on that, or is that purely a vibes thing?
It's not purely vibes. There's a concept in media psychology called "parasocial intimacy," and audio seems uniquely good at generating it. A twenty twenty-three paper in the Journal of Media Psychology compared listener engagement across audio, video, and text for the same content — same speaker, same words — and found that audio-only consistently produced higher ratings of perceived closeness to the speaker. The hypothesis is that video gives you too much information. You see the speaker's appearance, their mannerisms, the room they're in, and all of that creates psychological distance because it reminds you that this is a specific person in a specific place who is not with you. Audio strips all that away. The voice is just... In your head, almost.
There's a reason podcasts feel like someone is talking directly to you, even when you know intellectually that thousands of other people are hearing the same thing. It's the illusion of a one-to-one conversation.
Radio mastered this long before podcasts existed. The Fireside Chats weren't an accident. Roosevelt understood that the medium created a sense of direct address that print couldn't match and that newsreels diluted. When you watch a speech on television, you're aware of the cameras, the podium, the crowd. When you listen on audio, all of that falls away and you're left with just the voice and the words. It's a purer signal.
Which I think is what Daniel was getting at with the Netanyahu speech. When you read the coverage, you're getting someone else's framing, their selection of quotes, their spin. When you listen to the full thing, you're having your own experience of it. Even if you disagree with every word, at least you're disagreeing with what was actually said, not with a headline writer's summary.
There's research backing this up. A twenty twenty-four study from the Reuters Institute looked at how people's perception of political speeches changed depending on whether they consumed the full audio, watched video clips, or read news summaries. The full audio listeners consistently rated the speeches as more nuanced and less extreme than the clip and summary consumers did. The editing process, even when it's not intentionally biased, tends to flatten complexity. The most quotable line isn't always the most representative line.
"The medium is the message," but the editing is the editorial.
That's going on a t-shirt. But it's important. One of the things that makes audio powerful for this kind of content is that it's harder to skim. You can't scroll past the boring parts. You have to sit with the whole thing, at the pace the speaker intended. That's a constraint, but it's also a feature. It forces a kind of attention that text and video don't.
Which loops us back to the retention question. Because audio imposes a linear timeline. You can't skip ahead easily. You can't scan for the key points. You have to process the information in sequence, at the speed it's delivered. Does that help or hurt retention?
For narrative content, linear processing seems to help — stories are designed to be consumed sequentially. For factual or argumentative content, there's some evidence that the inability to review and re-read hurts retention, especially for dense material. A twenty twenty-two study in Applied Cognitive Psychology compared audio and text comprehension for a scientific argument and found that text readers scored about fifteen percent higher on immediate recall, largely because they could pause, re-read, and check earlier paragraphs.
Fifteen percent is not nothing. That's a meaningful gap.
But — and this is the crucial caveat — that gap mostly disappeared when the audio listeners were given a simple outline or a list of key terms before listening. Just having a mental scaffold, knowing what the major sections would be, brought audio retention up to near parity with text.
The problem isn't audio per se. It's that audio doesn't give you the structural cues that text provides — headings, paragraphs, the ability to see where you are in the argument. If you provide those cues externally, the gap closes.
And this is something good podcasters do intuitively. "We're going to cover three things today." "First, let's talk about..." Those verbal signposts are doing real cognitive work. They're replacing the visual structure that text provides.
Which we do constantly, and now I feel validated. So let me try to synthesize what we've got so far. Audio retention, for most practical purposes, is roughly comparable to reading for narrative content, slightly worse for dense factual content unless you provide structural scaffolding, and potentially enhanced by light motor activity that occupies your hands without engaging your language systems. The intimacy piece is real and measurable, and audio avoids the melatonin-suppression problem that makes screens problematic before bed. Have I missed anything?
There's one more piece worth pulling out, because it connects to something Daniel mentioned about this podcast specifically. He said the primary objective is to be informative, and he cares about whether listeners retain what we discuss. There's an interesting line of research on "pedagogical audio design" — how you structure audio content specifically for retention. And some of the findings are counterintuitive.
The most reliable finding is that conversational tone improves retention significantly compared to formal, scripted delivery. A twenty twenty-one study in Educational Technology Research and Development compared learning outcomes from the same factual content delivered in three audio formats: a formal lecture, a conversational dialogue, and a narrative story. The conversational dialogue — which is basically what we do — outperformed the formal lecture by about twenty-two percent on delayed recall tests. The narrative story did even better, about twenty-eight percent over the lecture, but the dialogue was close behind.
Twenty-two percent is enormous. That's not a marginal effect.
It's huge. And the researchers think the mechanism is social. When you're listening to a conversation, your brain engages social cognition circuits that aren't activated by a monologue. You're tracking the back-and-forth, the reactions, the moments of agreement and disagreement. That additional cognitive engagement seems to create richer memory traces.
The fact that we're two people talking, rather than one person lecturing, isn't just an aesthetic choice. It's actually doing work for retention.
And there's a related finding about "desirable difficulty" — the idea that making learning slightly harder can improve long-term retention. When we disagree, or when one of us pushes back on the other's point, or when we leave a question hanging for a moment before answering it, we're introducing small amounts of cognitive friction. That friction forces the listener to engage more actively with the content, and that active engagement strengthens memory.
That's the academic term for me being difficult.
You're pedagogically optimal, Corn.
I'm going to put that on my resume. But it makes sense. If everything is too smooth, too polished, too easy to follow, it washes over you. A little bit of friction — a moment where you think "wait, does that follow?" — pulls you back in.
This connects to something I've noticed about my own listening habits. The podcasts I remember best aren't the ones where I agreed with everything. They're the ones where something surprised me, or where I found myself mentally arguing with one of the hosts. That mental argument is engagement. It's exactly the kind of active encoding that leads to retention.
The worst thing we could do for retention is be boring and agreeable.
Which is reassuring, because we're sometimes neither.
I want to circle back to something you mentioned earlier about the evening listening ritual, because I think there's a piece we haven't fully unpacked. Daniel described sitting at a table with a beer, listening to a speech on a Bluetooth speaker, getting ready for bed. And he said it felt "somehow normal," even though there's a part of him that felt it might be weird to just sit and listen. That tension — between feeling like you should be doing something and allowing yourself to just listen — seems significant.
It is, and I think it connects to a broader cultural shift. For most of human history, listening was the primary mode of receiving information at a distance. Oral traditions, storytelling, sermons, radio. You sat and listened, and that was the activity. It wasn't weird to just listen. What's weird is our current expectation that every moment should involve multiple inputs.
The smartphone has trained us to feel understimulated if we're only doing one thing.
And there's a kind of re-learning that has to happen when you start intentionally doing audio-only activities. Your brain initially rebels. It wants to check something. It wants visual stimulation. But if you push through that, something shifts. You rediscover a mode of attention that was totally normal for your grandparents.
The radio generation didn't feel weird sitting and listening to a baseball game or a speech or a drama. That was the evening's entertainment. Nobody thought "should I also be scrolling something right now?
There's research on this cultural shift. A media consumption study from twenty twenty-three found that the average American now spends about seven and a half hours per day consuming media, but less than two hours of that is audio-only. The rest involves screens. And when people do consume audio-only content, they're almost always doing something else at the same time. Dedicated listening — just sitting and paying attention — has become rare.
Which makes it all the more valuable when you do it. It's like a form of attention that most people have let atrophy.
The circadian rhythm piece Daniel mentioned is smart, because it gives you a reason to build the habit. You're not just listening for the sake of listening — you're listening because it's part of a wind-down routine that helps you sleep better. The audio is serving a dual purpose: information and relaxation.
The dual-purpose framing is actually a useful way to think about a lot of audio consumption. It's rarely just one thing. It's education plus companionship. It's entertainment plus sleep aid. It's news plus background rhythm for your morning routine.
I think that's part of why the retention question is so interesting. People worry that they're not "really" learning if they're also doing something else. But the research suggests that for a lot of content and a lot of activities, the learning is real. It might even be enhanced. The key is knowing which activities help and which hurt.
Let's make that practical. If someone's listening to this right now while doing something else — which statistically, they probably are — what should they be doing, and what should they not be doing, if they want to actually remember what we're saying?
The evidence-based guidelines would be: light motor tasks are fine and possibly beneficial — walking, cleaning, cooking something simple, folding laundry, gardening. Visual non-verbal tasks are neutral — puzzles, organizing, certain kinds of craft work. Anything involving language is bad — reading, writing, texting, having a conversation, even listening to music with lyrics in a language you understand. And anything involving complex decision-making is bad — driving in traffic, cooking an unfamiliar recipe, anything that requires you to stop and think about what you're doing.
The person who's listening while jogging on a familiar route is probably retaining more than the person who's sitting at their desk staring at the waveform.
That's exactly what the research suggests. The jogger's brain is in that optimal arousal zone, and the running is automatized enough that it's not competing for cognitive resources. The desk-sitter is fighting the urge to check email.
Which makes me feel better about the fact that I process most of my information while horizontal on a branch.
Your natural state is pedagogically optimal. You've been ahead of the research this whole time.
Sloths: the original evidence-based learners. We also invented pizza, as I've mentioned.
You've mentioned it. Nobody believes you, but you've mentioned it.
The historical record is incomplete. But let me ask you something about the intimacy piece, because I think there's a dimension we haven't touched. Daniel mentioned the comparison to movie depictions of people listening to their prime ministers during the world wars. Families gathered around a radio, listening to a leader speak during a crisis. There's something about audio in moments of collective importance that seems different from watching the same thing on television.
I think there are two things going on there. One is the parasocial intimacy we already talked about — the voice in your ear feels personal. But the other is collective simultaneity. When you listen to a live speech on the radio, or even a recorded speech that you know millions of other people are also listening to, there's a sense of shared experience that's different from watching video. Part of that might be historical accident — radio was the medium of the mid-twentieth century's defining moments — but part of it might be intrinsic to the medium.
Video gives you too much individuating information. You see the crowd, you see the setting, you're aware of the production. Audio collapses the distance. Everyone hearing the same voice in the same way, regardless of where they are or what they're doing. It's a more uniform experience.
There's a democratic quality to it. A speech on the radio sounds the same whether you're listening in a mansion or a kitchen. Video introduces all these visual status markers — the screen size, the resolution, whether you're watching on a phone or a theater screen. Audio is audio. A good Bluetooth speaker and a cheap earbud are delivering fundamentally the same signal.
That's an interesting point. The medium flattens the consumption hierarchy. A billionaire and a college student listening to the same podcast are having essentially the same auditory experience. You can't buy a better version of a voice.
That's unusual in media. Text has reading level and typography and screen quality. Video has resolution and screen size and surround sound. Once you're past a pretty low fidelity floor, improvements are marginal. The human voice doesn't need high bitrate to be fully intelligible.
Which is why podcasts took off the way they did. The barrier to entry for both production and consumption is so low. Anyone with a decent microphone can make something that sounds professional. Anyone with a phone can listen. The whole ecosystem is more accessible than video or even high-quality text publishing.
The retention data we've been talking about applies across that whole ecosystem. Whether you're listening to a professionally produced show or someone's amateur podcast, the cognitive mechanisms are the same. The voice in your ear is doing the same work.
Let me push on one thing, though. We've been talking about audio retention as if the content is the variable and the medium is the constant. But surely the type of content matters enormously. I can believe that narrative content and conversational content transfer well to audio. But what about highly technical material? If someone's trying to learn organic chemistry or understand a complex legal argument, is audio the right medium?
That's where the research gets more cautionary. A twenty twenty-three review in the Journal of Educational Psychology looked at modality effects across different content types and found that audio works well for narrative, conversational, and explanatory content — the "why" and "how" stuff. But for content that requires holding multiple abstract elements in working memory simultaneously — complex diagrams, mathematical proofs, detailed taxonomies — audio is significantly worse than text. The problem is that audio is serial. You can only hold so many elements in working memory at once, and without the ability to glance back at earlier elements, complex reasoning chains tend to break.
If I'm trying to understand the structure of a molecule, I need to see it. If I'm trying to understand why a historical event unfolded the way it did, audio works fine.
That's the rough heuristic. And it explains why certain fields have been slower to adopt audio as a serious learning medium. You don't see many podcasts about advanced mathematics or molecular biology. The content doesn't fit the format.
Although there are exceptions. There are some very good philosophy podcasts, and philosophy can be extremely abstract.
Philosophy works because it's fundamentally argumentative and narrative. Premises lead to conclusions. You can follow a chain of reasoning in audio if each step is clearly articulated and the pace is right. It's when you need to hold multiple premises in mind simultaneously and compare them that audio breaks down. A good philosophy podcast will walk you through the argument step by step and pause to let each piece settle before moving on.
Which is a skill. Presenting complex material in audio isn't just a matter of reading a paper out loud. It's a different kind of writing, a different kind of structuring.
And this is something the best educational podcasters understand intuitively. You can't just take a textbook chapter and read it into a microphone. You have to re-architect the content for the medium. More repetition, more signposting, more concrete examples, more pauses. It's a translation process, not a direct transfer.
Which connects to something I've noticed about how people describe their podcast listening. They often say things like "I feel like I'm learning, but it doesn't feel like studying." Part of that is the conversational tone and the parasocial intimacy. But part of it is that good audio content is doing a lot of invisible pedagogical work to make the learning feel effortless.
The best compliment a podcast can get is "I didn't realize how much I was learning." That's the ambient learning effect in action.
That's your term, right? You coined that?
I did, in the context of people listening to educational content while doing chores. The idea that you're absorbing information without the conscious effort of studying. Your brain is encoding while your hands are occupied.
It's a good term. And the research seems to validate it, with the caveats we've discussed about the type of secondary activity.
The caveats are everything, though. The difference between ambient learning and wasted time is whether your secondary activity is compatible with language processing. Do the wrong thing, and you might as well be listening to static.
Which brings us to the practical question that I think underlies Daniel's whole prompt. If someone wants to build an evening audio ritual that maximizes both relaxation and retention, what does the evidence-based protocol look like?
Based on everything we've discussed, I'd say: First, no screens for at least an hour before bed — the audio replaces screen time, not accompanies it. Second, the secondary activity should be something light and motor-based if you're doing anything at all — tidying up, stretching, or just sitting with a non-alcoholic drink if you're optimizing for sleep. The beer is fine for relaxation but alcohol fragments sleep architecture, so if you're serious about circadian rhythm, maybe switch to herbal tea after the first one.
I've been saying this for years.
Your leaf medicine is not the same as chamomile tea, Corn.
The principle stands.
Third, pick content that matches your goals. If you want to retain factual information, something conversational and well-structured is ideal. If you want to wind down, something narrative works well — stories help transition your brain out of analytical mode. Fourth, if you're listening to something dense, give yourself a mental scaffold beforehand. Even just knowing the three main points you're about to hear improves retention measurably. And fifth, don't worry if you drift off at the end. The retention window closes once you hit stage one sleep, but the relaxation benefit continues.
That's a solid protocol. And it's notable how much of it aligns with what people were doing naturally before screens colonized the evening hours. Read a book, listen to the radio, have a conversation, go to bed. The circadian disruption we're all dealing with is partly a technology problem, but it's also a habits problem.
The technology enables the bad habits, but the solution isn't necessarily more technology. It's sometimes less. Or different technology — a Bluetooth speaker instead of a screen, a podcast instead of a social media feed.
The speaker is key, actually. Daniel mentioned he was using a new Bluetooth speaker, and that's a different experience from earbuds or headphones. A speaker puts the audio in the room with you. It's less intimate in one sense — the voice isn't inside your head — but more social in another. It feels like someone is in the room talking.
There's research on this too, though it's thinner. A small study from twenty twenty-two compared listening comprehension across headphones, earbuds, and room speakers and found that speakers produced slightly higher engagement ratings and marginally better recall for narrative content. The hypothesis was that speakers create a more natural listening environment — your brain evolved to process speech coming from a source in the room, not piped directly into your ear canals.
The optimal setup might be: dark room, comfortable chair, Bluetooth speaker on a shelf, and something worth listening to. No screens, no notifications, no multitasking beyond maybe a cup of tea.
That's the ideal. And the fact that it sounds almost radical — that just sitting and listening to something feels like a deliberate practice rather than a default behavior — says something about where we are as a culture.
It says we've forgotten how to do one thing at a time.
The research suggests that rediscovering that ability might be good for us. Not just for learning, but for attention, for sleep, for the quality of our mental engagement with ideas.
There's a paradox here that I want to name. We've spent most of this conversation talking about divided attention — how you can listen while doing other things and still retain information. But the deeper insight might be that the most valuable audio experiences are the ones where you don't divide your attention. Where you just listen. And the divided-attention scenarios are useful and practical and supported by research, but the focused-listening scenarios might be the ones that actually change how you think.
That's well put. The research validates ambient learning, but it also validates deep listening. They're different modes serving different purposes. The person who listens to podcasts while doing chores is learning. The person who sits down in the evening and gives a speech their full attention is also learning, but in a different way — with more emotional engagement, more critical reflection, more integration with existing knowledge.
Both are legitimate. The problem is when you only ever do the ambient version and never the focused version. That's like only ever skimming books and never reading one carefully. You'll pick up a lot of surface-level information, but you'll miss the depth.
The depth requires the silence around the signal. No secondary task, no divided attention, just you and the voice. And I think that's what Daniel was experiencing with the Netanyahu speech — that sense of direct engagement that only happens when you're not also folding laundry or driving or scrolling.
The beer probably didn't hurt the sense of occasion either.
A moderate amount of alcohol reduces inhibitory control and can increase emotional responsiveness to content. So you might feel more connected to the speech, even if your factual recall is slightly impaired. It's a trade-off.
Everything's a trade-off. That's basically the thesis of this entire episode.
The thesis of this entire episode is that audio is a uniquely powerful medium for learning, for intimacy, for winding down, and for reconnecting with a mode of attention that most of us have neglected. And the research backs up what a lot of people have intuited — that listening is not a lesser form of consumption, just a different one, with its own strengths and weaknesses and optimal practices.
The split-attention thing that felt counterintuitive — that doing something with your hands might actually help you listen better — turns out to have a real mechanistic basis. The Yerkes-Dodson law, the phonological loop, the automatized motor task distinction. It's not magic. It's neuroscience.
It's neuroscience that feels like magic until you understand it. Which is true of a lot of things.
That's the show, really. Things that feel like magic until Herman explains the paper.
I'm going to take that as a compliment.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen forties, the island of Réunion developed a distinctive variant of the Chinese suanpan abacus using local tamarind wood, which was prized for its deep reddish-brown color and resistance to humidity. French colonial administrators were so puzzled by its prevalence among shopkeepers that they commissioned a pigment chemistry analysis, which found that the wood's natural oils reacted with the brass fittings to create a subtle iridescent patina over time.
...right.
We've covered a lot of ground. If there's one thing I'd want listeners to take away, it's that the audio habits they already have are probably more effective than they think — and that adding a little bit of intentionality, especially around evening listening, can make them even better.
If you're someone who's been feeling guilty about "just" listening while doing the dishes, the research says you can stop feeling guilty. Your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Possibly better than if you were sitting still.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps other people find the show.
We'll be back soon. Until then, maybe try listening to something in the dark tonight. See how it feels.
It feels surprisingly normal.
