In the recent decade, podcasts have become increasingly popular with consumers – and with good reason: interesting topics and conversations with experts, comedians and celebrities on any platform, and simple to turn on and listen to while on your commute or at home. Experts have an inclination as to why podcasts have swept the internet and why it’s so addicting. A paper published by the journal Nature, a research team from the University of California, Berkeley, created a map on how the brain reacted to podcasts. 

“Widely dispersed sensory, emotional and memory networks were humming across both hemispheres of the brain; no story was ‘contained’ in any one part of the brain, as some textbooks have suggested,” explained Alexander Huth, leader of the team and a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience. The New York Times explained, “Using novel computational methods, the group broke down the stories into units of meaning: social elements, for example, like friends and parties, as well as locations and emotions. They found that these concepts fell into 12 categories that tended to cause activation in the same parts of people’s brains at the same points throughout the stories.” The team made a prediction on whether or not all their test subjects had the same parts of the brain “light up”, and to their excitement, they did. Using an MRI, they mapped the brains of their test subjects and they all had uniformity. 

It is no shock that podcasts have captivated audiences. The Atlantic details that a recent report by Edison Research estimated that 64 percent of 12- to 24-year-olds and 37 percent of 25- to 54-year-olds in the United States listened to online radio weekly in 2014. The same year, 30 percent of respondents reported that they had listened to a podcast at least once, with 15 percent indicating that they had listened to a podcast within the last month. This is a no-brainer to Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. “A good story’s a good story from the brain’s perspective, whether it’s audio or video or text. It’s the same kind of activation in the brain.” 

Just last year, comedian and host of the Joe Rogan Experience had more than 190 million downloads a month and is now listened to 1.5+ billion times a year! He amassed $78,373 per episode and has a couple thousands of episodes uploaded. The easy part of a podcast is that anyone with an electronic device can start one. It has been a platform for free-thinking in the past decade, with people like Edward Snowden, Alex Jones and Bernie Sanders being guests on different podcasts. Now more than ever do we have everything at our fingertips, and considering how over-stimulation has become an issue in recent years due to the absurd amount of videos, music and films released year-round, it is incredible to see how a three-hour podcast can have millions of listens when our attention spans are shortening.

The Guardian reports that “a recently published study from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark suggests the collective global attention span is narrowing due to the amount of information that is presented to the public.” So, how have numerous hour-long podcasts been able to become so popular? People love a good story and genuine conversations. More than ever do audiences crave authentic entertainment. 

Photo Credit: Carmen Ordonez