31/10/2020 This Is Your Brain on Podcasts: Why Audio Storytelling Is So Addictive - The Atlantic

CULTURE
Inside the Podcast Brain: Why Do Audio Stories
Captivate?
e emotional appeal of listening
TIFFANIE WEN APRIL 16, 2015

JASMIN AWAD/SHUTTERSTOCK

In my all-time favorite episode of Radiolab, “Finding Emilie,” a young art student

named Emilie Gossiaux gets into a terrible accident while riding her bike and,
rendered blind and deaf, is unable to communicate with her loved ones until she
makes an incredible breakthrough. Listening to it on my drive home only got me to
the middle of the episode, so I sat in my parked car staring at the garage until it was
over. I was captivated by the voices of Emilie and her family. I’ve been an audio
convert ever since.

It’s likely that thousands, if not millions, of others had the same experience last year
when they discovered Serial, the is American Life spinoff considered to be the
most successful podcast of all time (5 million downloads and counting) that
launched the medium back into the spotlight.
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As a New York magazine piece noted last year, the increasing popularity of audio
storytelling owes a lot to technology, as smartphones allow people to consume
shows on demand anywhere, and cars increasingly come equipped with satellite
radio and Internet-friendly dashboards. 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. e 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.

Beyond the obvious convenience factor of listening on the go, what is it that makes
some audio storytelling so engaging? And what happens in the brain when someone
hears a really compelling story?

“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,” says Paul Zak, the director of
the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Zak has
studied how watching and listening to stories in uence our physiology and
behavior.

In a study published in e Annals of the New York Academy of Science in 2009, Zak
and his colleagues had participants watch short video clips featuring an emotional
or unemotional scene. Afterwards, they lled out a survey about their emotions,
played a game designed to test their level of generosity toward a stranger, and had
their blood drawn. ose who reported feeling empathy for the characters in the
clip were found to have 47 percent more of the neurochemical oxytocin in their
body than those who didn’t feel empathetic toward the characters.

e researchers reason that experiencing tension in a story makes people feel

stressed, which makes their bodies release the hormone and neurotransmitter
oxytocin. Since oxytocin has been shown to increase empathy in some experiments,
when things get tense while listening to a story, reading a book, or watching a TV
show or movie, you may begin to empathize with the characters and get
“transported” into the story.

Which means, according to Zak, that the best stories will always have an increasing
level of tension, and that there exists a type of universal story structure—one in

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which a protagonist faces some sort of stressful challenge or con ict—that draws
attention because it’s engaging emotionally and intellectually.

“What we have found in our research is that people require some sort of stressor,
some sort of arousal response in the brain to have this type of narrative
transportation where we begin to share the emotions of the characters in a story,”
Zak says. “It makes sense that we need some sufficient reason to have that response.
Our brain is trying to save resources and energy and having this arousal response is
costly. erefore we only want to give attention to something when it matters,
when there’s something going on.”

He describes transporting into a story as a “neuro ballet” in which the reader,

viewer, or listener knows she's not physically part of the story, and yet she still
physically responds to it in a way that can change her behavior in the future.

Since oxytocin has been shown to make people more sensitive to social cues, Zak
says that stories that keep people’s attention have to be character-driven. “You can
tell a war story or something with a lot of action that will grab your attention,” he
says, “but you still need a personal story, someone to empathize with. We need to
have that social aspect for it to resonate with us.”

Podcasts and audiobooks bene t from the advantages of any character-based story.
But some research, like a recent study conducted at the University of Waterloo, has
shown that people who listen to the narration of a passage, like the audio
storytelling found in traditional audiobooks, remember less information, are less
interested in the content, and are more likely to daydream than those who read the
same book out loud or silently to themselves.

But anyone who has gotten hooked on a podcast knows that audio can be much
more than just narration. Emma Rodero, a communications professor at the
Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, studies how audio productions retain
people’s attention. Her work has shown that a dramatized audio structure, using
voice actors who tell the story exclusively through dialogue, stimulate listeners’
imagination more than a typical “voice of God” narration. Participants who listened
to the dramatized structure reported that they generated more vivid images in their
minds, and conjured the images more quickly and easily than those in the narration
condition. ey also reported being more emotionally aroused and interested in the
story.
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Another study illustrates the importance of using sound effects, sounds that
represent objects and/or environments and sound shots, an effect that gives the
listener a sense of space by recording a sound that’s far away. Rodero found that the
use of sound effects and sound shots in an audio drama increased the level of
mental imagery that listeners reported, and also caused listeners to pay more
attention.

Audiobook producers are catching on, and have started rolling out new types of
“audio entertainment.” A novel by best-selling crime writer Jeffrey Deaver, called
e Starling Project, has only been released as an audiobook, and features characters
brought to life by 29 voice actors. Adapted by famed sci- author Orson Scott
Card, Ender’s Game Alive, released by Audible in 2013, tells the Ender's Game story
entirely through the use of dialogue and sound effects. And companies like Graphic
Audio are creating audio dramas exclusively in the style, calling it “a movie in your
mind.”

e tagline captures one of the best things about audio storytelling, according to
Rodero. She says that, like reading, listening to audio allows people to create their
own versions of characters and scenes in the story. But she thinks listening, unlike
looking at a written page, is more active, since the brain has to process the
information at the pace it is played.

“Audio is one of the most intimate forms of media because you are constantly
building your own images of the story in your mind and you’re creating your own
production,” Rodero says. “And that of course, is something that you can never get
with visual media.”

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