Your Brain On Climate

Some people think climate science is made up.  This annoys other people.  But calling each other dullards is unhelpful, and it misses the deeper questions. What determines who and what we trust, including science?  And what can be done to make people and politics - particularly, Lord help us all, American politics - a bit less squabbly about it all? Joining Dave this episode is Laur Hesse Fisher,...

WE need to take action on climate change. WE need a revolution. WE need to unite and tackle the problem. Etc.  But who is this "we"?  Politicians and campaigners love to invoke it. It has powerful rhetorical force. But does this confusing "we" give us any sense of what each of us can actually do? Is it a linguistic problem or something more profound about how our brains think a...

Are we responsible for how we behave? If so, should we feel bad about it? And if the answer to those two is 'yes' and 'yes' respectively, how do we change our behaviour?  How much of 'behaviour change' is about nudging or encouraging individuals to change, versus how much is banning bad things and making good things easier and cheaper?  And are simple answers stupid?...

Try running for a few miles, and then a few miles more, and then several hundred few miles more. That's proper endurance that is, the kind demonstrated regularly by Damian Hall: ultrarunner, climate activist, author, and all-round lovely chap.  He's the holder of the men's record for the 268-mile Spine Race, so he knows a thing or two about keeping going when things look grim.   And...

The climate crisis needs all the ideas and imagination it can get. But today's guest says that liberalism - the system many of us live in, which cherishes individual freedom above pretty much all else - is a straitjacket on our imaginations, and our ability to think and act big. If it really is harder to imagine the death of capitalism than the end of all life on Earth, does that explain why...

Our ideas about climate change are filtered through layers of Stuff, and for us in the West quite a lot of that Stuff is inseparable from being gits to other countries for centuries.  We've nabbed land, exploited populations and perhaps most enduringly of all, seen the world as basically being for 'us' to do with as we want. That Stuff dies hard, and, this episode's guest argue...

The death of everything: no ROFLing matter. Right?  Well probably yes. But can chuckles save the planet?  Does laughing at humans being silly confused bags of water help the climate fight or take the heat out of it? And just why is so much climate comedy, well, crap? Joining Dave this episode is a right proper comedy mastermind, Stuart Goldsmith .  Stuart's spent aeons both behind the mic as...

You can't handle the truth! Or maybe you can. But does the truth set us free, or bum us out? Do we all have a duty to say it like we see it - particularly on things we're not seeing clearly enough, like climate change?  How much honesty can our flimsy little brains bear? Joining Dave this episode is Dr Rupert Read.  He's an academic, author, agitator and activist, and used to be one...

It's all very well demanding that everything happens NOW, but we're actually going to do - or not - about climate change is all about negotiation.  What happens inside those fusty negotiating halls?  How does one negotiate well and get what one wants, whether on climate or things more domestic? And does the climate have the time for us to negotiate our way out of a paper bag? Joining Dav...

Yup, buzz-buzz-swat-buggers. Now, I can't guarantee you're going to come out of this one in love with flies (and fleas), but maybe you'll think a wee bit differently about 'em. About what we need to do to our brains to make small buzzing things our chums, not our nemesis. And why needing to do it is pretty dang essential for not wiping out everything that lives, including ourse...

Yes you probably WOULD walk by on the other side, wouldn't you, and don't say you wouldn't, because you would.  Alas, a trio of brain wirings add up to the so-called Bystander Effect: our tendency to stand in a crowd of people watching someone flail in a canal, hoping it's not us that has to get our frock wet to jump in and save them.  In this episode Dave learns all about the...

Time travel! No not like Marty McFly, but in our heads.  Backwards via memories, albeit imperfectly. And forwards, to make plans for the future and think about all the ways they could go wrong and then make new plans and then etc.  Foresight is profoundly human and completely innate to your brain: just try and sit still with your thoughts for a bit, and you'll see how often you think about wh...

All I need to say to you is "Your Brain on Climate is a lovely cake of a podcast" and you'll drool and tell all your friends to subscribe immediately.  Or something. No look: our brains LOVE metaphors. We think in stories and our brains like making connections between different ideas to make sense of the world - particularly things we can't always touch and feel, like climate c...

We play when we're kids to try new things and learn how the world works, and when we think no-one's looking we do it as adults too. Play's  important for our development and so you should probably do it or you'll turn out a wrong'un. But Dave's guest today says play is also a way to smash the Very Serious Rules of how to think about climate change - rules the followin...

Right then. Everything you perceive - including what climate change is to you -  is a construction of your brain.  And your brain is winging it.  That's the reality of human consciousness, and everything I thought it was is completely wrong. So how do our brains perceive things, like buses? Are there even buses? (Yes, there are buses.) Have our conscious noggins evolved enough to cope with th...

We love it when someone gets what's coming to them - whether it's an individual we know personally and dislike, someone from a group we hate, or someone we just generally think is a wrong'un. That's schadenfreude - literally, "joy damage". Grubby, wonderful feeling. But what does schadenfreude do for us, psychologically? Is it a good and useful thing or a harmful thin...

When things get scary, we like hero(+ine)s. We kind of automatically create them - like there was always a hero-shaped hole in our stories that was just waiting for someone to pop into. Why? Are we really hardwired to look for heroes? Do they all wear capes? And for something as complex and fiddly and *wibbles hands expansively in the air* as climate change, is it a good or a bad thing that we cas...

What disgusts you? For starters, I bet, other people's oozings, or rotten meat, or other such things that hint at the Unclean. But you might also say corruption, or pollution. Or a particular politician, or a group of people. Or perhaps... even climate change itself? It's one of our most base, guiding emotional responses to the world, so in this episode we find out all about disgust -  h...

We are the places we live, and the places we live are us. Places made by oil, coal, and gas, by roads, and by industry.  Where the choices we make about what to feel and where to go are  shaped by the very things that are at the heart of the climate crisis. Eek. Psychogeography's about turning left when you're supposed to go right. Going into nuclear exclusion zones when you're not...

An episode all about one of the weirdest but most important of all human brain-oddnesses: pluralistic ignorance. When you think something and lots of other people also think that thing but none of you think anyone else agrees with you, so nothing changes. Got that? Dave is joined by Professor Deborah Prentice from Princeton University to get his noggin around this deeply human trait. On the menu:...

Being alive can be a lonely business, as can trying to do something about climate change. But how important to our brains is connecting with others?  And in our individualised world, might we be hugely undervaluing the importance of interpersonal connection in helping society take meaningful and effective action on climate change? Joining Dave this week is coach, facilitator, and expert in the gro...

Ever found yourself yelling at someone you love and thinking: hang on, what are we even fighting about? Or embroiled in a blood-pressure-raising ding-dong with a climate denier, which only succeeds in making you both hate each other even more than you did to start with?  Conflict: some of us find it easy, and some of us (like Dave) very difficult.  It has its own momentum and its own rules. What i...

Everything changes and everything stays the same. Imagine being a squishy human brain trying to navigate that. Add on a barrage of advertising and social norms about what 'novelty' looks like, and no wonder it's so hard to make sense of what we might really want to change in our lives. And then there's climate change. There's a clue in the name: it means Different. Are we...

When we lose someone or something we love, our brains want to grieve. Why?  What's going on when grieve - when we do it well, or don't do it properly?  Is it grief we feel when we see huge forest fires or melting ice caps caused by climate change? And if it is - where do we put that grief, in a society that doesn't recognise it? This week Dave speaks to the wonderfully kind and clev...

Food: yum! It keeps us alive and keeps our brains healthy (or unhealthy, all-too-often). And the food that we eat - what it is and where it comes from - is one of the most important things we're going to have to get right when it comes to climate change.    Kind of a problem then that there are very few things about which we're quite so uppity and strange.  Food is drenched in cultural m...