Your Brain On Climate

I'm afraid that you are going to die. Sorry. You can imagine afterlives and  amass great hordes of wealth, but you're still made of human stuff, and thus will die. Humanity's inability to get its head around this most inconvenient of truths is probably behind most of the silly pointless stuff we do, from rampant consumption to wars to spaceships to conjuring up Gods.  Joining me on...

Thing about humans is, we like to look on the bright side of life. Without optimism, we'd not have evolved out of the trees in the first place.   Our species has optimism bias. But we're all different, and some of us are a little bit too wired to be over-optimistic - and vice versa. This has big impacts for the messages we see about climate change.  In this MICRO episode, a snippet of my...

Climate change sucks, not least when it causes violence - which it does more than you'd think. In a hundred ways it can add stress and trauma to brains already under huge pressure, and when that's all finally a bit much - well, the worse demons of our nature can, and do, come out.  Grim. But are we doomed? Does it have to be like that? Can environmental peacebuilding turn climate violenc...

Comedy opens the mind and helps us cope with the sheer strangeness of being alive. But is climate change a suitable topic for comedy? In this micro episode of Your Brain on Climate, I chat to Stuart Goldsmith - stand-up par excellence and host of the Comedian's Comedian podcast - about what he's learned from trying to to do jokes about the state of the planet.  If you liked this episode,...

How should you bring up baby in the age of climate breakdown? Should you tell them what's happening or not? And given how messed up is the planet we're passing on - is it even fair to *have* kids?  In a YBOC first this episode is a 3-way chat. Dave meets Nina Alexandersen and Sophia Cheng - respectively someone who became a climate activist through fear for her kid's future, and som...

We vote in our self interest, right? So how come people living on islands disappearing because of climate change - and they know it - keep voting for Donald Trump?  The answer to that goes to the heart of our climate politics. But it also tells us something very important about how different people think about climate change and what should be done about it, even when they can see it literally kil...

I'm out in the garden looking for that pile of jobby I found the other day, and it made me think back to my chat in episode 17 with Erica McAlister all about flies (and fleas).  Erica is the London Natural History Museum's expert on all things dipeteric (flies) and siphonapteric (fleas), and an extremely funny and nice person too.  Reaching for that fly-killer? WAIT A MINUTE. Must we cal...

An episode all about the subtle art of talking bollocks.  We live in a golden age of bullshit. It can seem that our politics is riddled with it. Corporate climate communications are drenched in it. And despite the looming eco-crisis, perhaps our own brains are too.  In this episode, Dave meets author Mike Berners-Lee to chew over his new book, A Climate of Truth . It's a brilliant balance of...

In this bite-sized edition we look back at perhaps my favouritest episode ever - episode 9 about disgust, with Yoel Inbar.  We all have a gag reflex. But when we find people - like polluters - disgusting, are we feeing *actually* disgusted, or is it just a metaphor? What about how we might feel about things like climate change itself? Does it make us want, literally, to vom? If you like the show p...

An episode all about cognitive dissonance.  Ever feel like there are two yous in the same head? The one that cares about the planet, and the one that doesn't act like it does? And that having two yous makes at least one of your yous freak out? You (and you) are not alone.  Welcome to cognitive dissonance. As Walt Whitman wrote: you contain multitudes. It's a feature, not a bug, of being...

In this YBOC microdose, a hark back to my inspirational chat with ultrarunner and climate activist Damian Hall , who dispensed his wisdom about how to keep up the slog - advice that's as useful for changing the world as it is for running up that hill.  Sorting climate change is the definition of a marathon, not a sprint. It particularly feels that way right now. What we need is ENDURANCE, and...

Or: why we all hear what we want to hear, and disregard the rest. Confirmation bias is hardwired into human brains, and without it we'd never get through our day. But it doesn't half get us - and the planet - into trouble sometimes.  In this episode Dave learns all about confirmation bias from the splendid Professor Adam Harris  off of University College London.  Learn about how casinos...

Why is social change so hard - particularly right now? Part of the reason lies in pluralistic ignorance - the social phenomena that helps to explains everything from imposter syndrome to slow progress on climate change.  In this micro episode, we explore a nugget of insight from Professor Deborah Prentice - currently vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and at the time of our chat back in 2021,...

We're reasonably good at imagining what nuclear war would be like (although it'd probably be even worse than that).  But it's not the same for most other complicated, really really scary risks. Eg: the UK government is still not taking seriously the risk of another pandemic - and that's despite the fact we LITERALLY JUST HAD ONE, GUYS.   And it's the same for climate chang...

If you want someone to change their mind, it's best if they persuade themselves. And they're much more likely to do that if they actually *do* something new, rather than just pathetically feeling like they *should*. There's nothing like getting yer metaphorical hands dirty to show you you can do things you never thought you could  - from bleeding radiators to leading climate marches...

Common sense? Ain't nothing common about it. Populists - like Donald Trump - love to appeal to  'common sense', while pushing ideas as contentious as they come.  But what does  Trump get right about how he talks to people about big ideas - and what can everyone else learn from it?   And what does all this mean for how to talk about something as complex and polarised as climate chang...

Is climate science 'neutral'? Should it be? Are humans even capable of being neutral about anything? In this new-format episode, I dig into accusations that climate scientists risk undermining their work by going on climate marches. Can that really be true? Doesn't the scientific method speak for itself? And is it realistic to expect people to spend all day immersed in awful data, a...

When it gets hot, we all get a bit stroppy: think 'shouting at people on the internet' stroppy. But that's only the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Too much heat can trigger or make worse a range of mental health conditions. And what does climate change bring? More heat.  So what are the mental health implications of rising global temperatures?  Joining Dave this episode is Dr Alessan...

Time. You work on a human timescale, but the planet doesn't.  Sometimes we can think long term but mostly real life gets in the way: but the decisions we collectively take will have a huge impact on life on Earth now, and for generations to come.  What are the biases that peg us to short term thinking? How can we shift our perspective to the day after tomorrow, and how can that help everyday...

You are so much more lucky than you think, even if you think you're not. Most of us are dead proud of the good things we've done, and we tell ourselves how hard we have worked and how much we deserve it. But unfortunately we don't. This also works the other way round: we are never as much to blame for our 'failures' as we think. Thing is most things in life are down to luc...

Well you SAY you care about climate change, but you don't, do you? There's you, driving a car (!!!)  or not putting that plastic bottle in the recycling (!!!!!).  There's you, saying you value the planet, but acting like you JUST DON'T CARE. You and me and everyone else. The gulf between our values and actions is large you could drive an SUV through it.  This is the 'value...

Mindfulness: a technique for training your brain to reflect on what it thinks and why.  It can help us make smarter decisions, and can even get the House of Commons to stop shouting at each other quite so much.  Magic! But can it save the planet?  Today's guest is Jamie Bristow, co-founder of the Mindfulness Initiative - an amazing organisation bringing the technique to the heart of policy an...

Or: how chinwags can save the world. Imagine I could give you a superpower. The ability to make people trust you who currently don't. To help them change their own mind, on their own terms. And to maybe even heal society, perhaps just a little bit. WELL I CAN. It's called 'having a grown up conversation', and it's perhaps the most underrated thing we can all do about clima...

So much of our silly short lives is spent chasing after trophies or money or glory. Success! But it's never really enough. We just want more trophies and more more money and one day we die and so does everything else, the end. As a culture, we've got success wrong. Today's guest says we should instead see success as learning to lose ourselves in things - whether that's playing...

Frazzled? Go for a walk in the woods. It'll calm you down, fill your nose with lovely smells, and reset your eyes to room temperature. But why?  According to today's guest, humans evolved to need to chill out in natural environments. It gives us nice chemicals like serotonin, is good for long term mental health, and generally resets our stress alarms. This is the idea of Biophilia, and i...