Your Brain On Climate

If you've ever caught yourself writing off a  group of people with a simple and dismissive description of why they do what they do - or been thusly written off yourself - then you'll be familiar with 'thin description'. It's a bad way to learn what makes someone tick and probably annoys them as well. So instead, here's the idea of 'thick description': proper...

I am good. I protest. I save people. I must save the world - now.  If this even slightly feels like something you've told yourself, then this episode is for you.  Author and campaigner Anthea Lawson's brilliant new book is called How Not To Save The World . It's about the 'script' that activists - including her - tell ourselves, often without realising it. From this script...

When's the last time you were bored? Thanks to our phones, it's easier than ever to be distracted, stimulated, and fed attention calories of varying quality so you never have to worry about being bored again. But what do we miss when we live life without giving ourselves time not to do anything at all?  In this Micro episode, I revisit my chat from 2024 with broadcaster Simon Mundie , re...

In this episode I go for a walk in the woods with a former airline pilot who packed it in because of his climate anxiety. Joel Walker flew for years but could never quite ignore the state of the planet - like the forest fires and melting glaciers he could see from his cockpit. Eventually, in 2025, the cognitive dissonance got too much and Joel left flying forever.   As we natter through the trees...

Would you rather have a fiver today or a tenner this time next year? That kind of calculation is called 'discounting', and the more you'd rather have the fiver today, the more you are discounting the future.  Humans are hardwired to lean towards getting things now, unless the deal is sufficiently sweet.  That preference makes sense when you evolved to not know where your next antelo...

Climate change is REALLY SCARY, right, but that doesn't mean you have to wibble helplessly in the corner. While the go-to currency of most climate awareness campaigns is ' hope ' – does fear get a bad press? It turns out fear is a great motivator of climate action too, as long as we learn how to use its power for good, not the dark side. After all, if you think climate change isn&ap...

A few years ago I learned the Dutch word ' goedprater ': the excuses we give to justify something to others, which we can barely justify to ourselves. I do it all the time and I bet you do too, whether it's not going for that run you planned (ow, leg suddenly hurt) or caring about climate change but taking loads of flights (well, they were just going to go anyway, right?)  In this m...

Hope! What is it good for? (Absolutely every'thin).  We ain't doing much about the climate crisis without it. Movements are founded on it, and most campaigns are about wanting us to feel it. Which is exhilarating for those who feel it most urgently - but what about everyone else?  The good news is it turns out there are lots of different ways to have climate hope, even ones that might no...

Your brain is literally made of the food you eat. And *how* you eat it - slowly, or wolfed down at your desk - will affect how well you digest it. So way before any of the psychology stuff, getting a proper lunch might be the most important way to start getting your brain to be useful, in doing something about climate change.  In this micro episode, I revisit my chat with the brilliant Kimberley W...

The history of humans arguing about climate change is often just people throwing large numbers at each other. So it's time for an episode about how we think about numbers, why our brains are prone to falling for dodgy sums dressed up as facts, and how we can all learn to maths up a bit.   Joining me on this episode is Rob Eastaway - maths author, cricket nerd, and all round nice bloke. You mi...

I recently had the honour of being interviewed about what I've learned from 4+ years of doing this show - about human brains vs the climate crisis and how to bring them closer together.  This is me on the Climate Magic podcast, under the benign grill of Sarah Jaquette Ray, herself very much not a slouch in the 'being clever about climate psychology' stakes.  I hope you like.  If you...

Brain-eating amoebae are only the start of it. Just you wait until Clayton Aldern talks you through the ways big and small that climate change is changing what it means to be you. From your mood to your expectations and even your mental model of the whole world - your consciousness itself, for Chrissakes - Clayton explains with brilliant clarity how your brain is  climate.  Clayton Page Aldern is...

Happy New Year! And before your resolutions crumble into ash, here's a short episode about why change is hard - but yet it's the only thing we ever really do.  Back in 2021 I chatted to Andrew Simms about change: how humans constantly trip the fandango between wanting to upend everything, and to keep things exactly the same. Tragedies are written about it. And yet in a world where it can...

Predicting the weather is really hard, not least because of all those butterflies in the Amazon flapping their wings about. So an even-vaguely-right forecast is a scientific marvel and a masterclass in risk communication. And how people do and don't take it in is a similarly fascinating dive into human brains and how they deal (or don't) with uncertainty.   But these days you can't...

A new campaign, the National Emergency Briefing, thinks (rightly) there's a climate emergency going on. They want Keir Starmer to go on TV and tell the nation, like Boris did with Covid. But would that work? Do people think about climate change the same as other types of 'emergency'?  In this Micro episode I chat to climate comms guru Adam Corner about the similarities - and differe...

There's a vast online universe where men hang out and hate on women. This is the 'Manosphere', a place home to hucksters, spivs, scam artists and some of the worst humans alive.  But it's also a honeytrap for millions of lost boys simply looking for a story about the world that makes sense. You start out looking for fitness tips or how to get a girlfriend. You end up believing...

It's Halloween, when everyone is allowed to be strange for a day. A good time to ask: like the best ghost stories, why does climate change sometimes feel so uncanny? And what happens when the world we take for granted starts to feel ... haunted?  In this Micro episode, a snippet of my 2021 chat with psychogeographer and author, Philippa Holloway. You can listen to the full interview here or i...

Well... is it? Nearly half of young people say the future of the planet brings them mental distress. Not just young people either. More and more people of all ages are feeling something that feels like the thing we call climate anxiety. And for good reason: things not very brill, planet-wise.   But is climate anxiety something distinct from other worries? Is it just the latest snowflakey expressio...

Climate change: fast in a geological sense, but slow in a second-by-second human-perception sense. Our brains stop paying attention to things that change (relatively) slowly. This is 'change blindness' - and it's why we need laws and leadership that prioritise our shifting climate, because our brains struggle to.  In this MICRO episode, a snippet of my 2022 chat with neuroscientist...

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...