Your Brain On Climate

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 qui…

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 ma…

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 doe…

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 …

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, incl…

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 rh…

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 chang…

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 …

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 els…

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 la…

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…

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, l…

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? …

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 …

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…

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 th…

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 metaphor…

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…

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 everyt…