Dave Powell
Your Brain On ClimateEpisodes
Episodes of Your Brain On Climate
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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'
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 u
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
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"
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 individual
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.
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, an
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 en
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 clim
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
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
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
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
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
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 ma
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
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
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". Grub
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 a
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
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 cl
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 nothi
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 interperson
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 t
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
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