Your Brain On Climate
A show about climate change and climate psychology. But sideways. Explore human brains doing amazing or awful things, learn why, then see what it means for the planet.
Episodes
77 episodes
Biophilia, with Lauren Hall Ruddell
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 environmen...
(Dis)trusting Climate Science, with Laur Hesse Fisher
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 b...
We, with Jonathan Rowson
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 th...
Behaviour Change, with Lorraine Whitmarsh
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 indiv...
Endurance, with Damian Hall
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 activ...
Liberalism, with Christopher Shaw
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...
Decolonisation, with Ayesha Siddiqi
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 mo...
Comedy, with Stuart Goldsmith
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...
Honesty, with Rupert Read
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 ca...
Negotiation, with Camilla Born
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 ge...
Flies (and Fleas), with Erica McAlister
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...
Bystander Effect, with Gerdien de Vries
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 som...
Foresight, with Adam Bulley
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.
Metaphor, with Simon Lancaster
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 b...
Play, with Lucy Hawthorne
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. <...
Consciousness, with Anil Seth
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 i...
Schadenfreude, with Aaron Balick
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...
(Super)Heroes, with Al Kennedy
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...
Disgust, with Yoel Inbar
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...
Psychogeography, with Philippa Holloway
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...
Pluralistic Ignorance, with Deborah Prentice
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...
Connection, with Alison Crowther
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 interp...
Conflict, with Ian Leslie
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...