How does the world around us shape our brains and how can healthier brains create a healthier world?
This is the question at the core of this conversation with Dr. Burçin Ikiz, from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Dr. Ikiz is a neuroscientist working at the intersection of brain health, climate change, planetary health, and global health policy.
She is the founder of the Neuro Climate Working Group, an international, interdisciplinary collaboration with over 500 members that just published a new study on brain health and our changing climate, which we break down for you in this episode of Climate Magic.
Shownotes:
- Neuro Climate Working Group’s September 2026 report on how climate is changing our brains
- Burçin’s website: https://burcinikiz.com/
- Frederica Perera’s study on fetal health in Harlem and Krakow
- Joshua Carleton’s research on climate anxiety, salience networks, and collective action
- Tamma Carleton’s research on air pollution and suicide rates
- R. Jisung Park’s book Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of Global Warming
Instagram: @burcinikiz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/burcin-ikiz-phd-78990117/
TRANSCRIPT:
Burcin Ikiz: We know how resilient nature can be. After fires we see how these little buds of greenery come from the Earth, of the ashes, and so on. And just like that, our brains are really resilient, and they can redo the damage that's done.
Sarah Ray: Welcome to Climate Magic, a show where we explore the messy, human side of climate politics. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, an author and a professor of Environmental Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt.
How does the world around us shape our brains? And how can healthier brains create a healthier world? This is the question at the core of my guest this week's research and life purpose. Dr. Burcin Ikiz joins me today to talk about neurological health and climate change. In other words, how climate affects our brains and how our brains shape what we can do about the climate.
Dr. Ikiz is a neuroscientist working at the intersection of brain health, climate change, planetary health, and global health policy. For more than two decades, Dr. Ikiz has explored the brain from multiple perspectives. From the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases to the effects of air pollution, extreme heat, wildfires, urban environments, and other ecological stressors on brain development, cognition, mental health, and aging.
She works to translate scientific discoveries into practical solutions that can strengthen public health, inform policy, and inspire collective action.
Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Stat, Psychology Today, and other international media outlets. She has spoken at the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, TEDx, the World Bank, and scientific organizations worldwide. In 2025, she was named a Grist 50 Climate Leader.
I suppose it's not surprising that a neuroscientist like Burcin seems to have a million synapses firing all at once. That's how it felt to be in conversation with her. You'll see. Let's dive in.
Hi, Burçin. Welcome to the show.
Burcin Ikiz: Oh, thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
Sarah Ray: Can you start by giving us a story or an example of something that you're seeing in your field so that people who aren't familiar with your field can say, "Oh, this is what's alive for Burçin these days. This is what she's doing in her work."
Burcin Ikiz: Yeah, sure. So I'm a neuroscientist, and I started my career a little more than 20 years ago and was really encapsulated by the idea of brains and how fascinating they are. But wanted to... In wanting to understand more about it, I want to dig deep into brain health. What brain health means what a healthy brain is because I am a big believer of science is really important, but science should be for humanity.
So from the very beginning, for me, in my fascination with the brains, it was the idea of, well, I want to understand brain health, so I can help people who are struggling with health issues, who have certain neurological or psychiatric diseases. I want to be able to find cures for them. I want to be able to provide healthy brains for everybody.
And with that, I started my career as a PhD student. I started research as an undergraduate student, then as a PhD student, looking into diving deep into some of the neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. And at the time, my professor was like, oh, well, if you want to understand brain health, you have to find the neurons, isolate them, and look them under a microscope and really understand what's happening to these neurons? Why are they dying?
And if you can understand that, then you can solve the brain health problem. And that was the understanding. So I spent 10 years, 12 years under microscopes in the dark with, like, little dishes full of little neurons. But as the field progress and also my career and my understanding, I realized actually neurons are just one part of the puzzle because neurons don't live in isolation, even in our brains, they're surrounded by other neurals, they're surrounded by these non-neuronal cells called glial cells. They live in an ecosystem.
And our brains are not living in isolation. They're not islands. They're connected to the rest of our bodies, whether it's the gut-brain axis, it's the lungs, and our body is living in an environment, whether it's a natural environment, whether it's a built environment, whether it's a social environment, cultural environment, political environment, and they're all helping shape our brains. And so I think that's where that's the biggest part of my work, and I think the field of neuroscience is moving on to now, understanding how important the environments are in shaping our brains and how important our brains are in shaping the environments we live in. And so that's the part of the work I'm very excited about.
Sarah Ray: Yes, I love that. Do you have an example or, like, a story of your moment where you thought, Aha, I really need to broaden my net to think about including the environment? Was there a moment where you're like, wait, hang on. The neurons in the petri dish are not going to do it. [laughter]
Burcin Ikiz: Yes, yes, absolutely. I think it was my understanding. Through my work, I get to meet with a lot of people, a lot of patients with different neurological disorders. And there was one time and it's so fascinating to me as a neuroscientist, I was dedicating my life to understanding diseases, and I had met very little patients actually with the disease because we just think, oh, we understand everything about the brains just by looking at the neurons. But if you cannot really actually meet the people who have the disease or people who care for the people with these diseases, how can you really say you understand the disease? And I felt like there was a big missing point and meeting more people with these disorders and their caregivers, their family members, it started making me think about, you know, we're looking so much onto these genetic changes that happen, make someone more vulnerable, having the disease and so on. But sometimes you get two siblings, they have the kind of the same genetic makeup. They live more or less in the same environments, but one of them gets the disease and one doesn't. And what differentiates that? And that kind of made me get out of this genetic mindset and be like, well, let's actually look at what their lifestyles look like, what kind of real environments they were in.
And that was, for me, an epiphany, thinking about more generally about environments. And getting into climate change from that was in a very personal way. It was about five, six years ago, just having young children, and my oldest son, who was a kindergartner at the time, we spent the pandemic during the pandemic when everything was closed. And I had very young children. They were, I think, one and three, and everything was closed. As you remember, daycares are closed, schools are closed. Even-- I lived in Los Angeles at the time. Even the children's parks were closed. And playgrounds were close. So I was like, what am I going to do with these kids at home? And there's no help, no nothing. So I just started taking them out to nature and to the beach. And that grew a big fascination in my children and in myself in appreciating how amazing our nature is and the animals in it. And so my children grew up with this love of nature that I didn't get to experience because I grew up in a big city in Istanbul, at the center of Istanbul, Turkey, one of the most populated cities in the world. So my childhood was all buildings, cement buildings, and traffic, and so on.
So with them, I get to experience this amazing childhood of appreciation of nature. And one time, I was walking my son back from elementary school. He was a kindergartener. And he asked me what climate change was. And I explained to him a little bit, and I said, you know, what it means to animals, to nature. And as you can imagine, it really upset him. And my maternal instinct immediately seeing how upset he got was, well, you know, there are a lot of people who are doing something about climate change, so it doesn't come to that point where we lose all these amazing animals and the nature is devastated. And we can do something too. Let's go home, and let's think about what we can do together. We went home, and we got a piece of paper and some markers, and my son started drawing this island, and he put all his favorite animals on it and said, This is the island, I'm going to put kind of like a Noah's ark. The animals were holding little signs saying, "Save the planet" and "protect the oceans". And that kind of got me into thinking about what can I do in this space?
This is really important for us, for our children, and what can I do? What a neuroscientist? How can I most meaningfully contribute to this action? And I said, Well, I studied the brain. Let me see what you know about the interaction between the brain and climate change. And when I looked, I just couldn't find any scientific evidence. I couldn't find any scientists looking into this particular question. And I realized there was a big gap here, and I said, Okay, maybe I'm going to focus on this from now on. That kind of started my journey into this way.
Sarah Ray: I think it's so amazing. I love the story that your kids experience, well, first of all, you have this one layer where during COVID, your love of nature actually, the kids were the portal, right? The kids helped you do that. You sort of vicariously found love of nature through your children's love of nature. I, too, have found that as well, in my own children raising, and I had kids, little ones, a kindergartner and a-- oh-my-gosh, third grader in COVID. So I'm feeling you, you know.
And also, I was raised in Los Angeles. So I also have that memory of, like, this is the built environment and automobile eccentricity of that town is so intense, that almost everything that I have come to think of as an environmental ethic was not-- was the opposite of what I grew up around. So that's so right there with you, right? So then I got to be an adult with my kids. This is the way for me, too. But then you thought to yourself, how can as a neurologist, how can-- I'm not going to just reinvent myself into a climate activist or a climate politician. I'm going to take the thing I already do really well. I heard you say that, right? Like, I already have this thing, I'm a neurologist. What is the neurology touchpoint, Neuroscientist touchpoint with climate change? And when you found nothing in that field, you thought, okay, I'm going to fill that gap. That can be my climate magic. That can be my work that I do. And so I just love that story, how the kids it's all the kids' fault they did that to you, and figure out you can say to your kid every day, I'm doing it every day now. It's not just something that, you know, we think about when we go out in nature, you know, we're living and breathing and working on it now.
So that's a beautiful story, and I love that. It's also so inspiring for people to figure out. Yeah, you don't have to reinvent yourself to do something for the climate. So, this is-- so this is what happened to the field. Since then, since that moment that you found nothing in the field, what has happened? Tell us where the field is now.
Burcin Ikiz: Yes, yes, absolutely. And, you know, I have to say, that was specifically in the neuroscience field. There was nothing happening, and that kind of led me get out of-- We scientists love our little fields and been going really deep, kind of like the ostriches put our head down into earth and really dig deep and don't realize that there's a whole different world out there. And so, it helped me get out of my field and talk to-- talk to other people from different fields about this. I found an incredible epidemiologist who's been studying what air pollution does to children's brains, and then I get to find a psychologist who's studying how spending time in nature is so good for our cognition and mental health and so on and so forth.
And realize when I started looking outside of my field, there were actually a lot of people really caring about this one piece of that big puzzle. But for us to be able to solve this puzzle, we have to come together. And that's where the Neuroclimate working group idea came about, in realizing this is not something we can solve on our own. And we have to come from different disciplines, and most importantly, different geographies and different backgrounds. And so I started the group about 2.5 years ago in the efforts of, let's try to understand what climate change does to our brains. When I say brain health, we encompass everything that pertains to the brain. It's an umbrella term from children and fetal brain development, to cognition, memory, attention, to mental health, to brain aging, and neurological health, psychiatric health. It encompasses everything.
And so, we need people from coming from different backgrounds. And we all feel now the effects of climate change. But as you well know, too, it's not equally. So how do we bring also voices from different places into the store trying to understand what's happening, how we find solutions to it? So now we started with maybe 20 people 2.5 years ago, and our group grew in an incredible speed and pace, and now we have about 500 members from 66 different countries, like, the only psychiatrist from Mauritania, or a neurosurgeon from Malaysia, or the head of neuroscience department in Chile. It's a really incredible international group meeting monthly, sharing knowledge, doing collaborations, and really trying to find out what we know, what we don't know, and how we can protect our brains in a changing climate.
Sarah Ray: Yes, and leverage them better to address the climate.
Burcin Ikiz: Yes. Yes, exactly. It's a two way thing, right? For healthy brains, you need a healthy planet, healthy climate. But for a healthy planet, you have to have healthy, functioning brains that can make good decisions, act collaboratively. So it's a two way street. Yeah.
Sarah Ray: I love that you mentioned at the beginning, too, that a two way streetness of it. And I think so oftentimes the discourse around climate health impacts has to do with this one way street. What we see in the news, what we see so much discussion around is how does climate impact X, right? How does climate impact your brain? How does climate impact your mental health? How does climate impact-- you know, that's sort of the one way street. Like, climate is going to impact our brains in this way, and then all of a sudden, we're down some awful apocalyptic path, and we're thinking, Oh, no. But that other side of the story of how whether or not healthy brains are affecting, you know, are necessary in order for us to be able to do the work that's required to address climate changes, is maybe a little bit of a stickier kind of a field or it's less talked about in the main discourse.
So I love that you bring them both in there. That was so beautiful. But-- So the Neuroclimate Working Group, that's something you started 2.5 years ago. It's now got over 500 people in it, all across the world. You are having this, you know, these big interdisciplinary conversations between the connections between brain health and climate. You mentioned different populations are affected by this differently. Are there unique impacts or possibilities to go on that both way street thing, that different populations that you really feel like the group is trying to draw some attention to, or you really want to draw some attention to, who's affected-- whose brains are affected most by climate change that are often not-- maybe not discussed in mainstream conversations about climate change?
Burcin Ikiz: Yes, absolutely. So, you know, our brains are really fascinating because they're very plastic, but the plasticity has its limits. I think the most vulnerable populations we know now are fetuses and children because their brains develop so fast. I mean, within the first 3 to 4 years of life, our brains do incredible amounts of connections with each other and to learn, and there's incredible amount of plasticity going on. And within-- and after those times, the brain starts going into a refining period, you actually lose almost half of your connections, and rewire yourself because it's all about, okay, which is information is important enough to keep for the rest of my life? And then the body continues wiring, rewiring, the brain continues rewiring and wiring itself for the rest of the time. We know even during late stages of life, we still have some neur- regeneration happens and so on, but it's not at the level of it happens in children.
So that's a very critical point because also, their bodies are developing at the same time, too. So the immune-- there's a lot going on in our immune systems. The immune systems developing because even from, for example, when we think about air pollution impacts, because of their sizes, and the amount of breathing they do, they're just more prone to the health impacts coming from air pollution exposure. So definitely children and fetuses, even so you don't even have to be born.
We have this incredible professor in our group, Professor Frederica Perera at Columbia, the University. For the last 30 years, she has been studying, she started studying in the 1990s in Harlem, New York, and Kraków, Poland. The pregnant women, who have been exposed to air pollution because both Kraków and Harlem at the time had really bad air pollution problem. And she was really interested what happened to their babies afterwards. And what she had found was these babies were born more prematurely, and at a lower weight, which is really important effector of their development later stages of life. And these babies, when they came out, the structure of their brains were different than the babies that were born in the healthier environments. And they had they learned to talk later, walk later. They had higher risk of being diagnosed with certain neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD and autism.
Nowadays, you know, these children became young adults and so on. They have higher incidences of mental health problems as well. So you may think it's like, Oh, just prenatally. They don't even have to be born to be really impacted. It affects their lives across their lifespan and even intergenerational. We can now understanding air pollutioning paths, maybe even going down three generations down the line. So, that makes us have to really think, even small amount of exposure can have really long term effects on our brain health afterwards.
Sarah Ray: Yeah, I think a lot of people think of climate change being about big storms, or El Nino patterns, or hurricanes, or rising sea levels, or even wildfires. We're not really-- people don't really think of it in that way, right? Like that the increased air pollution, and its effects on fetus brains and bodies, and the sort of cumulative over multiple generations effects of what that kind of adds up to. How that can diminish quality of life, health, longevity, all kinds of outcomes, not to mention mental health and all the, you know, maybe GDP consequences of that, which, you know, are sort of the language of capitalism, saying, Can we put dollar sign on that so maybe we can start caring about it, you know?
Um, which, of course, I think is silly, but I'm just pointing out that's sort of oftentimes how it happens, right? I feel like we need to maybe step back a second, even before we think about how certain populations are more vulnerable to neurological impacts of climate change and ask the question, what does climate change do to the brain? What are we talking about here? We're talking about you just mentioned air pollution. But what other kinds of, let's say-- let's use some other synonyms for climate change, you know, what is it doing to our brain, climate change? I think it's a really complicated question now that we've just said, what the heck is climate change anyway?
Burcin Ikiz: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, your question comes at a perfect time, because for the last two years since we formed a group, one of the first things we wanted to do was, all right, let's show people how much evidence already is around what climate change does to our brains. And we've been just revising and collecting and adding onto the existing evidence, and prepared this report that will be um, publishing in just mid-September, so in just a couple of weeks. And where we divide it into what we talk about climate change related environmental factors. So there's excessive heat, there's air pollution, there is extreme weather events, which includes wildfires and hurricanes and floods and all kinds of different disasters.
There is vector borne diseases because we know there's a lot more spread of the vector borne disease, and that can have huge neurological conditions coincidences, as well. And as well as water soil contamination, food insecurity, and malnutrition because they can really, especially on a developing brain, not having enough water, not having enough nutrients, can be-- can cause brain stunting and a lot of other developmental factors.
So we got those six factors, and we were able to get all the evidence we could collect in that space that will be coming out soon. And what we had found, the most data we have around that is around excessive heat and some other extreme weather events, including air pollution. And excessive heat, what we know is quite interesting.
So our brains work the best when they're in a certain environment and a certain temperature, and anything that deviates from that, our brain is actually very sensitive to it and sees it as a stress response. So it starts releasing a state of stress, the communication between the neuron sites getting impaired. And this kind of slows down on our functioning. So we know, for example, right after big heat waves, children's cognitive scores or test scores go down.
There's much more on heat waves, there's much more violence, and crimes happening because the emotional regulation systems in our brains just don't function well. We don't sleep well, right? I'm sure everybody knows the feeling of not being able to sleep well and then being really cranky the next day. And, um, They even looked at the certain judges, how their decision process was right after heat waves, and they saw that they made much tougher judiciary decisions after heat waves versus on the night where they had a great, cool, nice, cool sleep.
So it does affect quite a bit of our lives, and we know that drink long. If you're someone with an existing neurological or psychiatric conditions such as epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, or you have to take antipsychotics for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, you become much more sensitive to heat and you have increased symptoms. There's a lot of hospitalizations happens due to seizures, stroke, dementia, MS attacks, and so on. During this time, suicide rates go up. So there's a lot of-- a lot of health outcomes we see after even a short period of couple days of heat waves.
Um, and similarly, when an extreme-- and interestingly, one thing we had found more mechanistically happens is that we have this really beautiful protective layer to between our brain and the body called the blood brain barrier, that is supposed to be kind of protect the brain from anything that harmful that might be coming from the blood.
But it's not a perfect barrier, it's not a perfect system. For certain individuals, especially the aging population or people with certain neurological conditions, those barriers may be more permeable. And what heat exposure does is that it makes, again, the barrier much more permeable, open it up, it’s porous..
And so at the same time, if you are exposed to more air pollution, let's say we're talking about wildfires, right? We live in California. On the really hot dry days, we have much more increased risk of having wildfires. So now all of a sudden comes the wildfire smoke and all the horrible things with it, anywhere from a pm 2.5 pollutants to now we know microplastics.
I mean, we lived in Los Angeles when the big fires happened last year, and get to see what kind of materials were in those fires because it was an urban wildfire. And now you have this normally really nice barrier that's supposed to protect the brain, but it's because it's hot, it's more open. And so more pollutants or inflammatory signals coming into the brain, causes more inflammation, and that causes actually the neurons to die. And we see even after wildfire smoke, increased stroke hospitalizations, dementia rates go up.
Now, actually, air pollution is considered one of the main modifiable risk factors for dementia, Parkinson's stroke, and it affects children's cognition, long term learning. And these are just the more neurological side. There's also, of course, psychological stress that comes from experiencing extreme weather event. And we know from the studies that have done with our colleagues in UCSD, even two years after an event such as a wildfire happens, when you look at how their cognition is doing in these populations, their cognition is still impaired, even like years after this passes. And if you have a repeated exposure, the effects get even worse. So if you go to experience another wildfire again, which, you know, in our history, we're going to seeing more and more, you may have these effects much more pronounced. Yeah.
Sarah Ray: You-- I could listen to you all day because this is so interesting to me. I'm fascinated. You're so smart. So fun. I'm just sitting here absorbing all of this like a sponge, and also sort of trying to keep breathing because it's sort of horrifying, too. Right, taking it in, taking it in.
I have many questions to follow up on it. Let me make sure I remember two. One is that you distinguish between the neurological and the psychological impacts of it. And I'm sort of curious. I know that listeners and I myself can probably imagine what you mean by that distinction. There's those neurons dying, and the permeable brain blood barrier. And then there's, like, the psychological stuff, which is the stress, right? This is stress and I don't like the stress. But maybe you can speak to a little bit about how those two things maybe relate a little bit more, like imagining maybe how the neurological might shape our ability to handle that stress. I don't know if there's an answer there.
And then you also said something about all these impacts like suicide, and aggression, and all of these things that happen. I know that we just had a bunch of heat waves in Europe, especially, but, you know, it's been really hot. It's been hot. And of course, there's this challenge of, how do you say, X number of people die from heat? Or, how do you measure the impact of heat on, you know, humans, right? And so I'm sort of curious if you when you read those kinds of articles, if you are always, you know, banging your head against the wall and saying, they can't measure this is what would you like us to be reporting on, right? What is the measure of how this is affecting us that you'd like to have people be more aware of? So these are kind of two different questions, just because I don't want to forget them, as you're speaking.
Burcin Ikiz: They are both great questions, actually, and it is something we talk about a lot. When you come to neurological and psychological, it's actually really interesting. That's a barrier I'm trying to break down in our field, because for a very long time, neurology and psychiatry never talked to each other. I am a neuroscientist, but, for example, I'm at the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford, and it's funny how they're like, Oh, neurology, that's a different field.
But I'm like, No, but they're both actually brain they're part of the brain. And the mechanisms I talked about, the oxidative stress, or inflammation in the brain, nerd degeneration, they actually both they're mechanisms for both psychiatric disorders and neurological disorders. When I say psychiatric or psychology, it has the psychological distress, anxiety, depression, or maybe more psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder.
When we think about neurological disorders, we may think more, let's say Alzheimer's disease, or Parkinson's disease, or epilepsy, and stroke and so on. But they actually when we look at mechanistically in the brain, I'm a molecular cellular neurobiologist by training, molecularly, it happens all in the neurons, and molecularly, they have very same mechanisms. So that's why I like to the call it brain health and encompass both of them because the mechanisms are the same. That's why I think we see when we look at these studies that have been done on fetuses that were in the mother's womb and what happened to these children afterwards, we start seeing first some neurodevelopmental effects and maybe some neurological things.
But then when they get to the age of adolescence and young adults, we start seeing outcomes to be mental health outcomes as well, which I think shows to us, are all connected. So we cannot just say, this is one and this is another. In our brains, our brain is connected to each other. So even distinguishing it neurological or psychiatric, there's a very big neurobiological basis there that should be united. And the impacts we see, that's why I think is not just one thing or another, one field or another, but they are connected as well.
Sarah Ray: Mm.
Burcin Ikiz: That's a question.
Sarah Ray: Yeah. I love that. I mean, I'm so grateful for you answering that because I think a lot of people think that mental health stuff is sort of I mean-- the premise, so many people think it's kind of a willpower thing or it's a choice thing, or you need to, you know, use cognitive behavioral therapy or talk therapy to fix your problems and get adjusted to this world. It's your job to, you know, that's on you to do that. And I think when you look at it if you think about the neurological conditions or causes of some of the mental health stuff sort of maybe is more of like an invisible disease, or invisible thing that people don't really attribute to something more like the environment or climate or even, you know, epigenetics or brains, that you're bringing some light to. So I just, really appreciate that. Carry on, second question. Sorry.
Burcin Ikiz: Yeah, no, thank you. And I think that's a very important distinguishment that needs to happen. And in our field, it's still so separated. And that's one of the things I'm trying to be like, No, let's come together again. Let's not separate. Let's not work in silos. We're looking at the same organ. But yeah. And then your second question is really important, too. I think it's actually really, really difficult to distinguish brain health impacts, associate them with an acute thing that happens.
A lot of the studies that come out about aggression, or suicides and so on, we are able to measure because they're very short term. So for example, if there's a hospitalization due to stroke or there's a hospitalization due to a seizure, an epileptic episode, or any other things, we can measure them. We have measurements, and we can then be able to associate it. Oh, you know, this wildfire, this extreme temperature happened, and now we had 20% hospitalization happened with stroke. Oh, that must be an association. It's epidemiological. There's great epidemiological variant studies that can be done and distinguish it. The thing with the brain is brain is a very beautiful but sneaky organ. It's, it's really-- yes.
Sarah Ray: I love that description.
Burcin Ikiz: It actually is really good at hiding damage. So when you look at how the disease progresses in the brain, is that by the time, for example, let's think about diseases like Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's. This is, let's say, an adult of 70, 80-years-old starts experiencing some memory lapses or some hand tremors, and it comes to a point of, like, they cannot button their shirts anymore, or they start forgetting a lot and something's obvious that something may be wrong, and they go to see a neurologist.
And then after-- through long tests, they get diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease. By the time the diagnosis happens, it's actually really late stage in the disease process because more than half of those specific neurons that die in this disease already are dead. And it's really hard to be able to do anything to protect the disease or cure the disease at that stage. And many times, actually, the disease had started years, even sometimes decades ago. But because the brain is so good, this pathway doesn't work, let me try this side pathway, or because it's so good plastic and it can rewire itself, it hides the damage, it hides the disease until it comes to a point of no return or, like, really late stage where it's like, all right, there's nothing more I can do at this point, and now you start seeing the symptoms.
And so, because of that, it's really hard in our field to be able to say, Oh, that wildfire, remember that happened 15 years ago. And do you see now in this population there's, you know, 30% more people have dementia, maybe that was the wildfire. It's really hard to be able to relate to that. Most of the tools that's why we have are looking at suicide, or hospitalizations, and certain very, very acute things and not really long term disease processes.
And that's a struggle. I think we'll get there. We're trying to-- there's a lot of modeling studies now happening, but because of this sneaky nature of our brain, or protective nature of our brain and be like, all right, I'll make sure we'll function well, it's okay. It's a really difficult problem to be able to really connect what's happening in the environment to the health problems we will see years down the line.
Sarah Ray: I think that.
Burcin Ikiz: The onset--.
Sarah Ray: No, no, sorry. I was going to say I think that's one of the problems of climate change, right? One of the problems of messaging around climate change is that there's so many effects of it that are just going to be knock-on maybe a generation or ten or 15, 20 years away. And so there's this kind of, well, maybe it won't happen or maybe I won't see the effects, or maybe I'll get luckier, or maybe we'll fix something between now and then. And so it's sort of like point source pollution, right? Like, we can't find the source of the thing because it's kind of permeating.
Or it's diluted, and you can't necessarily draw. You can maybe even go as far as to bring out a correlation, but not a causation, which, of course, is still required in litigation and science and all kinds of places to say, okay, now there's a liability or there's somebody who's responsible for that. Brain degeneration in this 20% of this population, we're going to make the fossil fuel companies pay for that, right? Like, I mean, there's just the sort of justice that comes out of knowing that's even a problem. First of all, you have to prove the problem, which as you just described is very difficult. And then, secondly, how do you, you know, how do you then attribute blame, or responsibility, or fix it? I mean, you can just see why this becomes such a problem of climate change in general. And you were about to say something, but I'm just really taking that acknowledgment.
Burcin Ikiz: Yeah, you're saying it.
Sarah Ray: I said that you were going to say, like, it's really hard to do this now. But thank goodness there are people trying to come up with models of this, right? I mean, it's pretty extraordinary. And I do-- I appreciate in slow burn how Park uses big data to try to figure that out, because it's so hard to see it on the case-by-case individual level. But if you look at really big data, you can start to see these patterns, and that's kind of a cool-- cool methodology that I think he uses there, that probably is pretty helpful here too. Let's go the other way now, right?
Like, we've just talked a lot about how climate change is having effects on brains and the difficulty of measuring that and proving that. But how about the other way around? We think about why brains might not be equipped to, or damaged enough by climate change so they can't, or whatever you-- you fill in the blank? Like, how and why might our brains not quite be able to deal with climate change? And what do we need to do about that?
Burcin Ikiz: Hmm. Yeah, that's a great question. It makes me think about this one study we did with colleagues at the University of Northern Michigan. One of the things we try to understand, and I think actually our brains know how to respond to it, but it's more that we don't give it enough credit. So let me try to explain what I mean by that. So my colleague, Josh did this again at University of Northern Michigan, did this study where they did imaging on young people that self identified as having eco anxiety, ecological distress.
And what he had found in looking at the imaging is that there was a part of-- the a beautiful way these imaging studies work, is that it can show up where the most activation in the body happens when you're feeling certain feelings. So, and he-- what he found the part of the brain that had the highest activation was the Salience Network, that was in a part that is not actually associated with generalized anxiety disorder or any other things.
So for the longest time when people talk about, Oh, I feel anxious about my future, I feel like an eco anxiety literature, it always thought about, Oh, it's anxiety, which anxiety, so it's something-- a feeling of an invisible threat that may not be there, the feelings related to that. But that's generalized anxiety disorder. And the part of the brain that lights up is not that part. It's the parts that actually reacts to a real life threat. So what the brain tells us is, we may not be aware of unconscious, but it tells us that, oh, there's a real life threat there, and I'm going to act on it. So that's the part of the brain that acts on a real life threat. And so, that's the part that gets activated. And when he did a different looked at different ways, what would deactivate that which would make people feel less eco anxiety or ecological distress was collective action.
So when you on pro-environment behavior, so when you start feeling like you are collectively being part of solving a real life threat, that parts get deactivated. So to me, it actually says that the body the brain is actually really aware that climate change is a real life threat. We may not be there consciously, but the brain is already thinking that, and so it's reacting to it, and reacting to something that it can't find a solution to.
And so when we were able to publish that study and shared with our climate psychologists, my psychiatrists friends, they felt-- they told us that they felt a relief because they could now say, like, Now we can tell our patients to the individuals who feel that way, saying, like, what you're feeling is legitimate. It is real. It has a real part, part in your brain, and it is acting on a real life thing. So to me, I think it to us, that was a really great revelation in thinking that, okay, our brains know what to do, and knows that the way to really elevate and solve the problem is collectively acting together and acting for the environment.
And so-- So that gives me the hope that, you know, maybe we have to listen to our brains more and be more aware of what it can provide for us in thinking about climate action as solutions.
Sarah Ray: That's a really, that's a really different story than what I often think about in terms of cognitive biases that make it really difficult or, you know, so-called wiring of the brain that makes it really difficult to perceive the threat as a threat to respond to at all. And you're describing the study was done with people who already were self describing as having ecological distress. Therefore, we can assume that they already perceive climate change to be a threat.
And I was sort of-- I'm sort of always walking around in the space of people talking about the people who don't self describe themselves as having ecological distress, is there something in their brains that are not-- that's making it really hard for them to perceive this as a threat, for one. You know, there's people talk about climate change is too abstract or it's, you know, not right in front of them. Like all of the things that risk perception theory has kind of a list of criteria that a risk needs to be perceived as by humans in order for humans to act on it or perceive it even as, you know, to have a threat response to it at all. So it's super interesting that there's that whole group of people who don't aren't responding to that threat at all. Maybe cognitively, for cognitive reasons.
And then there's people who, like the people in that study, who are absolutely perceiving this as not just an abstract risk in the future, but a threat that's right in front of them, which you just described, the part of the brain actually lit up for the threat that's right in front of them. So the brain is somehow taking in information and correctly perceiving climate change to be something that's an immediate threat. And then there's all the people in between. I mean I just-- I mean, you know, I'm thinking to myself that it's more than just the brain, right? It's the way we take in information about what we should perceive as a threat to begin with.
Are we consuming a lot of news about it? Are we doomscrolling? Are we around a lot of people who are talking about it all the time? Are, you know, are we getting it in our education? Are we getting it in our families? When we're told about climate change, are we told it in a frame that this is a really terrible apocalyptic thing that we should be really scared of?
Or are we being told about it as a way that we can collectively fix this problem like you beautifully described with your son at the beginning of this conversation, right? There's got to be different parts of the brain that are activated with these different frames, with these different communities shaping us, with these different narratives we're consuming? You know what I mean? So like-- It's not just a story of the brain either, right? It's like, how are we even coming to perceive a risk that our brain then would respond to in any way in the FMRI imaging? Right? Like, it's like, I mean, there's so much that has to happen before that even would light up a part of the brain.
Burcin Ikiz: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think there's a lot of reasons for that. Like you said, like, where do we get our information source from? How was climate change communicated to us, even from the beginning. I think when I was growing up, I remember vaguely climate change being in the conversations or that, you know, our world is in a bad shape kind of conversation, but it was about polar bears and melting ice, which is true. It was happening. We also got starved poor polar bear images, and that was so heartbreaking.
But I think that also that kind of communication made us feel like, Oh, that's in a way, because we are very reactive. Individuals-- humans are very reactive species. So if it's not going to affect us immediately, we can put it back in the back burner and think about our daily lives. And that kind of communication, that kind of imagery, polar bears and ice, unless you live somewhere where you have polar bears in your daily lives, it's like, Oh, yeah, that's a distant problem.
I mean, I grew up thinking that's going to be a problem that my children's children's children are going to face, let alone myself. And then come 20, 30 years later, our house almost burned down by wildfires and, you know, and we're seeing these crazy heat waves that is killing thousands of people and so on. So all of a sudden, it's like, oh, actually, that this is something happening right now in-- affecting our daily lives, and it will be part of our children's daily lives. All the time. So it's a real life threat, and I think that's where the conversations start to change because you can be wherever you are in the political spectrum, but you are also affected by the heat. You're seeing also the heat. You're seeing these flash floods that have not happened before, killing hundreds of people and children. And so I think bringing back those conversations to what's happening now, how it affecting, ourselves and our loved ones, I think is an important thing to bring about in making people realize, this is a real life threat. And let's activate that salience network for everyone.
Sarah Ray: Activate, I like that. Let's activate that salience network for everybody. Spoken like a real neuroscientist there. In my lingo in a classroom, I'd say, "Why doesn't anybody care?" [laughter] Yeah, beautiful. Okay.
If you're just joining us, this is Climate Magic. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, and I'm speaking with Dr. Burcin Ikiz. Okay, what are the solutions?
[LAUGHTER]
Burcin Ikiz: I love that.
Sarah Ray: Can we turn to how do we fix all this? This feels really intractable, complicated. Yes, huge. Yeah, overwhelming.
Burcin Ikiz: Yeah. Yeah, no. That's the really important part of the conversation. I try to usually in my lectures, I start with the impacts, and then I make everyone halfway through, take a deep breath. I'm like [SIGH] "Let's change the conversation." Guess what? You know, we know how resilient nature can be. After fires, we see how these little buds of greenery come from the earth, of the ashes, and so on. And just like that, our brains are really resilient, and they can, um redo the damage that's done unless it's really at the very end stage.
But let's focus now that we're not there. And so I think there's a lot of things if we can we can do, and guess what? We don't have to come up with a new fancy AI technology. The solutions already exist. And we know one of the things we know is these clean air policies or climate action mitigation policies can have huge co-benefits to our brain health, too.
There was a study done by a great colleague, Tamma Carleton. She's a climate economist at Berkeley. And in 2000-- I think sometime in the 2010s, China had, like, cities that had the worst air pollution in the world. I'm sure you remember the pictures of just smog and these people had not seen blue skies ever in their lives. And then China went through some really strategic and very clean cut solutions of curbing air pollution and cleaning the air. And within weeks of air cleaning out, they saw suicide rates dropping at an enormous speed, and Tamma's group were able to really make a direct association with the air getting cleaner and the suicide rates dropping. We see this happening with dementia rates as well in US, in France, and in other places.
And most recently, I had mentioned you about Frederica Perera's work where they had studied what happened to in 1990s in Harlem, these babies that were born with air pollution exposure. She had a great way to look at since then, the Clean Air Act passed and so on. And she went back to these school children, and so what after the Clean Air Act happened, how did their cognition get better? And they were able to just publish a couple of weeks ago, New York Times featured it yesterday, I believe, looked at the cognitive scores of children improved drastically just from having clean air to breathe. So I think so, you know, maybe the solutions we're looking for is right under our fingertips and knowing that, like, and so maybe the climate action or the cleaner process don't have to be anything political. If you care for your brains, if you care for the health of your children, of your parents, acting on these can have huge, huge, huge benefits on our brains as well.
Sarah Ray: I don't want to say, let's get rid of climate politics as a platform, but you're saying that so much can be done, around organizing around climate change without even calling it climate change. Just say brain health. Just say cognitive performance of children, just say suicide rates, say Alzheimer's, basically brain health or health as the common ground that everybody can mobilize around and dispense entirely with the framing of climate change in some situations. Much can be done. The solutions are right there. Much can be done. You don't even have to get parties to agree on this.
Burcin Ikiz: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, we did that recently. We were able to work together with World Health Organization. In 2019, they had bring out these dementia prevention guidelines. It was the first guidelines that went to every health ministry in the world talking about, you know, dementia is a serious problem. These are some of the things that can be modifiable that can prevent or delay dementia. And it was mostly around behavioral changes. So you start diet and looking at the scientific evidence, very evidence based, looking at diet, exercise, and so on and so forth. And since then, they had been revising and revising the existing evidence or coming incoming evidence. And just a couple of months ago, the second version of the revised version came about of these dementia prevention guidelines, and we were able to contribute to it.
And this time, for the first time ever included one environmental risk factor and that was air pollution. And that, I think, has a very symbolically important thing because now disinformation doesn't have to go to the environmental ministries. It's going to the health ministry. You say, "Is dementia a problem you care about? Guess what? Clean the air," and that's going to have-- So I think those kind of bringing in, it doesn't have to mean we have to get rid of any of our climate politics or other environmental politics. It just say, maybe there's a different route there to reach to people that we couldn't previously reach as well through this health perspective. And it doesn't have to be just brain health, any other health, you know, any other health human health aspects are also equally important.
Sarah Ray: Yeah, I love that. I mean, sometimes I get a little bit uncomfortable when I think, "Oh, these behavior changes are what's going to protect my body and mind and brain from climate change." Those always feel just like putting, you know, very tiny band aids on a gushing wound, you know? And I think, "Oh, somebody named fossil fuels, stop telling me to change my behavior."
You know, this is real frustration, and I think for a lot of people, it causes this sort of pain of cognitive dissonance, you know, like, I'm being told to You know, get out of air pollution or stop eating meat. But I live in this world where I can't control the conditions of a lot of these choices. And so I think that that framing or that advice is just sort of a sidestepping of the real problem or just kind of we can't change this other stuff, so we're going to throw our hands up and give up and just tell you to take this behavior change, lifestyle change thing. But yes, I love what you're saying. Is there some way that some of these groups, the WHO or whoever can kind of leverage the health consequences for this larger structural change? It's not just putting band aids on, you know, let's get rid of air pollution, for example, without even naming fossil fuel, without even naming climate. I think there's some real interesting maneuvering, political maneuvering that we might all be needing to be doing in this particular political moment where energy around climate is really, really low. So how are we going to get to some of the same ends in a different way? So I love that. And it's true. It's not that it's wrong. It's, you know, it's not a misdirection. It's true.
So I love all these different ways of thinking about how we can see the evidence of climate change's impact in all of these other spaces. So yeah, I'm loving that. Okay. So you're saying the solutions are right there. We can just, you know, the question is not about, do we need to come up with some radically interesting solutions? The punch line there is, let's just start getting people to get the salience going at the collective and civic level, Salience, you know, in the brain. Okay, so, questions as we sort of come to the end of our conversation here, what do you want to make sure that listeners understand about neuroscience and about this conversation? I'm assuming you don't want people to come away and say, "My fetuses are going to have this and there's nothing I can do about it. It's a total apocalypse. We're going down this road of all this terrible stuff." And I would say, too, I want to put it in, like, a parentheses over here that much of what you said about things like evidence around Alzheimer's, if we're seeing it diagnosed, it's the impacts are super late and any actions that might be taken to stem that or prevent it or hold it off are really hard to do at that point. Similar to climate change, right? Like, you mentioned people are starting to feel climate change, and so they might be starting to wake up to it because it feels like a threat right in front of them all of a sudden. Unfortunately, with climate change too, once you're starting to feel climate change, it's kind of too late to really do the mitigation that's needed to avoid where it's going, you know?
So I feel a little bit anxious about if our brains require the threat right in front of us to feel salience. If the diagnosis, so to speak, doesn't happen until it's too late, you know, this doesn't feel good. You know, what should we take away from this that's not apocalyptic?
Burcin Ikiz: Yeah. No, that's a great question. And I really if I can leave this conversation with any feeling, it's the feeling of hope, definitely not that we're doomed. And that's why I think it's important to I think one of the first things we had to make... Believe within our Neuro Climate Working Group was to make the invisible visible, showing that actually brain health was not even a conversation for so long in climate change and its impacts or so just bringing it out, and that's what I think our report is hoping to do is, like, there's a lot we know already that damaging it can be across life, intergenerationally, and so on. But that being said, the solutions do exist, and our brains is I truly believe our brains are resilient. And I think our salience network could be already activated.
And there's a lot of reasons why we, you know, make the evidence even more, we'd learn more and we make it better and more accurate. There's already so much enough for us to act on. And the ways we can act. And whether it's these climate and clean air policies or whether it could be one of the other things that I haven't mentioned. Is we're trying to really look at, like, vulnerabilities and what does resilience and vulnerability mean? And what are the different indicators of that anywhere from biological to cultural and social, like, what makes an individual or community or a place more resilient and more vulnerable?
And so there's a lot of different things that can it's not one solution fits all, but it's actually there's different things we can take to protect ourselves, to make ourselves more resilient. And while fighting for climate mitigation and fossil fuel phase out and while fighting for cleaner air. So yeah, that will be the message I would like to leave. We are working on bringing a whole plethora of different options one can take from behavioral to biological to cultural, social, you know, ways to protect their brains. And then while you're doing that, we work on the policies that will protect our environment and protect our brains.
Sarah Ray: Yeah, I often think that the you know, the other direction, that direction of we need our brain health to fight this battle, you know, that one is a sticky one because, you know, it's sort of like saying, "it's a little bit ableist, right?" It's sort of like, "Well, the system is ruining our brains. How are we going to have that? You know, who gets to have that?" And I think, you know, yes, I agree with that. And also, that doesn't mean we should dismiss brain health as an important tool in our toolkit to fight this battle and that people who can work on brain health ought to be investing all they can in brain health as that tool. I also wanted to kind of, you know, as I was thinking about this, this purpose of this show, you know, lots of people care about climate change. Like you said, the brains that you're studying are already suggesting that the salience network is activated. Right? People perceive this risk.
And so that's really great, right? And also, lots of people are beset by the psychological overwhelm and inefficacy feelings that they can't do anything about it in large part because of the way solutions are framed as too elusive, you know, not a fast enough, not effective enough, not big enough. So what's the point, right? So we get this defeatism on the other hand. And I think the beauty of this show is it's trying to bring folks like you in to say, "Okay, there's, in fact, those are cognitive biases that don't have to be true," right? These are ways that your brain is actually tripping you up from engaging in this risk salience of that your brain is already telling you.
So I love thinking about, oh, yeah, you've just said all those things. And also, I feel like this is sort of the point of the show, too, right, to have a little gentle correction around some of the things that our brains are telling us about the risk of climate change and what we can or can't do about it. So yeah, I'll take hope from that, definitely. [laughter] One last question for you. With all of this going on and that beautiful story of your children bringing you into the door and the portal of climate, what are your own practices for keeping your brain health or sustaining your work and energy and hope? You know, what's your climate magic?
Burcin Ikiz: Yes, children and nature. It just and observing nature with children. I think just going back to children have this beautiful way of keeping you at the present and really focusing on the moment for good or bad, right? It can really work when they're around. And so, but also it keeps you really being able to notice. Like, I think my way of being able to appreciate our planet Earth doubled, tripled, quadrupled with being able to see it through the eyes of my children. And they have this way of really making you focus, leave away all the um, fears you have about the future and focus on the moment. And there's so much we can do at the moment.
So what I try to do is every time I get stressed out and kind of feel, I just go be with them and just realm in their joy of being in the moment and just finding small things and taking pleasure in that. And I think that there's so much to find hope for and pleasure for in the small moments in the small things, the way the leaves move with wind to appreciating little hummingbird that come by your garden and so on. And I think, like, that's where magic is, those little small moments and being able to cherish those.
Sarah Ray: Yeah, and I think it would be harder to cherish those moments if you also didn't feel like you were doing that other work. I mean, sometimes when I engage with nature, I feel a sense of sadness and a sense of anticipatory grief or, you know, it triggers me a little bit. It makes me think, Oh," what if this is the last time I see this bird here," you know, this kind of knowing things are bad. But I think I honestly think you can't have-- you can't have-- I can't enjoy nature that way if I wasn't also doing these other things to feel like I was in solidarity with them or doing what I could with my climate magic to do that, to do that work, to protect it, or to be at least in a relationship with it in some positive way, you know? So, you know, I think that the two things are really married really beautifully. So thank you for sharing all of that with us, Burcin. It was great to have you.
Burcin Ikiz: Thank you so much, Sarah. The pleasure was all mine.
Sarah Ray: You just listened to my conversation with Dr. Burçin Ikiz. You can follow the Climate Magic pod on Instagram, LinkedIn, and khsu.org, where you can also find show notes and transcripts.
Connect with us by sending an email to climatemagicpodcast@gmail.com. Huge thanks to Cal Poly Humboldt, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Abigail Smithson for editing Climate Magic. Special thanks also to Mike Dronkers and KHSU for sustaining the magic infrastructure, to Tibora Girczyc-Blum for creating Climate Magic's social media content, and Cal Poly Humboldt's Accessibility Office for producing such excellent transcripts.
I'm Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray and thanks so much for listening to Climate Magic.
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Intro
How does the world around us shape our brains and how can healthier brains create a healthier world? This is the question at the core of my guest this week’s research and life purpose. Dr. Burcin Ikiz joins me to talk about neurological health and climate change– in other words, how climate affects our brains, and how our brains shape what we can do about the climate.
Dr. Ikiz is a neuroscientist working at the intersection of brain health, climate change, planetary health, and global health policy.
For more than two decades, Burcin has explored the brain from multiple perspectives, from the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases to the effects of air pollution, extreme heat, wildfires, urban environments, and other ecological stressors on brain development, cognition, mental health, and healthy aging. She works to translate scientific discoveries into practical solutions that strengthen public health, inform policy, and inspire collective action.
Becoming a mother transformed the questions she wanted to ask as a scientist. She began thinking about the world future generations will inherit, and the role neuroscience could play in building healthier, more resilient societies. When climate change started, as she puts it, “activating the salience network” in her own brain, she decided to take what she was already trained in– neuroscience and brain health– and apply it to the climate problems. That’s textbook Climate Magic, right there.
So, in 2023, this attention culminated in the founding of EcoNeuro, a research and policy initiative that bridges neuroscience, environmental science, public health, and policy to advance brain health in a changing environment. The following year, she founded the International Neuro Climate Working Group (NCWG) after realizing that no single person, discipline, institution, or country could address these challenges alone. Having grown up in Türkiye, Burcin understood that environmental challenges and their solutions look different across the world. She wanted NCWG to bring together diverse disciplines, geographies, and lived experiences, with a strong commitment to elevating voices from low- and middle-income countries.
Today, NCWG has grown into a global network of more than 500 researchers, clinicians, policymakers, public health experts, community leaders, and people with lived experience across over 60 countries. Recognized by the World Economic Forum as a leading global initiative addressing the mental health dimensions of climate change, the network advances interdisciplinary research, education, policy, advocacy, capacity building, and collective action.
Burcin is in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where she serves as a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health and an Affiliate of the Stanford Center for Human and Planetary Health.
Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg, STAT, Psychology Today, and other international media outlets. She has spoken at the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, TEDx, the World Bank, and scientific organizations worldwide. In 2025, she was named a Grist 50 Climate Leader.
Look out for a forthcoming book Burcin is co-editing, called Ecological and Green Neuroscience: Reimagining the Brain’s Universe, which explores how neuroscience can deepen our understanding of the relationship between human health, ecosystems, and the natural world.
I suppose it’s not surprising that a neuroscientist like Burcin seems to have a million synapses firing all at once– that’s how it feels to be in conversation with her. You’ll see, let’s dive in!
Outro
You just listened to my conversation with Dr. Burcin Ikiz.
You can follow the Climate Magic Pod on instagram, Linkedin, andKHSU.org, where you can also find show notes and transcripts. Connect with us by sending an email to climatemagicpod@gmail.com.
Thanks to Cal Poly Humboldt’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Abigail Smithson for editing Climate Magic. Special thanks to Mike Dronkers and KHSU for sustaining the magic infrastructure, Tibora Girczyc-Blum for creating Climate Magic’s social media content, and Cal Poly Humboldt’s accessibility office for producing such excellent transcripts.
I’m Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.”
