Is your brain wired to face climate change? If your brain prefers the rewards of avoiding climate change over the rewards of fixing it, is there no hope? How can we help our brains work for, instead of against, climate change?
In this episode of Climate Magic, I talk with Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime, a pediatric neurosurgeon and author of an incredible book, Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis. If you ever wanted to hear a neurosurgeon break down the connection between our climate crisis and super-brainy concepts like “utility calculation,” “social reward,” “curtailment substitution,” and “honeybee rewards,” then this episode is for you. Spoiler alert: it’ll make you feel really smart, and I think you’ll feel empowered by the many ways Dr. Duhaime describes that you can actually leverage your brain better to meet this ecologically perilous moment.
Shownotes
- Ann-Christine Duhaime on a Climate One podcast episode about Happiness and Climate Change
- Minding the Climate book website
- American Association of Pediatrics’ statement on climate change and children’s health
- Environmental Voter Project (apropos of Dr. Duhaime talking about voting)
- Climate Change, War, and Health project
TRANSCRIPTION:
DUHAIME: One of the huge things that gives people climate anxiety is worry about themselves and their own futures, worries about their children. But the point is that altruism and doing things for others is another potent reward. If it weren't, we would not have survived. Things that are positive to you.
Maybe that's the best way to word it. They're there for an evolutionary reason.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we explore the emotional life of climate politics. I'm your host, Doctor Sarah Jaquette Ray, chair of the Environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt. In today's show, I talk with Doctor Ann Christine-Duhaime. She's the author of a book that I find totally engrossing: “Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis”. More on Dr. Duhaime. She's a senior pediatric neurosurgeon at the Mass General Hospital and is also the Nicholas Tea Service Distinguished Professor of Neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. Those are some big titles. Very impressive.
Her neuroscience research investigates mechanisms, pathophysiology, imaging, and the treatment of injury in the immature brain to study injuries occurring in infants and young children, including those seen most commonly in child abuse. Dr. Duhaime is also a faculty associate at the Harvard University Center for the environment. She serves as an associate director of the Mass General Hospital Center for the Environment and Health, and as associate editor in chief of the Journal of Climate Change and Health. Doctor New Haven I talked at length about the relationship between brain and behavior and environmental issues, and how her interest in this topic has manifested in all kinds of projects, including her book Mining the Climate, as as a project developing a green Children's hospital and a current project on climate change, health and war.
Basically, this episode helps answer the question: how can we leverage everybody's unique brain disposition for reward to address climate change better at all scales? And she shows us her own climate magic and offers up some tips about how to work on your own climate magic yourself with this new information about your exquisite brain. Let's dive in.
Doctor Duhaime, I'm excited to have you on the show. My first question is, you're a pediatric neurosurgeon. How did you even get interested in the climate crisis? And thinking about green hospitals and all the rest of it? What is that pediatric slash neuroscience slash climate connection?
DUHAIME: Thank you for that question. Doctor Wray, the answer is very simple. We deal in our fields with, children, and we try to, solve problems that are threatening their future. And the problem of climate change and the the world's future is the same future that our children that we care for and all the children we don't care for will inhabit. to me, it felt, limiting and somewhat irresponsible to, fail to use some of my energies to address this global problem that will affect all children.
That's the business we're in is the future of children.
RAY: Why do you think many people who do pediatrics, or even just health in general, are not really centering climate? it feels you went on a limb to go off and write a book about it. What's, what's stopping him?
DUHAIME: I was inspired in part because people in the pediatric fields are some of the first physicians to have joined this, this chorus of people. And it was the American Academy of Pediatrics that came out in 2015 and made a statement that, ‘look, pediatricians, that's a huge health care organization, a huge professional organization with a lot of influence’. And they said this is a real threat to the patients that we treat and to children all over. They were in the vanguard. And I would say that most pediatric providers, pediatric subspecialties, pediatric, international health care organizations have been at the forefront.
I'm not an outlier. What I think is.
RAY: That's good to hear.
DUHAIME: No, I think what's a little different is that pediatric neurosurgery, all the surgical fields, were a little slower than general pediatrics and things that deal with some of the issues of climate change that are, a little more common, a little more direct, asthma and air pollution, those sorts of things. Fetal medicine, because those things are affected very directly by climate change. But I will say that my own professional organization, the American Society of Pediatric Neurosurgeons, was the first neurosurgical organization, adult or pediatric, to join the National Medical Society consortium, for Climate and Health, which is a national organization of medical societies of different professions within medicine. And, they were the first.
And I think it's again, because we take care of children and we're always thinking about their future. That's what we do for a living.
RAY: And that seems to me rubbing up squarely up against rhetoric that suggests that, climate science and climate research is actually harming children, which is, a pet peeve of mine about how, climate research is actually being underfunded and defunded because of, presumably it's, causing climate anxiety in children.
DUHAIME: I would say that climate change is causing climate anxiety in children. Adult inaction is causing climate anxiety and children. Disinformation from fossil fuel companies because of strong economic interest is causing climate anxiety in children. But it is true that when you are ignorant of something, you don't have anxiety about it.
On the other hand, it's also true that when you don't know about a problem and it accelerates and gets you into trouble, it would have been nice to have known about it.
RAY: I'm grateful to hear what you're saying there, because that's, of course, a pet peeve of mine. When I hear ‘climate’, protecting youth being the reason why we need to not teach them about climate, I think, ‘oh my gosh’.
I know we're on the same page about this, but you just beautifully articulated that a lot of your the beginning of your beautiful book, Mining the Climate introduces people like myself who are not really neuroscientists. Naturally, I'm not familiar with the parts of the brain, and I can't map it out. But you have some beautiful maps. You do this thing where you describe for quite a while, the default reward system in the brain, and why that default wiring or evolutionarily built system in the brain may not be quite aligned with what's required from this crisis, from facing climate change, recognizing, seeing, understanding it, much less doing anything about it.
And I would be curious if you could unpack that part of the book where you talk about the reward part of the brain. Why is that such an important part of our neurobiology that we should understand when we're thinking about the climate crisis?
DUHAIME: Sure. And this is the crux of the beginning of the book. And if anybody ever reads this book, I will tell you, I tell everybody, try to skim that chapter. It's a long chapter.
It's chapter two in the book, and it goes through some of the neurobiology of the human reward system. And it talks about some of the answers to the questions you're asking, Sarah, which is why do we have this? a couple of little things to mention. One, it's not a spot in the brain. It's an enormously complicated and beautifully designed network within the brain.
It's not, it's not a little part. It touches almost every part…
RAY: I can't just remove it.
DUHAIME: You could have big consequences. And, another aspect of it is that our biology happened, it evolved over time. And we're not talking over time, over a thousand years. This evolved over millions of years and was built on the diagram, the scaffold, the chassis, whatever metaphor you want to use of other organisms that predated humans. The elements of this incredibly designed and beautiful system basically arose from the evolutionary pressures of survival and typically that's short term survival. You need to survive into reproductive age, reproduce, have an advantage, and those genes get preserved. And that part of the book goes through, how did this happen? Where did it start?
And it goes back to the fact that it started. If you really want to understand a little bit about how is this designed, how does it work, you go back all the way to single cell organisms and a single cell organism. The example used in the book is E coli. We've all heard of E coli. you get coliform, bacterial infections.
You can't go swimming because there's too many coliforms in the water, or you get it from spinach or something and it can give you gastroenteritis. But these little single celled organisms E coli actually can. I'm going to put this word in quotes “decide” whether to move towards sugar and away from, say, an acidic environment. They don't have a brain.
They're a single cell. How do they do it? The book goes through the mechanisms that evolved to allow organisms to do things that would help them survive in the short term, moving towards food, moving away for something toxic. And the way they do it is a general principle of all biology. And it's not magic. it's not the Harry Potter magic wand, but it sometimes feels that way.
But what it is is the basic principle of most of biology, which is that, bacteria interact with chemicals that it encounters in its environment. And that interaction of those two chemicals changes the shape of the chemical on the surface, such that certain things are allowed into or out of that cell. And then it's this chain reaction where it happens that people understand this. Now at the molecular level in E coli, the little squiggly tails of E coli, what we call the flagella, move in one direction.
If you're moving towards sugar, that puts you towards the sugar and it moves in the other direction. you get away from something bad: acid. And it has to do with these chemical reactions on the surface that interact with this whole intricate mechanism. Now, that did not come designed from heaven either. That came over bit by bit by bit of tiny little molecular changes in the genetic underpinnings of these organisms that evolved and said, hey, guess what?
If I move towards sugar? Not that they were consciously saying this, but, I'm going to survive better and I'm going to reproduce more and hey, if this works and gets me away from this acidic environment that could kill me, I'm going to survive better. And that's how it started. It's really an extraordinary story. And then it built up over time and the book goes through.
How about little tiny nematode worms? They're about as big as a single the width of a single letter, the letter L on a printed page. That's how big they are. And they scoot around in the dirt and they have certain things they have to accomplish, and it figured out how to use certain kinds of other systems that helped it make more decisions. Do I move here? Do I move there? Do I move away from a predator? Do I go in this direction? Likewise, as life got more complicated, as organisms got bigger, and the book talks about the giant sea slug in California, there, a fruit-sized blob, which is incredibly intricately-designed, and it's been worked out in this animal because it has big nerves that you can test, big nerve cells. It demonstrates how as these systems evolved, this animals could learn that if you did this, you got food.
And if you did that, you didn't get food. Do it again. And that's learning. Do this thing that's good for you. Do it again.
And that's the beginning of this so-called reward system. It's not designed as a reward system, your credit card. You use your credit card to get points. It's designed to teach the organism what it needs to know to have survival advantages.
And that same mechanism, the book goes through how it worked in mammals and then ultimately how it works in humans. And one point I want to make that's important that you brought up. It's not hard wired. I want to get rid of the term hard wired.
RAY: Good. Thank you.
DUHAIME: All of our brains are made up of exquisitely, flexible systems that interact with one another. And you can use the word circuit. You can use the word “system”. The point is that these are billions in the human billions of neurons, individual nerve cells and different cells around them that help them work and have their own functions that exquisitely respond to both genetic signals that you inherit, but also everything that happens to you throughout your life.
And they're designed to be flexible by nature. You have certain predispositions of things that we evolve to to find rewarding, but they're extraordinarily flexible and malleable. In order for us to live in all the different kinds of circumstances and all the different stresses and strains that we encounter in a normal lifetime. We're not so much hardwired as we are predisposed. And the system is evolutionarily designed to be extraordinarily flexible, which is why many different things can be rewarding to different people, which is part of the reason why we all differ from one another, even though we have a lot in common.
RAY: I love that. Thank you for that reframing from hard wired, which makes it feel oh, let's just throw our hands up. We can't do anything about that. This is just the way we are.
We're going to be reward-seeking creatures. And that's just the way it is. Which is, of course, that nature versus nurture debate that goes on and on and on. I had a question later in my sequence of questions about what stuff is the hard wired stuff and what's the stuff that we can do anything about.
But you're already suggesting that we can do something about all of it. It's all not.. soft wired isn't the way to put it. But predisposition means that we can. It's malleable. We can work with it.
DUHAIME: And I would like to go back to something you just said, about the nature and nurture debate. To me, there is no debate. It's always both. It's always both, of course.
And we don't.
DUHAIME: But the two interact continuously every second. During this conversation, your brain's being changed and my brain's being changed. And whoever's listening, their brains are being changed. Oh, my gosh, how lovely that. That's the beauty of it. Constantly being changed.
And the book gives examples, extreme examples which you may want to get to. I won't preempt you, but of how things in one phase of your life can utterly switch in how rewarding it is. And things within a culture or between cultures can utterly switch 180 degrees as to whether they're seen as good or bad. And I also want to make the point that your reward system is not just about what we all think about as rewards, which is acquisition or monetary wealth or whatever.
We are rewarded by a lot of things. If we weren't, there'd be no parenting, there'd be no altruism, there'd be no doctors. It's not all about one type of reward or reward systems evolved with many, many, rewards and capacities. And that's why there's a chapter in the book called The Universe of Human Rewards, because it's big and one of the biggest and most potent.
And again, you may be planning to get to, this is the reward of social interaction that is enormously rewarding to humans. I'll stop there and let you ask another question before….
RAY: I love it because first of all, I love that you've already covered a couple of the other questions I had about what we can work with? Because I don't want to be told that this is hard wired. Thank you for cracking that open for us. And this idea that their brains are exquisite at doing this, adapting in real time and that there's a magical, beautiful thing happening of our brains changing, just interacting. Ever since I read your book, I go around the world thinking, what is my how is my brain?
And try to get meta about it. I'm trying to watch my brain calculate all the rewards and punishments that are around me. And actually, this is interestingly enough - and I'm sure you've thought about this too, but interesting. This is a premise of Buddhist practice about figuring out what the feeling tones are of the different kinds of stimulus that we get in the world.
Buddhist meditation asks you to take in stimulus and observe whether or not you are drawn to it or repelled by it. Aversion and grasping, aversion and grasping. And that's the classic framework for Buddhism too. I can imagine myself as an E coli bacteria just having a Buddhist moment over here, am I grasping or am I gonna try to run away from this thing?
And that that's really the sum of life, of the sum of life is going through the world, either moving away from stuff or moving towards stuff, and that the ability to, something called enlightenment or whatever, the ability to have agency is the ability to recognize when that's happening. And you said, invite some maybe control over, over the matter, do I choose to go to that or is is that an alignment just because my body is drawn to it or it looks pretty or it's on my phone or it's a shiny thing, or the credit card company told me, I'll get some extra points for it. It's the dopamine hit thing, ? You're saying there's a lot of rewards.
It's not just that many people get reward from actually not falling prey to all of the different hooks that would have our immediate attention.
DUHAIME: And I would also stress that it's not as though reward is a thing and you get it three times a day. This system is constantly working. And it's not that I have a reward for this, and I don't have a reward for that. And let's get past the issue of dopaminergic hits, which is a common thing you hear now, to a llittle deeper sophistication about it.
Let's call it reward circuitry because that's what it's called. But it's not the term reward that we usually think of. As I mentioned, it's more nuanced than that. It's constantly working.
You are constantly working. And then it helps play in, into your decisions and the decisions. The term that is used for the millions of decisions you make in any day. And these are not all conscious decisions, it is what we call a utility calculation.
And a utility calculation is heavily influenced by the actions of this beautifully designed complex reward system. If you are walking into your house and you hang up your coat, let's say, or you hang up your whatever, you usually don't think about that, but you've made a decision to do that. When we say decision in this biologic neuro biologic terminology here, we're not necessarily talking about, oh, I need to decide, am I going to go to the birthday party or not? I need to decide: am I going to buy this new thing? No. When I'm talking about decisions, I'm talking about every single thing you do.
You have decided to do it. Even if someone's forcing you to do it, you make a decision that I'm going to go along and not resist. That's a decision. And when we talk about utility calculations and decisions and reward systems in this context, we're talking about every single thing you do.
Now, there are some things that you're not deciding quite in the same way that I'm talking about. Blinking your eyes… because that's a biological reflex thing. It's done by a different system for the most part, a parallel. They intersect, but for the most part, those are not the kinds of decisions we're talking about. But all your actions, and even to an extent, your thoughts, are influenced by this system.
It's an amazing, amazing feat of bioengineering. It's just extraordinary and it's a wonderful thing that we've inherited, but we have to do it. We have to recognize when it's ill suited for a particular crisis at hand.
RAY: Which is what I think the first half of your book lays that foundation. I will read something about this just so listeners can get a flavor of the book about it. You say, “comprehending the deleterious consequences of this average temperature rise at a global level, global warming takes work concentration, background knowledge”. It's homework.
And for what? Short term reward? It just makes you feel bad. Is it the least bit surprising? People would rather spend their mental energies on more immediate, positively rewarding things and might be distrustful of those who say, this is such an awful problem. Most of us simply don't fully comprehend why two degrees would change things drastically.
This is something with which we have no direct familiarity or experience, and at some level, maybe skeptical skeptical about the whole thing. Additionally, if you are being rewarded in other spheres of your life for behavior that runs contrary to environmental goals, cognitive dissonance is likely to kick in, and it may be easier to change your beliefs to fit your behavior than to deal with resolving the troubling conflict. That's the ‘reward thing and the climate thing’ meet each other in the bar, summed up.
DUHAIME: That's the crux of it. And you found you found the heart of the matter here, which is, why you hear a lot about climate change. Most people who aren't professionals in that world, don't have the background to, to get it. And this and it feels bad. It's not your fault. It's not oh, you're dumb because you don't.
You might have learned a little bit about it in high school biology if you're of a certain age. But for most people it's hard. It's hard work. Who wants to think about it?
It's no fun. It makes you feel bad.
RAY: It makes you feel bad. And the rewards of not paying attention to it are much higher, is your point. Which gives me a lot for me. That gives me a lot of compassion for people who aren't paying attention.
That channels my anger into compassion or my frustration or my righteousness. And that's very helpful. I appreciate that it connects to a concept you talk about in your book, too, about risk perception and the brain's ability to perceive this as a problem in the first place. It takes hard work, but it also takes, as you describe in the book, and other, folks have written about this too, about how the brain doesn't perceive climate change as a threat.
And I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about whether or not how and why climate change just doesn't capture the imagination to act in response to it as a threat, the way other amygdala, pushing things might do in our lives for these little amoebaes going around. It's not a bear bearing down on us. And, you say something that there's a mismatch between our perception of risk and the real threats of climate change. Tell us more about that.
What's going on with our brains that we don't even know about climate change?
DUHAIME: Thanks. First of all, we've always had weather. We've always had storms, we've always had floods, we've always had wildfires. None of this is new. And it happened not in connection with climate change, when there was no climate change in human history. Remember that climate change is new. You can take it back to the industrial revolution.
People say that the curve of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really started to accelerate in 1950, and it's accelerated faster and faster as the population has increased and industrialization has increased, and transportation has all become fossil fuel-dependent and so forth. It's been this rapid acceleration during people's lifetime, of which there have always been these things that occur with increased frequency and severity because of climate change. It's very hard for people, even in historical memory, to say, oh, this is something new. And it's very easy for people to say, oh, I've seen this before. And just because something's worse, there were really bad hurricanes and not bad hurricanes that were really bad floods and not bad floods.
And it's difficult for people to say, oh, ‘this has to do with my SUV’. ‘This has to do with these two plane flights I took last year’. ‘This has to do with the fact that my house is 6000 ft’ and it's fueled off the grid. ‘And I live in Utah, and that's largely coal.’
RAY: It’s much less bad climate policy that it seems completely out of our control.
DUHAIME: It's worse. It just doesn't seem like there's an easy way for us. We are creatures of learning from our own observations and our own experience. That's what we trust the most.
And it's very hard. It's much harder for us to learn and believe and trust in and have that visceral connection to things. We learn from people we don't know who are experts in things we don't understand, who are talking heads on some show, and particularly if somebody else that we do trust because they seem like a regular guy gal, is telling us it's baloney. It's a lot to ask of people. And climate change is really hard because it's long term. The consequences have always been with us, but they're getting worse. People recognize, though, that things are getting worse.
But again, it gives them a bad feeling. And there are plenty of people who are gaining from having other people not experiencing the actual effects because they have something to gain. They are being rewarded. They're not evil.
Or maybe, I'll let you make your own judgment, but they are being rewarded by their own reward scaffolding, which is, oftentimes I work for something, and this is my job. And I want to do a good job at my job. And my job is to, try to, increase the profits of my company. And that makes me a good person.
And I'm going to go on the wall as employee of the month. Those rewards are much closer and more comprehensible and feel better than.. imagine what you would have to do if you worked for a company. Not even a fossil fuel company, but a company that's pushing people to consume more because their profits go up. Whatever.
It's very hard to buck that, when you're making a living off of something or your friends do it or their social reward or whatever because of some “theoretic downside” of what it is that you're being rewarded for being somebody good to do it. It's really, really asking a lot of people, which doesn't mean we shouldn't ask. But it isn't surprising. And as you said earlier, I think this is really important. What this whole exploration has done for me has allowed me an arm's length neuroscience view of why we're struggling with this as a society.
Without being judgmental of people because they have their reasons and it's not the human reward system. The human brain is exquisitely flexible. And the question is knowing that, how do we help people? How do we help our leaders?
How do we help our friends and family? How do we help society as a whole? What is most effective at helping them recognize this problem that is coming for all of us, and that is tricky for us to really grasp.
RAY: How do we rig this? I got out of some parts of your book -I don't know if this is a controversial question - but I almost got a sense of if we could just rig the system that the reward systems were all pointing in the direction for everybody. We could do this. We could just skip the part of making people care about this problem, or even teaching them and having climate literacy be a prerequisite for them, caring and doing anything about it. That's a little bit of a wild thing, but there's part of me that went down this path of, oh, what's the possibility here when we take this to its logical conclusion or maybe in a logical conclusion to you, but taking it to its furthest conclusion means that there is some there is a lot we could do without even convincing people to care, I suppose, is what I'm saying.
DUHAIME: There is, but, but I don't. Some people have said to me somewhat cynically is, oh, do you want to put deep brain stimulation in people and just watch them? And the answer is, you don't need that. You don't need that. Because the reward system already.
While I'm making the case that this is challenging for us, it is not by any means impossible. it.
But you have to recognize how it works. One of the things I said earlier was one of the most powerful human rewards. When we think about rewards, we think about acquisition. We think about money, we think about points that get us stuff throughout history, there's plenty of good, solid evidence for this. One of the most powerful human rewards is social reward.
And one of the ways that you can align people to get more rewarded about pro-environmental behavior is doing it with other minded people. And this has been shown to be… why do we think movements take off? Because you feel you're with like-minded people. Why?
Why did the sunshine movement take off? Why do some leaders that you can think of off the top of your head, why are they…. because they're charismatic and people get social reward out of being with like-minded people, and particularly with a charismatic leader. That could work against you as but it certainly is one of the powers of understanding how the brain works.
Now, I'm not talking about mob hysteria and whipping people up into a frenzy, with disinformation or lies. I'm talking about people who can spread the hopefulness of collective action. There's individual action, too, but collective action and political action tends to be very powerful with respect to social reward and belonging. That's why political action on any topic gets traction.
RAY: And it's not just that. It's rewarding. It's what's needed.
DUHAIME: But even apart from political action, one of the examples I give in the book, in the book, there is, a thread that goes through it of a politician who's about to vote, on, on, on legislation that is pro-environmental and it goes through in each chapter. How is that person's decision going to be made based on these various things? And, and part of it is it will depend on things you have no clue over, what you had for breakfast, what your kid watched for a movie the other night, all kinds of things that you won't even think of when you're making that decision. But they influence it.
RAY: I love that part of your book.
DUHAIME: A lot of it is unconscious. But the point I want to make is if you're a CEO or you're a middle manager and there is a pro-environmental decision that your company needs to make, you can choose this or you can choose that. And one is bad for the environment and one is better for the environment. But one maybe loses you a little more money.
That doesn't have to be the case. But let's just say for argument's sake, it does. It's really hard to make that decision on your own, but if you are a member of, Milwaukee businesses for climate action and there are eight other CEOs and you talk about this decision with them and the other CEO say, I did something that last week, that is powerful social reward that can overcome some of the reluctance, because that's just an example. I don't know why I said Milwaukee just I Milwaukee.
But the point is, that's social reward. That is recognizing that in climate action, some of the rewards will be financial because frankly, the scales are tipping towards renewable energy and forth being cheaper. And that efficiency of systems, actually saves you money.
I'll give you one example. In my hospital, one of the things we're doing is a program using an outside nonprofit that helps laboratories become more sustainable. And it calculates the carbon savings, the waste savings, solid waste savings, and it calculates the financial savings. And here's an example where everything aligns, they save money, they save carbon, they feel better because they have to do it together. Other labs are doing it. there can be either friendly competition or social reward, because they're all doing it together. And the institution loves it because it saves money on their bottom line. There's an example of aligning the rewards, but it doesn't happen on its own.
There has to be some external force that helps those things to align. But it's just one example of how, that's an institution scale thing. And those are ways that everybody wins. One of the themes of the book is, you don't have to curtail to be pro-environmental. You have to substitute food.
RAY: Yes. I love the curtailment substitution conversation in your book, too. That speaks to this reward seeking part of the brain, too, that says ‘if I make these decisions, I'm going to lose. I'm going to deprive myself.’ I will be without. There will be scarcity in my life versus, ‘let's if we think of this as more of a substitution thing’, and it's really saying ‘which sources of pleasures do you want in your life?’ Which sorts of rewards do you want to enjoy? Can we train the reward part of your brain to enjoy this pleasure over here that you may have ignored in the past, or whatever?
I think one of the most compelling parts of your book, and it really beautifully pushes back on any critique that could happen, which is this is just about the individual. You're just talking about the brain. You spend a significant amount of energy in your book unpacking why all people at all the scales of the system, the meso macro and micro, macro and micro. I think you have these three scales, all of these scales.
The same thing is true. All these people are decision makers at these different scales. It just might have different ranges of impact depending on where they're at in the system. And I wanted to read a section of the book where you bring this up because of course, sociologists debate this all the time.
Is it the system or is it the individual climate movement has been agonizing over this for for a long time, and I think it's actually befuddled the climate movement in some ways and alienated a lot of people. ‘Oh, I don't know if it's the individual change matters. Or do I need to some change? I can't touch the system, I give up entirely.’
You point to this and you talk about it in your book, and I want to really draw it out. You say, page 126 on the system versus individual part of what's happening in our brains. Let's assume that companies, institutions are responsible for about half of the carbon in the atmosphere. And individuals in their private lives contribute roughly half of these emissions in the US already. By just saying individuals have two systems, they both matter equally.
Let's work on one and also work on the other. But you suggest a binary that you then go on to say this is a false binary. And it's beautiful. You say, even apart from what the exact percentages are, some researchers have argued that in the short term, changing individual behavior is the only effective means to reduce carbon emissions.
This is because of longer term solutions, new technologies and government policy changes, particularly if they involve complicated and often contentious agreements between countries, just take too long. Thus, say the experts, what we do as individuals over the upcoming couple of decades is the most important bridge to slowing down emissions, enough that technological advances in alternate energy production, new kinds of energy infrastructure, and implementation of effective national international policies can cook, catch up to the rapid pace of global warming. These are things we can do now without requiring the dismantling of enormous petrochemical infrastructure and substituting new ways of doing almost everything in our lives. And then you'd go on to talk about how that's true for everybody at all the scales.
DUHAIME: The criticism about focusing on individuals that people conflate with talking about the brain at all, comes from the climate movement's irritation with the idea that they trace back to economic interest, particularly fossil fuel companies, that it's on you to solve the problem. You, Jane Q Citizen, because you have to put your bottles in the recycle bin, and that'll solve the problem. And it has nothing to do with us, stopping selling fossil fuel or transitioning to renewable energy for our company. And they push back on this idea about its individual behavior.
And, and that, of course, does make sense. You do have to call that out when it is used as an excuse to not make more systemic change. But the point that I'm trying to make in the book is that there are no decisions made without a human brain. maybe you can say I. but but in general, decisions are made by a human brain. And if you are the president of a university, if you are a legislator, if you are the leader of a country or the economic director of a country, if you are the head of a hospital system, it doesn't matter.
You are making decisions, which, as you said, may have impact over many larger things, but the decisions that you make are influenced and mediated by the same equipment we all have now. Political action is citizens, presumably, or organizations or whatever, trying to influence the decisions of those decision makers whose specific choices affect a larger spectrum of change. And that's how political action works. But it isn't to say that the decision is made somehow outside of the brain.
And, to understand how decisions are made, you need to understand that they are not always logical. There's a whole section in the book on how your brain perceives money. How do we make decisions about money? A lot of this has been tested with game theory and research, in functional MRI and so forth.
And it turns out that your decisions about money are not strictly logical at all. In the example in the book is, I think I used rake; rake your neighbor's lawn and they pay you. You're a kid and you're proud.
I rake the lawn, I got paid, and you're happy about that, and you're happy about the amount of money you got. But if the kid down the street rakes a smaller lawn and gets the same or more than you do now, you're pissed off. Sorry. I'll use that phrase.
RAY: Maybe not.
DUHAIME: Radio. Sorry about that. But the funny thing is that the values or direction of how you feel about us can be changed by all sorts of factors that are not logical, compared with other people. What, mood you're in if you just had a win or loss and this has been shown in psychology, your, your area, which, you can manipulate people to make decisions in one way or another by whether you praise them or criticize them before they make the decision. There's all sorts of things that go into these decisions, and that includes people who are making decisions with big impacts. That's how political action works.
That's how advocacy works. You can influence those decisions. Now there's a big emphasis, one of the buzzwords that's in a lot of the climate communication world is storytelling. And it's very true that, in in medicine, storytelling or testimonial level evidence is considered the lowest level of evidence. That is says, oh, my brother in law had this and had this surgeon and he lost his leg or whatever. That's crummy evidence.
It is not good scientific evidence. And yet what we know is that testimonial level evidence aka storytelling, is a powerful motivator and influencer of people. That's why social media works. That's why entertainment works. Our challenge in part is to not manipulate the truth and not manipulate people's behaviors, but to recognize those things that are powerful motivators for them when they're making decisions.
RAY: The forces that shape our decisions. You listen here on page 134 since you're talking about it. And I had a question about it. I really love this. Tilting your choices will be your inherent biological affinity for novelty versus familiarity, your comfort level with taking risks, your fear of negative consequences, your background, reliance on facts and data, your overall status and situation in life at the moment, the opinions expressed by those around you and your opinions of those people. Whether you think your opinion will make any difference at the voting booth. What happened to you this morning or last week or decades ago? What happened to your grandparents and many other factors, some rational and some less. Those things all go into our decision making, which is what you were just saying.
It's just oh, we're not those homo economicus rational creatures that all these theories have told us, and we have inherited this enlightenment view of our of our what that liberal democracy has built a bunch of people who are rational, brained minded, who are going to look at the marketplace of ideas and, and make wise decisions in service of what's best. ? this is you're really throwing a wrench in the system that it's who you called it. Exquisite, but it's complicated. all of the forces that go might go into someone's decision making it beautiful. The way you describe all those things is gosh, if you tried to calculate all that with every single thing a person does around climate change, you can see why it's a mess. It's difficult.
DUHAIME: But I do think, I have to admit, I do think it's amazing. I think it's amazing. And I think it has stood the test of time. But now we have to recognize in what ways it limits us, in what ways this particular crisis that we're facing is a real challenge for us.
And we have to pull out more stops than we otherwise would, because we have to help get over some of the hurdles here.
RAY: What your analysis shows, there are things we can do that are about the way we think about it, the way we think about our brains, the way we understand our reward systems, the way we understand how it is that all those things that I just listed from the quote from your book might add up to something I'm doing and the work we can do to become more aware of that and how those forces are shaping our decision making. If we know of them, we can change them. You never mentioned mindfulness in your book at all, but that is the potential of mindfulness to crack open some of these things around that. You're coming out from a neuroscience perspective.
Since you wrote this book, how has anything evolved for you? Have your theories changed it all? Has the political moment that have evolved since you wrote this book made you think differently or in new ways? Or when would you add things or would you say something more urgently?
DUHAIME: Of course the problem is accelerating, it's increasingly urgent. I think that honestly, I've been increasingly convinced of this idea, this basically brain oriented idea, because you can just see it once you start, it's anything else, you you learn a new word, you never heard of that word. And then the next week you hear it three times. And it's the same idea where once you have that perspective, it infiltrates everything.
I think you made an important point that I'd like to elaborate on, which is when you mentioned mindfulness, when you mentioned, you can focus or concentrate on certain things that may help you change your own mind, but I don't think that's enough. I think the utility of looking at things this way is to recognize the world is full of people with enormous differences from one another, although we share some predispositions. And if we're going to affect change that influences others, whether they're politicians, decision makers, CEOs, our institutions, whatever it is that we're trying to influence, because this will require these larger scales, we may be helped by understanding what those people whose opinions we're trying to change will be influenced by, that will work with what they're rewarded for versus against it. you are not going to help people change their mind by criticizing them, by berating them, by othering them. But you may not I didn't come up with this.
This is common stuff, ? You may be able to find common ground. You may be able to find solidarity. You may be able to find courage.
I will give you the example of exercise. There are some people who genuinely want to exercise, but many of us, because of a predisposition we inherited to conserve our energy, because that helped us to survive exercise. For many of us, that is done for fitness is work. But if you find three other people that you do it with regularly and afterwards you go to the coffee shop and have some healthy snack or whatever. I am making this up.
But the point is, you now have converted something that you saw as a negative utility calculation that was hard to do on your own. It's just something that is fun and much easier to do.
RAY: The point of that is the social dimension. Again, you brought it back to this, the pleasure there that we can always bundle with anything that might be perceived as not rewarding to somebody will always be social reward. usually is what you've been saying over the course of this talk.
DUHAIME: And we talked about social situations where it's out, but there's another really potent reward, which is altruism, which is care for others and looking out for others. And I think that, one of the huge things that, gives people climate anxiety is worry about themselves and their own futures, but worries about their children, worries about their family. There's an organization, a national organization called Mothers Out Front. I use it in the book as an example where it's concerned about your children.
And that's a universal, highly universal reproducible cross-cultural thing. Now, it could be parents out front or grandparents out front, or aunts and uncles out front, or siblings. It doesn't have to be the mother's guardianship. but the point is that altruism and doing things for others is another potent reward. If it weren't, we would not have survived. The point is, everything that makes you feel good is not quite the word, because it's not good in the sense of pleasure. But it's a little hard to put it all in one bucket.
But things that are positive to you, maybe that's the best way to word it. They're there for a reason. They're there for an evolutionary reason. That's what we have to tap into.
RAY: When I look around me, I'll think about everybody. What is what is rewarding to them about this behavior? What is what feedback loop that they're getting in their brains is telling them, keep doing this thing, even if I think is bonkers.
DUHAIME: ? And remember, it's never a single thing. Your reward system is getting input continuously. It's making these utility calculations.
Should I do this or that continuously? Most of it is below your level of consciousness. But for example, politicians, what do they care about getting elected, having enough money for their next election campaign? There are obvious ones, but they are also ‘I'm going to be optimistic’ or say, most of them go into public service because they actually want to make their constituents healthier, happier and so on. This is part of why the climate movement has linked up with people in the health professions, because it turns out climate change is bad for your health, and pollution is bad for your health.
And the idea is that everybody wants good health, even people who, work for fossil fuel companies. They're not evil. They want good health. They want their children to grow up.
There are things that are rewarding to almost everybody. The problem is it's hard sometimes for people to see the steps. But sometimes and one of the things the book talks about is how do you be rewarded?
Let's talk about climate change. But sometimes things are rewarding just because they're cool. And that was the example of the Ford, I think F-150 lightning. They did not market it because it was the eco green tree hugger truck.
They marketed it because the torque in an electric vehicle is so high that it could crush the in the car crusher. Competitions it? It was marketed for its honeybee rewards, not its ecological benefits. And that's an example of where sometimes you got to find things that align with the rewards of people who need to change their behavior, not because of climate change, but because of the co-benefits, whether it's health, whether it's efficiency, whether it's, making more money, whether it's that it's a cheaper option, whether it's that there'll be less air pollution in your community and your health care costs will go down, you got to find where the reward is.
RAY: If there's a listener here who's oh, I was thinking that this podcast was about emotions and climate change, but now I'm opening up my whole brain to the idea of health care hospitals. What are the climate change impacts of hospitals? How can they do better? Where is that work getting done?
And then maybe also something there about pediatrics. Where is pediatrics on moving towards climate change? You talked about this a little bit at the beginning, but I'd love to hear more, especially for a listener who might want to go look it up, support it, follow it a little bit more.
DUHAIME: Thanks. What I will say is that in the United States, as most listeners would know, we spend per capita, one of the highest amounts on health care of any country. Our, per capita, our percent of GDP on health care is 18 to 20%. It's huge. It's a big part of our gross domestic product.
And in part people will say that's because there's a lot of waste and there's a lot of inefficiency. But in part it's because of the ability of us to deliver many new kinds of care. There are gene therapies, there are incredible machines and equipments that make things safer and better. We can make diagnoses. In part, people forget this.
Part of the reason our health care costs are high is because we have much more we can do for people. There is probably a lot more efficiency in the system that can be gotten, but that would be a whole separate conversation. And I am not a health care economist. But what I will say is that our carbon footprint in the health sector is quite high. It's been estimated at between 8.
5 and about 10% of all carbon emissions in the US is from the health care sector. Now, hospitals are one of the more intense places for carbon emissions, and that's because we always have to have power. We always have to have lights on, we always have to have ventilators running and high tech equipment running and radiology and MRI's and on. I tried to link these two things, and there's a whole chapter in the book called The Green Children's Hospital.
By working with a team of people to design a prototype experimental children's hospital, small 100 beds, roughly that would be net zero and would be in addition, the honeybee reward for people who, don't care that much, or maybe even don't believe in climate change would be that this hospital was full of nature nothing you would ever see. every wall would be green with plants every. And there were some technical challenges to that that have to do with health care. But we had a whole team that was very enthusiastic to design this. But it requires a big donor. If anybody sent in, the idea would be we would design it that it could be a living laboratory for how do you deliver not just health care, which is high tech, high energy requiring, but how do you deliver anything that requires high energy in a way that is both beautiful, soothing, natural health inducing, zen for whatever word you want calming, healing, and also good for the planet.
In the meantime, I would say that no one who you're voting for and what their position is in climate change at every level, your local level, your state level, your national level, because these are the people that have a bigger impact. And you want the people that are harder to get over that hurdle about the future of our planet, because it's going to affect you. It's going to affect your children in the next generation, whether they're your children or the next generation's children, it's going to affect our planet. And this problem is accelerating.
Even if we stop all carbon emissions today, if there were a magic wand that could do that, climate change is going to get worse for a period of time. But how much worse it gets and how bad things get around the world will be somewhat insulated here for a period of time because of our economy, but there is going to be a lot of loss and suffering, serious humanitarian suffering, and we have the opportunity to make it less bad. We have an extraordinary opportunity if we can help other people through what we know and through understanding how they make decisions at every level, we can do things that will influence them and will, we used to say about Covid flattening the curve, we can help to choose our future. We have that capacity.
Our brains are flexible enough. We are not hard wired. And those of, people who care about this have extraordinary power to influence other people because who will be influenced by something offhand that you say that will go into their utility calculation, that will go into their decision making, you may never know it, you may never see it, but it will influence them. And, I would urge people, don't underestimate your own power.
RAY: As you're talking. I'm thinking, this is empowering. We just have no idea what we can do now. We'll make a difference, and we can't afford to act as if it might not.
Which is where I think a lot of people land when they think the problem is too big. And I can't do anything about it as an individual. I really appreciate that you brought it back to how powerful we are as individuals. Thank you very much for that.
This is beautiful. Are there any organizations that are doing this work either around pediatrics or, health and climate change or hospitals and climate change that you want to shine some light on?
DUHAIME: There are lots of them actually, and more every day. The National Academy Committee is leading a health care challenge for decarbonizing the health care system. Europe is a bit ahead of us. The National Academy of Medicine is doing this. Europe is ahead of us because they have a little bit less political headwinds. There there are many organizations in medicine, in pediatrics that that do this thing. There are many, local and municipal organizations.
I think sometimes it's easier to work at the local level, and then those local levels coalesce to become more national and international. Honestly, now I am working and leading a group that is focusing. I think we might have mentioned this on climate change, war and health. And this is an international effort where basically the premise is climate change is a choice.
War is also a choice. It doesn't mean that if you're attacked, it's your fault you chose it. But the decision to go to war are human decisions made in the human brain. Both of these are decisions that influence our future in enormous ways.
The project is studying whether these two things climate change, war in the setting where climate change already is having effects, and the idea here that we hypothesize and are gathering evidence to support or refute, is that war may set back an entire region's ability to adapt to climate change, never mind mitigate against climate change. For generations, we're looking at a 50 to 100 year time frame, and basically our hope is that we are doing case studies in a number of countries that either currently or recently have dealt with the twin threats of climate change and war. That's a project that is a, long term project. And anybody that's interested in supporting that would be welcome.
I'm not here to fundraise. But to me, we have to work at every scale. This is a very big, very long view doing things in your own life, doing things in your own place of work, doing things within your own circles of friends and families, doing things in your own political sphere of influence with other people, which raises that sphere of influence by community. All of these steps and all of these approaches are important to us.
RAY: Now, that's your climate magic there. What's the magic you're offering? In this moment, that is partly what I'm trying to do with the show is to try to spell out for people that they're not powerless, you've said, and that there is a unique way that they have something to offer in their spheres, you've just beautifully described. Thank you much, Dr Duhaime!
DUHAIME: Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you. And, best of luck and keep the faith.
RAY: That was my fascinating conversation with Doctor Ann-Christine Duhaime, pediatric neurosurgeon and author of Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis. Show notes can be found at KHSU.org. I'm Sarah Jaqette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
ANNCR: Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
