When we think of climate change, we might think of droughts, floods, wildfires, emigration and climate refugees: but what if the call is coming from inside the house? What if it impacts the way we think and act?
Today's show is with Clayton Aldern, Senior Data Reporter at Grist and author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains.
Clayton explains where additional climate risks will be coming from, and much of it is how much even small changes in heat can increase impulsivity and crime, decrease test scores, and generally make things more difficult.
If human bodies are so susceptible to environmental conditions, what does that say for justice? How are we meant to understand agency and determinism? How do we hold one another accountable while also practicing forgiveness for human frailty?
There are no shortage of big questions today! Enjoy.
Resources
The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello, thanks for listening. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. This show has been a very long time in coming. It is with Clayton Aldern, senior data reporter at Grist and author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains. This is a fascinating, terrifying and beautifully written book. I can’t say I’ve read anything else quite like it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we get into philosophical territory right off the bat. If heat makes us worse decision makers, what does that have to say about how environmental conditions determine outcomes? How much agency do you, any of us, actually have?
Are we all just mechanical brains responding to stimuli without choice? Is determinism actually real, and if so, what are we meant to do with that insight? Is it supposed to change how we think about justice? Should it make us more forgiving of ourselves and the frailty of others? Is that even the right way to conceptualize brains, minds, bodies, ethics? We talk about a lot. It’s a really fun show. It’s about neuroscience. It’s about public health, justice, fairness, criminology. There’s a lot to today’s show. I hope you enjoy it and pick up a copy of Clayton’s book. The link is in the show notes to do so. Thanks so much for listening. And here is your show.
Thanks for being here, Clayton. Glad to have you.
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks for having me around.
Ross Kenyon: I read this book right before the show went on hiatus, and so I had all this knowledge deep in my brain and then it all evaporated. So what are we even doing here, Clayton? You’re going to have to teach me from scratch how a changing climate changes our brains.
Clayton Aldern: Great. Bring it on.
Ross Kenyon: Can you please recount for me 300 pages of the book that you wrote and the stories that you detail?
Clayton Aldern: You know, actually the story — I mean, it’s certainly not uncomplicated, but I do think that the central message here is quite clear, which is that the environment is reaching in, right? We often think about climate change as this thing that’s happening somewhere else in the world, and in particular somewhere outside of our bodies, much less to say anything of something else that’s happening in another country or in a future time. But I think what the neurological research would suggest is that climate change is here now, inside our brains, right? And we have all these examples of the degrees to which various environmental vectors are bearing on brain health and behavior and decision making. And this is a book about those vectors.
Ross Kenyon: It’s one of those topics where the common term for this in journalism is boiling the ocean, which maybe you disagree with. Maybe this is not a case of boiling the ocean, but the book is many things. It’s about memory, it’s about biology, it’s about culture, disease. Did it actually feel like boiling the ocean, or am I misreading you?
Clayton Aldern: No, it’s a fair point. I mean, I think what became true for me over the course of writing it was that it was one of those effects — and forgive me, I don’t remember what these things are called — but once you see it, once you see it, you see it everywhere. So in that sense, it’s certainly true that this is a work of somewhat generous and expansive boundary, which is to say we cover a lot of ground. But I would argue that that’s just the nature of what it means to write about the environment, right? The environment is everything outside of the individual. So if we take that claim seriously, then we ought to confront it at many different spatial, temporal and sectoral scales.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, writing about the environment is also famously difficult because it is yet everything that is not us. And then if you also include us in there, are you just writing about everything? I mean, you tell stories though, which is one way that I think you maybe thread the needle here, because you’re trying to make this a human experiential piece of writing.
Clayton Aldern: Yeah. Well, and to ground this a little more, there’s a chapter in the middle of the book in which I introduce the work of a neuroscientist named Karl Friston. And Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist, right? He thinks about models of the brain, models of the mind. And in particular, he’s offered up what is effectively a theory of everything that says, what is it that organisms do? What is it that brains do? Nervous systems writ large — well, they model the world, right? They seek to use their sensory organs to take in information about the outside world.
And then they have this generative model with which they are comparing these sensory signals to their expectations and adjusting those model parameters as a function of the mismatch, right? So what do brains do? What do organisms do? We’re trying to model everything in the environment such that we are not surprised by it, and therefore, right, if you accept that premise, therefore it’s completely unsurprising that perturbations to environmental variables beget changes within our brains. So I think this is kind of the whole story in a nutshell, right? We’re talking about the fact that organisms are effectively generative models of their environments, and environmental change therefore begets change within us.
Ross Kenyon: This model generating capacity that human brains have — how much of it is evolved within the climatic conditions of the last 10,000 plus years, and how much of it is hundreds of thousands of years old and thus could survive different climatic conditions than what we might be experiencing now and likely to experience in the future?
Clayton Aldern: It’s a great question. I mean, Friston would say that this modeling capacity, this modeling function of brains, of organisms, is actually something that is innate to thingness. It is actually a definition of what it means to exist.
Ross Kenyon: I was going to talk about Kant anyways, so.
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, great. So we’re already there. So, so, so Friston would argue, well, no, this is actually just an innate quality of what it means to exist at all, right? You have to draw a border between a self and everything else outside that self, and you maintain that border basically by the self modeling everything outside of it. So we’re getting a little abstract, but this is a way of saying that the brain has always done this. All nervous systems do this. Now the question becomes then, to your point, to what extent can we continue to adapt for the purpose of evolutionary fitness as the climate changes?
And as I understand it — I mean, first of all, there’s not a great answer to this question. We simply don’t know. But we do know that there are limits. And my understanding of the limits basically suggests that humans can adapt to probably something on the order of 50% of expected climatic changes, biologically, neurologically speaking. And the rest of it we simply can’t adapt to, right? There’s a certain point — wet-bulb temperatures are a great example. You know, there’s a certain point at which we can simply not produce enough sweat from our sweat glands to cool ourselves appropriately.
And if we wanted to adapt accordingly, well, over the course of generations we could perhaps grow more sweat glands. But we can’t do that on a time scale that outpaces that at which the climate is changing. So in that sense, we are not infinitely adaptable. We can model our environments. We can adapt appropriately to a series of environmental conditions that we are likely to experience. We cannot adapt everything away.
Ross Kenyon: I think humans assume that culture is quite malleable too, but you document places and cultures in which the world is changing so quickly that the commonly used ways of understanding physical phenomena and our relation to them are being eroded by climate change as we speak. We think culture is a very fast moving evolutionary adaptation, or set of adaptations, but is it perhaps not as much as we maybe think it is?
Clayton Aldern: It’s a good question. It’s not one I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. I mean, I think when I think about culture change and some of what we might consider to be the softer elements of these routes of influence that the environment is furthering here, I’m thinking less about the temporal aspect, less about the degree to which — right, we’re kind of having a conversation about elasticity right now. I’m thinking less about elasticity and more about the direction of causality, right? What is influencing what in the first place? To me, it is not surprising per se that culture is or is not malleable. It’s not surprising per se that it may or may not operate at a different time scale than climatic changes.
What feels worth noting, though, is that we have really great evidence that explicitly demonstrates the degree to which environmental influence bears on culture in this causal fashion, right? This is true with respect to language. It’s true with — right, I mean, anytime you mention the phrase eco-anxiety or climate anxiety, for example. And this is not what the book is about per se, right? This is a book about direct environmental influence on the brain. But anytime we’re in a conversation about some of these mental health effects, we’re talking effectively about culture change. We’re talking about a disconnect between a person and a place, right? Because place is one of the vectors through which identity is constructed.
That is something we know neurologically, right? We know that when developing humans self differentiate, when they become a self, when they understand themselves to have an identity — yes, that identity is predicated on a whole series of understandings about preferences and being able to recognize yourself in the mirror and who’s your family, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s also a function of affiliating yourself with groups and practices and places, right? That’s what it means to have an identity. And so is it any surprise that, again, there’s some kind of influence between an environmental vector and a more identitarian expression? I think the answer is, you know, no, when you spell it out like that. But I don’t know if that would have been my first guess had you said, well, where does identity come from and why is it changing?
Ross Kenyon: You document in the book cases of PTSD or other mental illness and health issues as a result of dislocation from climate disasters. Does this play into what you’re speaking about now?
Clayton Aldern: I think it does. I think where it is perhaps most compelling in terms of disconnect is with respect to some of the intergenerational effects that have been documented, right? We hear, I think again, often in soft terms about intergenerational trauma, right? And to the extent that anthropologists and sociologists have demonstrated these types of effects in Holocaust survivors and their children, right, children of families who experienced the Rwandan genocide, right, Indigenous families for whom ancestors were violently displaced, right — we see that there are these kind of bread crumbs of intergenerational trauma woven throughout some of the sociological literature.
What is being demonstrated in cognitive neuroscience is that, for example, if you as an infant or as an unborn child indeed are in utero during the time an extreme storm hits, right? So there’s this fabulous study that came out of New York City that basically sought to understand what happened to the children who were in utero during Hurricane Sandy relative to those who had been born around the same time but weren’t in utero during the storm, or indeed were conceived after it. And what these researchers demonstrate is that you see an uptick in a whole suite of emotional and behavioral disorders as early as preschool, presenting in these kids who are growing up, you know, six to ten years later.
And, you know, the question then becomes, well, how can any of that happen? And what the neuroscientists would say is that we’re looking at epigenetic inheritance, right? We’re looking at these huge glucocorticoid storms, right, cortisol among them, for example — really big stress profiles being exerted upon the developing child when the mother is exposed to this extreme weather event, right? A hurricane crashes into town. Very, very stressful experience. That stress profile is going to be transferred to the unborn child, right? These are genetic switches that are being flipped because of epigenetic changes on their genome.
Lo and behold, epigenetic changes are heritable. So now we’re not just talking about the fact that an unborn child is being affected by a hurricane and we see some thumbprint of that effect later in life. We’re also suggesting that, unfortunately, it may be the case that the next generation after that may be prone to some similar effects. And again, we’re talking about things like ADHD, anxiety, depression, conduct disorder. These are disorders that are presenting in children as young as preschool at rates, you know, 20x, 30x those of their peers. And that type of cognitive shift, behavioral shift, cultural shift, dare I say, is that which I think is worth paying very serious attention to.
Ross Kenyon: It’s terrifying. We think of property damage, lives lost, limbs lost. But if merely surviving a very stressful event can cause decades of trauma related illness to future descendants, either current or future descendants, how do you even start to tally the cost of those, the repercussions from that? And how do we prevent it? Surely we can’t prevent any sort of stressful situation. I’m not even sure that we would want to avoid all stressful situations that might lead to some of this. I think once it’s at a certain level of magnitude, we of course want to avoid it — natural disasters.
Clayton Aldern: Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, what Dr. Yoko Nomura would say, who was the PI on the study I just mentioned, is that for a developing child, stress in its own right can be inoculating, right? We do want to be exposed to some kind of glucocorticoid response. We are when we’re in the womb, because the world is stressful, right? We are, or at least, you know, we are likely to encounter stress at some point in our life. So we should have the biological tools for responding to it appropriately.
The problem is when the stressful event or events are so extreme that, you know, we reach a breaking point, we find ourselves in a world of hurt, right? Those stress exposures are no longer inoculating per se. So what do we do with that? Well, Nomura would argue that we need to be thinking really critically about these notions of biological resilience, right? What might that look like in practice? What might it look like as expecting parents? What might it look like as young children, to defend ourselves and our, you know, future generations from these types of threats at a biological level?
Ross Kenyon: Are you able to, through mindfulness and other techniques, mitigate this in some way, or does it just run deeper than that?
Clayton Aldern: That’s a great question. It really is a great question, because when we look at something like extreme heat, for example, right — and there have been dozens and dozens of studies on the relationship between extreme heat exposure and cognition, right, the degree to which we can solve problems, think critically, make decisions, et cetera, et cetera. What’s happening in the brain when we’re exposed to extreme heat? You’ve got, you know, a couple chunks of your prefrontal cortex that are always kind of chattering with one another when you make a decision. And some of those chunks, for example, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, are overworked in extreme heat.
What happens when you have an overworked dorsolateral prefrontal cortex? Well, you have outsized influence coming in from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. What is the VMPFC? Well, it’s the chunk of your prefrontal cortex that’s receiving inputs from the limbic system, things like the amygdala, right? These are very emotionally attuned centers of the brain. So if the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which by the way has much more to do with rational decision making, is overworked and not able to balance out the inputs from the VMPFC, unsurprisingly, our decision making under extreme heat conditions is going to look a lot more impulsive.
It’s going to look more emotional. It’s going to look, at a neurological level, right — if we look at an fMRI, for example, or some electrical measures of brain activity, we’re basically going to see the disconnect between some of these functional networks, right? Your brain activity that’s usually operating in tandem is going to look more randomized. What does mindfulness do? It basically erases all of those types of effects. So you see more coherence between these regions. You see the ability of something like the DLPFC to communicate more appropriately with the VMPFC.
Mindfulness is something that affords a kind of strength underlying these networks of functional connectivity. And of course, I mean, behaviorally speaking, what do we see in folks who practice mindfulness? We see an ability to not be distracted. We see an ability to respond to stress in a manner that doesn’t look impulsive, for example. And so, you know, there’s a lot of great research that would suggest mindfulness is a wonderful place to start, simply because the evidence on the ground shows us that mindfulness interventions and practitioners thereof are operating in such a way, are navigating their environment in such a way, that it looks as if their brain networks are kind of operating at the types of full capacities that something like extreme heat starts to inhibit.
Ross Kenyon: It makes me think thoughts about how justice will be administered. I don’t think we want a future in which people do terrible things and say it was three degrees hotter than it was ten years ago, and that’s why I did a terrible act. But it does make me wonder just how in control of our emotions and behaviors that we are, and how much is actually environmentally determined. I’m very agent oriented. I do not like seeing others merely as a set of forces acting upon us and driving us around. I don’t like thinking that.
And even if it’s true, and it might ultimately be true, that determinism is to some degree the fact of how decisions and choices and outcomes happen, I don’t know that it’s good for us to believe that. I certainly don’t want to believe that about myself. I want to believe that my choices are my responsibility and I have to live with them. Although that might be delusional in some case, I’m just wondering, how do I even operationalize what you’re talking about in that future where we might have increased environmental stressors and maybe that is a more fair way of understanding human behavior?
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, I mean, I think that — I mean, first of all, you know, my, like, handle on all social media is compatibilism, which is the vein of philosophy that would suggest even if you accept the premise of determinism, you don’t get to immediately default to nihilism. You don’t immediately get to default to hedonism, right? It’s the one that says, yeah, sure, maybe physically this universe is deterministic, and also that’s not our experience. It doesn’t feel that way. And the feeling of agency is enough to recapture moral responsibility.
So first, I would say even if our behavior were 100% environmentally determined, that to me doesn’t bear on the extent to which we ought to be exercising compassion in the world. It doesn’t bear on the extent to which we can understand ourselves as operating as free agents, in the sense that we feel as if we are in control of our behavior. Now, that said, we do know that there’s a probably less than 100%, but somewhat significant influence of the environment on our decision making, as I demonstrate left and right in this book.
So what do we do with that, right? Is somebody going to end up in a courtroom in 30 years arguing, you know, temporary thermogenic delirium and getting off because it was three degrees hotter that day when they stabbed their friend? I think for me, the answer’s no, we’re probably not going to end up there. And I agree that that’s probably not the outcome that we want. What I do think is that as we come to understand the significance of environmental influence on decision making, we can use that understanding to shore up the types of biological resilience that I think folks like Dr. Nomura are advocating for, right?
What might that look like in practice? If you are aware of the fact that extreme heat — right, exposure to extreme heat — makes it more likely for you to commit a violent act, which is true, then the next time it’s really hot out and you’re feeling somewhat aggravated, you might be, in a mindful manner, more prone to think about the fact that it’s hot out, and that is why you might be feeling a little more aggravated, and therefore you might be a little less quick to the trigger. So I think there’s something about this understanding, there’s something about the awareness of these vectors, that’s actually very useful in terms of modifying our future responses to that.
Ross Kenyon: Does the research that you’ve conducted and compiled in this book make you more forgiving of human frailty? No one’s asked you that before, it sounds like.
Clayton Aldern: Well, I’m considering whether or not I accept the premise. Are humans frail?
Ross Kenyon: Are humans frail insofar as they make ethically dubious decisions, they put themselves first in ways that are not compatible with justice? Questions like that.
Clayton Aldern: I find myself to be ever more forgiving of the human experience and the manners in which that manifests by way of decisions we make, the more I learn about the degree to which it is environmentally influenced. But I do think that there’s a fine line between empathy for that type of frailty, as it were, and again, the, you know, legal or litigatory or — right, any of the manifestations of like the justice component that may arise in some theoretical future where we are assigning blame and responsibility as a function of these factors, right? I think there’s a line to be drawn between empathy and the implications for responsibility, because I suppose what I’m saying —
Ross Kenyon: It’s a tough question, reflecting on the things that your book had to teach me. I’m already somewhat sympathetic, and I might actually be a compatibilist if I had read more of that literature and thought a little bit more about it. I’m at least sympathetic, given that I essentially summed it up without actually meaning to. But it does make me feel a bit more — recognizing how much I am a brain in a physical body that responds to stresses in ways that are autonomic and I’m just, like, not even aware of — makes me more forgiving of myself and also more understanding of others in ways that I think are really useful.
The downside of me thinking so agentically about ethics is that it puts a lot of pressure on oneself, where these are all things that should be in your control. And in actuality, they might not be that way. I might be falling into the vice of assuming so much responsibility for action that it’s almost aspiring to God like status. Do I actually have this much control over myself or not? Am I a body or am I a mind, or both? I have a lot to say and a lot to ask about that, but I’ll just let you start.
Clayton Aldern: Well, I think actually those are the essential questions here. You know, I think there’s a lot of room to explore them because I think they’re big. And you’ve touched on a really important distinction, which is that between the mind and the body — if we can call it a distinction, which of course I would argue we can’t, that there is no mind without the body, right? I think the other line of inquiry that you see in this book is around embodied cognition, the fact that brains don’t make sense outside of the context of the body, right?
And that’s because, again, if you buy Karl Friston’s argument, the function of the brain is to model the environment, right? Everything outside itself. Well, OK, what is outside of the brain? What is outside of the organism? Those are slightly different questions, because the body encases the brain, but the body inherently includes all of the sensory organs that the brain uses to navigate the world. And so again, without that body, the brain is incapable of sensing anything. And in fact, there’s no measure of success at living, right?
What do feelings do? What are emotions for, right? As an agent with conscious access to your generative model, right, feelings are these suggestions to your consciousness as to whether or not you’re doing a good job at living. And what are feelings? They are embodied, right? When you’re hungry, when you’re feeling pain, again, even happiness, sadness, right — these are physical things that are happening in your body that are modulated by things like your endocrine system, right, and various neurotransmitters and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so without those embodied experiences, your brain has nothing to model, right? In fact, it doesn’t have an input or a suite of inputs to its model. And so the notion of modeling the environment kind of collapses, because you don’t have a set of expectations against which to compare it. You don’t have the other terms of the model. So, you know, this is a long way of saying, when I’m thinking about the collapse of agency that is so readily read in deterministic worlds, I don’t really get that bothered by it.
Because I guess my read is that if the point of organisms is to model their environment, if the loop that we’re talking about is sensory information comes in and actions go out, and you can draw this difference between an entity and the world by drawing some border between the two — it’s just as true that your actions are the world’s sensations, and it’s just as true that the world’s actions are your sensations. Which is another way of saying that every time we’re acting, we are indeed acting, because everything outside of yourself is perceiving you, right? The generative model of the world is perceiving you.
And so I don’t know, I mean, again, this is — we’re kind of in highfalutin territory here. But I think this is a really critical point, because when I, you know, think about determinism kind of stripping us of our free will, I’m like, well, yeah, maybe it does. But at the same time, that’s only if you consider all these arrows flowing in one direction. And existence isn’t about a unidirectional street, right? It’s relational. Existence is necessarily relational, because it’s an act of modeling, right? There are loops involved. And so we don’t lose agency in a deterministic world, it just looks a little bit different.
Ross Kenyon: I think topics about the big picture questions of ethics and ontology, and these are very important and interesting, and, you know, epistemology and what is the mind and questions like that are really important here. But also, of all the stories in your book that you detail, which are the ones that scare you the most? They’re all varying types of scary, but which are the ones that you’re actually actively concerned about?
Clayton Aldern: I suppose the stories for which we are still gathering evidence, and also for which we know that there are probably a series of synergistic facts that we haven’t even begun to wrap our minds around. One that comes to mind is the story of neurotoxins that are being released by cyanobacterial blooms, blue-green algae blooms around the world. We know that these neurotoxins are a primary causal predictor and influencer of the likelihood of somebody experiencing a neurodegenerative condition like ALS, right, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease — really, really cruel neurodegenerative disease to get in mid age.
And we have enough of an evidence base that suggests this is a causal pathway. But we don’t know how these neurotoxins are interacting with things like methylmercury in the water. We have one study that shows it’s a synergistic effect, but you know, we need more. We also don’t know the extent to which these exposure rates are varying over time, because while we have good satellite imagery that tracks bloom size and frequency, it’s not like we have a bunch of air monitors set up around the world that are assessing the extent to which these blooms are in fact off gassing the neurotoxins in question, and at what rates. And by the way, you need to adjust for wind direction and speed.
So there’s a lot of research to be done there. And even once you’ve done that research, we need to understand epidemiologically the extent to which the neurotoxin exposures in question result in something like the presentation of ALS immediately versus in a month versus in a year versus in a decade versus in three decades. And of course, it looks something like the latter end of the spectrum, that so much of neurodegenerative disease progression is a series of cumulative hits that your immune system and genome encounters over the course of your life.
But, you know, given the fact that that’s true, here we are in 2024 exposed to, you know, this toxic soup of air pollution and smog and wildfire smoke. And now let’s add, you know, neurotoxins from blue-green algae blooms to the mix. We simply don’t know, even though we understand it to be risky, what’s going to happen in 20 years. We don’t know the effect of these exposures today on the future, because the future has not come to pass, and because we haven’t come to recognize yet how serious the exposures may be over a given time period.
That strikes me as scary, right? Because what do we know? Well, we know it’s a causal exposure. It’s a causal risk factor, rather. And we also know that blooms, as a function of climate change, are increasing in size and frequency, right? As storm runoff becomes more severe and as waters warm, right, these are good conditions globally speaking for blue-green algae. And so we know that these exposure rates are going to climb. We just don’t really know what’s going to happen once that occurs.
You know, the same is true of these brain eating amoebae, right? This organism, Naegleria fowleri, is a free moving amoeba that hangs out in freshwater systems, and as waters warm, that appears to be a lot better for its health and homeostasis and self maintenance. And so you’re seeing more and more of these cysts waking up, as it were, because they can kind of just hang out in this, like, state of almost suspended animation until conditions are right. And lo and behold, conditions are becoming more and more right.
And as summers warm, young children are spending more and more time jumping into lakes and streams. And so exposure rates to something like Naegleria fowleri are increasing. And this is something — you know, this is an amoeba that has a 97 to 99% fatality rate upon contact. It’s not like this is a disease factor that’s ever going to be a major cause of death in the world, right? It’s always going to be extremely rare. And also it’s going to become more common, and we’re likely to encounter other disease vectors like it. So that’s another area where I’m like, you know, your question is what scares you? I’m like, well, that scares me, because we simply don’t know what the next 50 years are going to look like.
Ross Kenyon: Even if the number of deaths are small and the risk is relatively small in absolute terms, it’s likely to have a chilling effect on human behavior anyways. If you know there’s this one in a million chance that your child is going to die from a brain eating amoeba, you might just not take them to the lake at all. They might miss what, for many American kids, is a fundamental experience of summer, that may no longer be culturally relevant or accessible to them in any meaningful way.
Clayton Aldern: Right. And now we’re talking about culture change again, which is, again, this is why I think they’re kind of inseparable. And when we’re talking about the neurological route, as soon as we start discussing changes in behavior, we’re also talking about the cultural route.
Ross Kenyon: Are there things that you’re seeing that make you optimistic, or maybe temper some of the bad feelings one might experience from reading a book so terrifying?
Clayton Aldern: Well, I do think it’s important that we’re having this conversation, right? I mean, again, I think that awareness is part of the kind of grand story here, in terms of the resilience that we could inculcate at some point, right? If we’re not aware of the effects in question, we have no hope of confronting them. And I mean that, you know, kind of both individually and societally, right? You mentioned, like, is anybody measuring, you know, the cost of something like generations of PTSD coming down the pike? No, not really. Well, actually maybe The Lancet did, like, one study.
But the point is, usually when we think about the cost of climate change, at least when it comes to health, we’re thinking about, you know, epidemiological models that were written 20 or 30 years ago. They capture things like malaria and cardiovascular disease and diarrhea. And we can price those things and, you know, using the kind of classic tools of public health, come to an understanding of the dollars and cents that might be tossed into a cost benefit analysis, such that we know what a climate solution might be able to divert or avert in terms of public health costs. That’s all well and good.
Nobody in the world is seeking to do that for the neurological health costs of climate change, right? And to be clear here, we’re talking about the relationship between extreme heat and aggression, right, which results in productivity losses, uh, if people are being killed, but also just simply if they’re not spending as much time at work. And we’re talking about, you know — and I don’t think this is exclusively a story that needs to be a function of productivity costs or labor, but that’s one way to measure what we’re talking about.
We’re also talking about loss of education years, right? Because another thing extreme heat does is it makes cognition a little more difficult to pursue as an organism. And so you see students lose exam points on hot days, right? And that’s going to, in aggregate, delay graduation for some folks, or, you know, result in a kind of lower footprint of learning for them. And we know that, of course, there are productivity costs associated with education losses, right? Nobody’s really measuring that, to say nothing of the infectious diseases that affect the brain.
Again, all the epidemiological models out there that are going to be flowed into these grand climate economic models used for cost benefit analysis at policy making level — they’re all about malaria for the most part, right? We’re not thinking about non malarial infectious disease. And we of course know how to price these things, right? We have DALYs and QALYs and all kinds of, you know, modes of assessing economic loss as a function of disability or as a function of mortality and morbidity. So we could be measuring these things, but we’re not. And yet I mention this as part of, you know, an answer to your hope question, by saying we could be doing that. It’s actually pretty easy. We could be doing that.
So I think that in familiarizing myself with this research, I’ve begun to see a little bit of possibility for where we could go societally, and in terms of thinking about addressing some of the threats in question. It also strikes me as a route of optimism here that we are now seeing groups of researchers come together and brand themselves as working on this problem, right, the climate and brain problem, in a way that they were not before, in a way that is reminiscent, for example, of the fact that five years ago it was really, really uncommon to hear the phrase climate anxiety, or to think about climate change and mental health.
Today, that’s a ubiquitous idea, right? You see it all over the news. There are dozens of working groups around the world, huge reports published by international bodies on climate change and mental health. Everybody’s heard the phrase climate anxiety. I feel we are at today a point for the neurological costs of climate change, these brain health effects, that we were at for climate change and mental health five years ago. I would say that in five years we can expect the conversation you and I are having now to be a much more ubiquitous one.
I think that the researchers that I’m seeing convene conversations around these topics, the working groups that are forming, the publications that are beginning to roll out of academia and the nonprofit sector, to me suggest that folks are beginning to coalesce around something resembling a unified research agenda in the climate and brain health space. And that has never been the case before. That’s exciting to me.
Ross Kenyon: How do you figure that happens? What is your theory of social change for those working on problems like this? Because I’m not writing a book — getting it published takes a long time. So you’ve been thinking about this and writing about this for years at this point. How come they weren’t right at the vanguard with you several years ago? How, why, all of a sudden, is now this a cool, sexy, important thing to be doing, to spend your career points on?
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know if we’re quite at cool and sexy yet. Maybe give it another 12 months. I think we’re kind of like seeing maybe like a look over somebody’s shoulder situation. Like, what are you guys working on? And that is promising to me. But you know, why wasn’t that happening five years ago? I think it’s a function of language, right? I think for the most part, we’re talking about this unnecessary — and I hate to use the word because it’s overused — but there’s this unnecessary siloing that occurs in academia.
And much of that siloing, sure, it’s a function of funding streams, the various incentive structures that, you know, kind of build these vertical towers in academia, but also it’s a function of what people call the things they’re working on. And part of my work in writing this book was trying to demonstrate the fact that the cognitive neuroscientists who are thinking about heat and behavior are speaking a different language but working on the same thing as the behavioral economists who are thinking about heat and behavior, who are working on the same thing as the chemical ecologists who are thinking about — well, there aren’t too many working on heat and behavior, but ocean acidification and behavior, right? Protonation and behavior.
Right, there are so many scientists out there in the world who are working on the relationship between the environment and the organism, unsurprisingly, because that’s a huge umbrella I just drew up. But they wouldn’t consider themselves to necessarily be involved in the same work as some of their peers in other disciplines. And I think that is what is beginning to change.
Ross Kenyon: To what degree do you attribute causality to your book and your journalism?
Clayton Aldern: Oh, very little, but not insignificant. I mean, maybe if we had to put it on a one to 100 spectrum, maybe I had 5% responsibility for some of the shift. I mean, people have been writing about it, right? Like, it has started to trickle out of the Academy. It has started to trickle out of media. I think if my contribution has been noteworthy at all here, it’s to have kind of attempted to group this set of what have, I believe, been parallel but unitable conversations into one, right?
I’m kind of involved in some braiding here, and I think the braiding is useful, right? I mentioned a couple working groups that have emerged on the subject. I’m a member of a couple of them, and perhaps the most prominent is this working group on climate change and brain health at Columbia that is working out of their school of public health. We have about 100 members now. Everybody in that group, you know, for better or for worse, is familiar with my book, right? And these are people from vastly different walks of life. These are folks who — again, we’re talking about, you know, neurologists, neuroscientists, both theoretical and experimental. We’re talking about psychologists, folks who work in policy, folks who work in media.
But anybody who has had a serious professional inquiry into climate change and brain health, broadly understood, kind of found themselves in this Columbia working group. And again, for better, for worse, we do kind of have a biblical text of sorts. There is at least something to point to where we can say, yes, this is what we’re talking about. Now maybe I can take this book and hand it to my PI, or hand it to my council member, or whatever it may be, such that we can begin to disseminate this notion of a shared research framework, as opposed to continuing to work in our silos. Is that actually happening? I don’t know. It kind of sounds better when I say it than what I imagine is the truth. But I think it is useful to have a foundational text. That’s kind of what I’ve sought to write here.
Ross Kenyon: Well, quickly, Clayton — actually, just so you know, quickly, but not super quickly. What do you — is another book coming? What’s next for you?
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, yeah. That’s not nice to ask authors that. You know, the answer is yes. And in fact, there’s a reasonably well developed idea, but you know, it’s not one that I have an elevator pitch for. The sneak preview is — I hate to say it, because this is, it’s going to be for a very specific type of listener.
Ross Kenyon: If you enjoyed our conversation about the, you know, ontological implications of generative modeling of one’s environment, this is the book for you.
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, it’s, I think, an attempt to think about the broader implications of existence being a function of modeling. And this comes from the computational neuroscientific field that asks questions about what’s known as the free energy principle. Maybe you’re familiar with the phrase predictive processing, right? So it’s a book about predictive processing and the free energy principle, but not just about the organism, right? Because these are analyses that one can apply to the individual cell, a species, a population, an ecosystem, right?
So what are the implications of the free energy principle, right, this notion of minimizing surprise, this notion of matching expectations to one’s sensory experiences? What are the sociological, societal, political, et cetera implications of the free energy principle when applied to different spatial and temporal scales? That’s kind of the gist. And the reason I said, you know, there’s not an elevator pitch yet is because if I tried to say that, you know, anywhere other than, I imagine, this Zoom call, you know, everybody would have walked away by now. So I’m still working on refining it such that somebody wants to actually pick that thing up. But yeah, it’s a little more political and a little more ecological.
Ross Kenyon: Looking forward to it. If anyone’s going to be interested, I suspect if someone’s listening to this show, this is — you’re in a very sweet spot. Although everyone escaped without us talking about Kant, really, except just alluding to him. So lucky you, audience. Maybe next time.
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, yeah. That’s episode two.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. Thanks for being here, Clayton.
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was illuminating even for myself.
