July 2, 2025 • 62 mins
As the world gets hotter, how is it changing our brains? In this episode of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are joined by neuroscientist and author Clayton Aldern to explore how environmental shifts (especially climate change) are quietly reshaping our minds, behaviours, and capacity for decision-making. Drawing from his acclaimed book The Weight of Nature, Clayton explains how heat, trauma, and ecological instability are influencing everything from memory and empathy to aggression and judgement.
This isn’t just a conversation about climate change, it’s about what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world. Jean, Scott, and Clayton dig into the science behind our evolving mental states and offer a compelling call to rethink our relationship with the environment, not just to save the planet, but to preserve our own mental wellbeing. This is a conversation every leader should hear.
Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
Social:
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LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
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YouTube @evolvingleader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jean Gomes (00:03):
Because of recent geopolitical realities, the
climate change agenda has becomea whole lot more complex, if
that were indeed possible. Butone thing's for sure, it will
continue to shape our world inmany unforeseen ways, in the
weight of nature. Theneuroscientist Clayton Page
Alden explores the impact it'shaving on us as the world gets
(00:25):
hotter. As he explains, as theenvironment changes, you should
expect to change too. It is,after all, the job of your brain
to model the world as it is andthe world is mutating. What is
fascinating and worrying inequal measure, is how climate
change will impact our mindset.
As the world gets hotter, thecost to humans will be the very
(00:47):
thing that we need to solve theproblem the loss of patience,
judgement and empathy.
Scientists have long observedthe correlation between
temperature spikes and violence,riots and irrationality. For
example, on final exam days,school students, chances of
graduating decrease by apercentage point for every extra
(01:11):
degree, the hotter is, thefaster time seems to go when
we're making decisions. In thisshow, Clayton Alden goes deeper,
looking at why, revealing afascinating dance between
internal stress and externalpressure. This includes the
influence of heat on serotoninlevels and depression and what
(01:32):
psychologists call the overinterpretation effect where we
wrongly anticipate malignmotives from others or
exaggerate felt harm on us. Wespent the last few decades
looking at climate change'simpact on the planet, but we
also need to urgently considerthe impact it's having on us.
(01:52):
Tune in for an importantconversation on The Evolving
Leader you
Scott Allender (02:15):
Hi friends, welcome to The Evolving Leader,
the show born from the beliefthat we need deeper, more
accountable and more humanleadership to confront the
world's biggest challenges. I'mScott Allender
Jean Gomes (02:25):
and I'm Jean Gomes.
Scott Allender (02:26):
How are you feeling today? My friend?
Jean Gomes (02:27):
Hot, angry, depressed, sense of futility and
grudging resentment. On aserious note. On a serious note,
I'm feeling the opposite of mostof those things. Despite what's
(02:49):
going on in the world right now,I'm feeling a huge amount of
optimism, because I'm seeing forevery trend, there's a counter
trend, and I'm seeing thatcounter trend starting to build
some momentum right now. So I'mfeeling a degree of hope, and
you know, the folks that webring onto the show are actually
going to propel that. So I'mfeeling really optimistic,
(03:10):
particularly about thisconversation, how you feeling,
Scott?
Scott Allender (03:11):
I'm feeling a mix. I'm feeling a bit of
tension. I think physically, I'mfeeling a bit activated. I'm
feeling partially distractedtoday, lots going on. I'm
feeling this constant tensionaround trying to balance staying
informed and staying mentallywell, and that's that's a new a
(03:32):
new challenge on a daily basis.
So just taking things as one dayat a time as I can, and being as
mindful and present as I can andwhat needs doing each day. A big
bright spot in this day is theconversation we're about to
have, because we've been waitingto have it for some time. We're
joined today by Clayton pagealldern, who is an award winning
journalist and data scientistcurrently working at the
(03:56):
intersection of climate change,environmental degradation,
neuroscience and mental health.
He's written extensively forpublications ranging from the
Atlantic, The Economist andenvironmental magazine, grist
and today, we are super eager toexplore the ideas and
implications for our audience inhis incredible new book, The
(04:17):
weight of nature. Clayton,welcome to The Evolving Leader.
Clayton Aldern (04:21):
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me.
Jean Gomes (04:23):
Clayton, welcome to the show. How are you feeling
today? I
Clayton Aldern (04:26):
am based in Seattle, so my day is just
getting started, which is tosuggest I'm sipping some green
tea and looking at,occasionally, a window that is
somehow providing a little bitof sunlight, which is a little
anomalous for Seattle, so I'mdoing fine,
Jean Gomes (04:45):
excellent. Well, before we get into the weight of
nature, which I was saying toyou beforehand, was absolutely
one of my top books of lastyear, it opened my eyes to a
whole bunch of things that Ihadn't understood. Can you give
us. Quick introduction to yourcareer and how you became
focused on your current work.
Clayton Aldern (05:05):
Yeah, happy to I tend to introduce myself these
days as as a recoveringneuroscientist, which is is, you
know, a nod to the fact that Idon't work in neuroscience these
days. It is my training. It'swhat I went to grad school for
(05:25):
and and yet, I've moved awayfrom the lab, and instead am
thinking about how tocommunicate findings from the
lab. That's the short answer,that the slightly longer answer
is, I was in grad school forneuroscience, and had wrapped it
up in a manner that feltsomewhat satisfying at the time.
Insofar as I was working in alab, I was a computational
(05:48):
neuroscientist, so that meant Ispent a lot of time looking at a
screen, modelling brainactivity, right? That felt a
little disconnected from realityafter a few months, to be
completely honest, and the longstory short, there is that I, in
2015 decided to leaveneuroscience per se, namely
(06:14):
because I had begun to receiveand review and internalise a
series of reports that hadstarted to trickle their way out
of the academy that were relatedto the relationship between heat
and violence, between, you know,something like a temperature
deflection and aggression,right, human behaviour. And some
(06:35):
of these reports were out of thePentagon, some of these reports
were out of Stanford. You know,these were people who I think we
would recognise as reputable,broadly speaking, in academic
literature, by and large, not tobe taken without a grain of
salt, but certainly writers onsome subjects that were worthy
(06:56):
of review. And taking a look atthese pieces was a little bit of
a shock at the time, because itseemed to suggest that, if you
clear away all the socioeconomics, if you, if you, if
you correct for all of thefactors that might influence
something like aggression, youknow, you can imagine, that's
(07:18):
things Like income, it's, it's,it's things like, you know, the
type of social environment inwhich you find yourself, right
you correct for all thosethings. There's still an effect
of temperature on behaviour, andthat, to me as a neuroscientist
at the time, felt a little bitunignorable, and it wasn't clear
(07:39):
why or how what could beentangled from the
socioeconomics? But it seemed tome to be worth asking that
question. And the story of thepast 10 years for me has
effectively been, how can weunderstand this influence of
environmental vectors onbehaviour writ large and
(08:02):
broadly, my my career, is afunction of trying to
communicate these relationshipsall the manners in which a
changing environment are, youknow, changing us from the
inside out.
Scott Allender (08:12):
So let's talk about the what you've discovered
in that because that's what's sofascinating about your book.
It's not just a book on what'shappening in nature and the
environment and the implicationsof climate change. But as you're
saying, how it's changing, ourpredicting brains, right? So you
even said, I think our brains, Igot your book right here.
(08:34):
Authors love when, when youquote them back to themselves.
So it is the job of our brain tomodel the world as it is, and
the world is mutating. So I'dlove to, sort of for you to
start to unpack that for us.
Clayton Aldern (08:46):
Yeah, yeah.
Happy to you know it's it'sworth taking a step back here
and reminding ourselves what itis that the brain does. Why do
we have brains? What a nervoussystems do? Well, they allow us
to sense and make sense of theworld. So in practice, what does
that mean? It means that if wecan delineate between an
(09:07):
environment and some set ofinternal states, if you can make
a distinction between an insideof something and an outside of
something, and that thing thatthat has an inside is alive, we
can start to describe somerules, thermodynamically
speaking, statisticallyspeaking, we can start to
(09:28):
describe from rule, some rulesthat characterise how that thing
behaves, how it exists at all.
And one of the most important ofthose rules is the fact that for
this thing to persist in time.
What it really needs to be doingis minimising the degree to
which it is surprised by itsenvironment, right? And in order
(09:49):
to do so, it needs tostatistically sample its
environment, and needs tounderstand the regularities of
its environment so it's notsurprised. By them, right? In
practice, I'm not surprised bythe fact that the sky is blue.
I'm not surprised by the factthat I have, you know, two hands
if, if I was, I wouldn't be ableto get anything done, but, but
(10:10):
brains, nervous systems, right?
The stuff that's on the insidetrying to understand the
outside, what it, what it whatit does is constructs a model of
that outside it builds a modelof that outside world, such that
as we navigate it, as weambulate, as we sniff around and
(10:32):
see, as we communicate withothers, we do so in a manner
that is unsurprising to us. Wedo so in a manner that ensures
we can navigate that worldsuccessfully and not be caught
unaware. And in other words,we're talking about a system, a
(10:52):
nervous system. We're talkingabout a system that allows an
organism to have consciousaccess to a generative model of
its environment. Okay, that'skind of the core position that
we have to start from here. Ifyou accept that premise, if you
accept the idea that what brainsdo is they model the environment
(11:12):
around them, and they allow theowner organism to have access to
this model so we can consciouslyunderstand our relationship with
our environment, and you alsoaccept the premise that the
environment is changing right?
Then it, of course, falls outthat as this environment changes
well, our model must change aswell. Our brain must change as
(11:34):
well, because it is the job ofthe brain to reflect changes in
the environment so we cannavigate that environment,
environment accordingly. And loand behold, here we are finding
ourselves in a rapidly changingworld. It shouldn't surprise us
at all that our brains arechanging in kind. It is their
job to reflect reality. And asScott you you know, quoted my
(11:59):
self back to me, right? Realityis changing. Reality is
mutating. The world is in flux.
And so, of course, this thingthat exists within us to reflect
that world indeed reflects thosechanges. That's the that's
that's the core premise here,
Jean Gomes (12:19):
yeah, and I think the thing that immediately stood
out for me when I was readingthe book this first kind of aha
moment, was that we've spent alot of time figuring out what's
happening to the environment,but we haven't really thought
about what is happening to us,what is happening to our brains
and bodies as a result of that.
And the book in part, what itdoes is it really considers a
(12:40):
very significant range ofimplications from how we, you
know, judgement and decisionmaking, our health and
relationships and our thepsychological and physiological
reactions, and we could spendseveral hours talking about some
of those things. So for our forour listeners, it'd be good to
(13:01):
just kind of, like, pick a fewof these that are, you know,
perhaps not things thatanybody's really thinking about.
When you talk to people and theygo, yeah, no, I that's that's
new to me. Can we run through afew of these?
Clayton Aldern (13:16):
Yeah, yeah.
Happy to you know, I think thequestion of memory is a useful
starting point insofar as thisis the kind of most obvious
manifestation of this modellingnotion, right? Because memories
are a manner in which you encodeinformation about the world. You
store information about theworld. They are a picture of
(13:36):
what's out there. Butimportantly, again, you know,
memories are static, right?
Memories reflect an associationthat you formed at some point in
your life between a series ofperceptual inputs and internal
thought processes and emotionsrelated to those inputs. But
it's, it's a picture of thepast, right? It's maybe a fuzzy
(13:59):
picture, but it's a picture ofthe past. Yet, as we suggested,
the world is changing, right? Welive in a world of environmental
flux, and so if we only everremembered, in fact, if we
remembered everything, we alsowouldn't be able to get anything
done. It'd be, it'd be, actuallyworse than this notion of being
surprised by the sky, forexample, it would be the, you
(14:24):
know, the character from theBorges story, in which you're
just stuck in this kind ofperpetual mode of remembering,
and so you can't move. And soactually, we need a process,
neurobiologically speaking, thatcompetes with memory, and this
is called forgetting. So Soforgetting is, is often
pathologized in neuroscience,right? We understand it as an
(14:46):
aberrant effect of age, forexample. Or if, if you know
something like Alzheimer'sdisease, right, some kind of
neurodegenerative conditioncomes to town, you see a
degradation of memory. And so weconsider forgetting to. A bad
thing, but forgetting isactually a really important
neuroplastic process thatcompetes with memory. And I
(15:09):
would argue that part of thereason it's so difficult to
internalise, right, to feel, tounderstand at this kind of core
emotional level, some of thechanges that we're witnessing in
the world is because there'sthis gap between the empirical
reality of the science all themanners in which the world is
changing, and how we encodethose changes within us. Because
(15:31):
it is incumbent on our model toupdate. It is incumbent on our
brains to forget what that pastlooked like in order to remember
what the reality of today lookslike. So So I would offer you
know, a starting point is tojust think about the fact that
there are all these cues aroundus basically whispering to our
(15:54):
brains that, oh, this is the waythe world has always, has always
looked. Don't worry about it.
Yet, you know, sure, maybeinsect populations have fallen
75% and you know how many years,but, but that's not what it
feels like, right? We're kind ofalways resetting our baselines.
And so a really obvious effectof something like a changing
climate, on, on our behaviour,on our felt experience, is, is,
(16:15):
is in the subtle manners inwhich we forget the way the
world used to look. So that's,that's kind of a gentle, nuanced
manner in which we can start toexplore these ideas. If you want
the the laundry list of how elsea changing environment bears on
our brains as you, as yousuggested, it's, it's, it's,
(16:36):
it's, it's a stark and kind ofgrim list, right? Because,
outside of the somewhat morenuanced discussions around
memory and language, forexample, we're talking about
really serious interventions onbehaviour. For example, we
talked very briefly about therelationship between heat and
(16:56):
violence earlier. This is a wellunderstood animalistic response.
It isn't unique to humans.
Again, any you know,effectively, anything with a
nervous system encounters anissue wherein it's metabolically
costly to maintain that nervoussystem at the point at which
it's supposed to be maintainedfor optimal health. Right? This
(17:18):
is homeostasis. Homeostasistakes energy. It takes a lot of
energy to cool the brain, and soas heat increases in our
environment, as ambienttemperature rises, that's an
additional cognitive load,effectively on our processing
power, right? It's basicallylike giving us if you imagine
(17:39):
cognition as kind of thisjuggling act, right? Heat acts
as another ball that you have toadd to the mix. And it's a
little bit harder to keep upwith your critical thinking
processes when you're addinganother ball to the mix, right?
And we see fingerprints of thatkind of relationship wherever we
look, right. So so temperaturedeflections are related to
(18:02):
everything from plummeting testscores and students to incidents
of hate speech online, right? Wesee more incidences of, you
know, union grievances, forexample, filed on hotter days as
as has been studied in the USPostal Service. We we see
(18:23):
immigration judges less likelyto side with asylum applicants
on hotter days. We so, so, soleft and right, right. We see
this manifestation of kind oftemperature, for example,
reaching in and kind of fiddlingwith the switches of our
behaviour, but it's, it's, it'smore than that, because there
(18:45):
are also things like ticks andmosquitoes, right? These, these
vectors of brain diseases likecerebral, cerebral malaria,
things like neuroborreliosis,right? And effect of Lyme
disease, we don't have to changeanything about our behaviour.
All we need to do is stay in thesame place and let the world
(19:07):
continue to burn. And thesevectors of brain disease expand
their habitable range, right?
They can live in more places,right? Rainfall patterns are
changing. Ecosystems arechanging. And so you see these
types of brain disease vectorsexpand where they can live. And
again, we don't need to doanything. We can just continue
living our lives, and the riskof encountering one of these
(19:30):
brain disease vectors is goingto increase for us. So so you
can imagine a whole additionalswath of manners in which we are
coming into contact with anenvironment that in its rapid
flux, is introducing, you know,new variables to the equation,
(19:51):
right, introducing additionalrisk factors that, frankly, we.
Were it not for a changingclimate, we wouldn't have to
think about and the reason Iphrase it like that is because
I, you know, I wrote this bookbecause I'm interested in
environmental change and thehuman brain. But this is not a
(20:14):
book about climate change perse, right? The fact of the
matter is, climate change is agood reason for us to pay
attention to these effects. It'ssomething that throws these
effects into relief, because wecan witness a change in the
climate, and then we can observea corresponding change in
behaviour, for example. But thefact that the climate is
(20:38):
changing is kind of immaterialto the core processes we're
talking about. You know, thisis, this is a book about the
brain. It's a book aboutbehaviour and cognition and and
these processes exist in absenceof some great climatological
force that is shifting in acertain direction, right?
They're with us all the time.
(20:58):
Climate change is what throwsthe conversation into relief.
But this is, this is really aconversation about what it means
to be a human at all. The factis, we are, we are sensitive to
our environments. We, of course,are embedded in and enmeshed in
our environments. And when thereare changes in those
environments, we see thosechanges reflected within our own
(21:20):
neurochemistry,
Jean Gomes (21:26):
there was something that stood out for me in that
you said we we can't aircondition our way out of the
problem. And obviously that partof that is just the
practicalities for you to cooleverything. But it was also
something that really struck me,which is when you're in a high
rise block in New York, andyou're in, you know, it's quite
(21:47):
cold, and you look out and youknow, it's humid and boiling,
somehow you still feel hot, andyou still get the kind of
physiological reaction changingyour mindset. Can you talk to us
about that?
Clayton Aldern (22:00):
Yeah, yeah, I can. And actually, it brings
this, you know, immigrationjudges paper to mind, because,
again, you know, these are the,you know, the finding in this
particular study of, you know, ahandful of, I think a couple
dozen US Immigration Courtjudges all around the country,
(22:20):
you basically found that whenyou compare judges to
themselves, and that's theimportant point here. It's not
the fact that there are moreaggressive in terms of rulings,
right? More aggressive judges inTexas versus Minnesota. The fact
is, when you compare judgesdecisions to their own past
(22:44):
decisions when you when you lookat the degree to which leniency
changes as a function oftemperature, you note that
indeed we find less lenientjudges showing up on hotter
days. Okay, so that's all welland good, fine. How does that
happen? Especially becausejudges often work in air
(23:07):
conditioned buildings, right?
So, so what? How? How can it bethat this effective temperature
creeps in and follows them towork? And you know the answer
is, we. We biologically aresomewhat slow beings. And what I
mean by that is it takes a whilefor us to acclimate. If you have
to run and catch a bus, and youget onto that bus, you're,
(23:30):
you're going to be, you know,breathing heavily for a while
because you just ran. In fact,you're going to be overheated
for a little while because youjust ran. And that's, you know,
a somewhat extreme example, thefact that you really exerted
yourself physically. And nowthere's this come down period
where you return to baseline.
Those types of come down periodscharacterise our experience all
(23:53):
day long, and you don't need torun to activate them. So the
fact that folks have, you know,maybe experienced a night of,
you know, unpleasant sleep thenight before because it was
warm, or the fact that it was,you know, particularly hot
morning and, you know, maybethere was a longer walk to work.
Those, those types ofenvironmental inputs matter over
(24:17):
the course of hours, right? Theydon't matter over the course of
weeks, but they matter over thecourse of hours, because it
takes people a while toacclimate, even if they've
entered an air conditioned spaceand and, you know, in addition
to that, I would offer in termsof the fact that we can't, you
know, air condition our way outof the problem, part of that is
(24:38):
a simple function of the matterthat humans are not infinitely
adaptable. We can adapt to somethings. And in fact, some of the
best estimates we have suggestthat, you know, people are
probably capable of physicallyadapting to something on the
order of half of theclimatological changes that are
kind of coming down the pikeover the next. 50 or 100 years,
(25:01):
that's only half, right? Whatabout the other half, you know?
And so sure we can air conditionthe heck out of society, and
maybe there's a band aidsolution there in that we would
expect, perhaps in the nearterm, to see fewer incidences
of, aggressive behaviour. Andfrankly, we would probably see
(25:25):
parity of test scores in manydistricts, right, wherein you
have, for example, poorerschools without air condition,
without air conditioning. Nowbeing air conditioned, lo and
behold, when that happens,there's always a bump in
performance, right? So we wouldsee these kinds of short term
(25:46):
effects creep in. But you know,given the global energy mix, for
example, more air conditioningright now in the world tends to
mean more fossil fuels. So inthe long term, climatologically
speaking, right? Environmentallyspeaking, that's probably not a
good idea, but furthermore, thatphysiological Band Aid is only
(26:07):
exactly that. It is, it is, itis a stop gap. It is not the
same thing as growing more sweatglands, for example, which takes
generations and and so you canimagine that, you know, yeah, we
could. We could listen, we couldzip ourselves into a space suit.
We could purchase a space suitfor everybody on earth and zip
(26:29):
them up and let the world, youknow, go to absolute heck. And
it's, you know, 200 degreesoutside, and everybody's happy
inside their suits. But theproblem is, at that point,
we've, you know, spent so muchmoney that there's, there's
nothing left over to feedourselves, right? We can, we can
adapt our way through theproblem. In so far as we can
(26:52):
throw money at technologicalsolutions that are indeed useful
in the short term, but at acertain point, there are trade
offs, and ultimately, some ofthe long term solutions look
very different.
Jean Gomes (27:05):
Yeah, so if we think about this, maybe tell me if
I've got this wrong. But if wethink about this, we can adapt
to the kind of 50% of the theconsequences of climate change
which are really about us, andbeing able to re effectively
model our picture of the world,and so it doesn't cause us a
(27:26):
metabolic overload or trauma orso on. But let's talk about the
the 50% that we can't cope with,and things like, you know, the
trauma that we might experiencefrom from environmental loss.
Clayton Aldern (27:38):
Yeah, no, that, that's a that's a great point,
you know, by way of example andand, you know, here, here's a,
here's a, here's a two tieredexample on trauma, right? So you
know, you're perhaps familiarwith the notion that something
like a hurricane or a wildfirecan cause PTSD, right? Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Unsurprisingly, if you as aperson are exposed to an extreme
(28:01):
trauma, right? A traumaticevent. It doesn't need to be a
matter of war fighting, right?
If you are exposed to atraumatic event such as an
environmental disaster, lo andbehold, you may end up with
symptomology reflective of posttraumatic stress disorder. So,
(28:23):
so, so that's kind of tier one,and we see it left and right. We
see it basically in the wake ofany kind of natural disaster
that rolls into town, you alwayssee PTSD rates skyrocket, and
that skyrocketing is basicallycontingent on one's exposure to
the disaster in question. So if,if you actually, you know, lost
property, or, you know, Godforbid, a family member, right,
(28:45):
if you were directly exposed tothe disaster, you're going to
see, you know, in a subpopulation of people, or rate of
PTSD, about three times that offolks who were indirectly
exposed to the disaster inquestion, maybe they knew
somebody who lost property or afamily member and and those
(29:06):
folks are going to have a rateof PTSD three times that of
folks who didn't experience thedisaster at all. Right, so there
is this scaling effect when itcomes to exposure to
environmental trauma and themanifestation of the trauma in
question by way of some kind ofneuropsychiatric condition.
Okay, so that's kind of tierone, tier two, and this is where
(29:30):
it starts to I think it reallycomplicated in terms of our
future outlook and our abilityto adapt, as you suggest, a lot
of the traumas that weexperience in life, and this is
also true of environmentaltrauma. Have, have, have a
heritable component, right?
We've, we've, you know, kind ofheard whisperings of this over
(29:52):
the past couple decades when wetalk about intergenerational
trauma. This is, you know, thetype of language that's used
when we study. Be folks likeHolocaust survivors and the
children thereof, or, you know,descendants of survivors of the
Rwandan genocide or something.
There's, there's this literatureabout intergenerational trauma
that would suggest that there'sa kind of mechanism that affords
(30:15):
a, you know, some kind ofbiological message passing
effectively, to encode a stressresponse to encode, you know,
some kind of trauma responseacross generations. How does
that happen? Do we see itmanifest in the case of
environmental trauma, etc, etc?
Unfortunately, the answerappears to be yes. So, by way of
example, we had, you know, astudy. We saw a study come out
(30:35):
of New York a couple years ago,in which cognitive
neuroscientist named Yoko Emmawas, was in 2014 in the middle
of this, this study of expectingmothers in New York City. And
she was, she was studying therelationship between stress and
pregnancy, and wanted to knowhow various inputs to, you know,
(30:58):
maternal life affected the thelives of the children in
question, and and this wasn'tabout environmental trauma per
se, or anything like that. Itwas, she was just wanting to
know, like, how do thesedifferent modes of stress affect
children when their mothers areexposed to these modes of stress
(31:20):
when they're carrying thechildren in question. And so
she's, you know, got this cohortof 400 mothers that she's
following around. And thenHurricane Sandy rolls into town,
right? Superstorm Sandy, think Isaid 2014 but maybe that was
2011 Superstorm Sandy rolls intotown, right? And all of a
sudden, there's kind of anatural experiment. Natural
(31:41):
experiment here, because thisis, this is one of the greatest
stressors that Dr Nomura couldimagine, right? And, and some of
the folks in her cohort werecarrying children, some of them
had already given birth, andindeed, she would recruit a few
more folks who, you know, hadyet to conceive at the point of
the storm. So, so So all of asudden you have this in a
natural division, wherein, youknow half of the people in her
(32:04):
study had had had children inutero when Hurricane Sandy came
to town, and you know half hadeither already given birth or
had yet to conceive. So, sothere were children who were
exposed to the storm in utero,and children who weren't what
she then did is followed thosekids over the first 10 years of
their lives. And lo and behold,as early as preschool, you see
(32:29):
in the children who were exposedto the storm in utero incidences
of depression, anxiety, conductdisorder, OCD, right, the types
of neuropsychiatric conditionsthat we want to be keeping an
eye out for in everyone, muchless very young children. You
saw these conditions manifestingat rates in the children who
(32:50):
were exposed to the storm, 20xthat of the other kids, 30x in
some cases, 40x when it comes tosome conditions, really, really
shocking effects and and, youknow, when we talk again about
intergenerational trauma, theargument here is, well, these
are basically epigenetic changesthat we're witnessing being
(33:12):
passed effectively in a nongenetic manner, right, in an
epigenetic manner, from frommother to foetus, and then,
unfortunately, theoretically,probably from child to their
offspring in the future, becauseepigenetic changes are, in fact,
heritable as well. And so, youknow, this is a situation in
(33:33):
which I think, I think we can,we can. We can look at it and
say, well, this makes sense. Wecan parse it. We can say, Yeah,
okay. You know, stress is isactually somewhat inoculating in
small exposures, right? We wantto be exposed to stress. Because
(33:53):
if we weren't right back tomodelling the world, if we
didn't know that the world was astressful place. And certainly
it is, you know, we wouldn't beable to get anything done. We
would be overwhelmed all thetime. It's actually, you know,
it's, there is such a thing asbiological resilience. We want
to be able to understand andreact to stressful situations
appropriately. And so exposureto stress, including in utero,
(34:17):
is probably a good thing insmall doses. The problem is
that, you know, everybody'severybody's got a breaking
point. And with, with, with theincrease in size and frequency
of storms like Sandy over time,we're going to see more people
reaching that breaking point andand right now, the science, it
probably isn't good enough to toto suggest, you know how many
(34:41):
people that's going to be and towhat extent folks are going to
be affected. And indeed, becausesome of this research is
emerging, whether or not we'regoing to see ripple effects
across further generations. Andso, you know, when I think
about. About this question ofadaptation, what it is that
(35:01):
we're doing as we orientourselves toward the future? You
know, part of my answer is justa kind of nervous shrug in that
we can characterise some ofthese effects, and we know a lot
about them. And then there are,there are emerging risks that
we're just beginning tounderstand that, frankly, we
(35:24):
haven't the faintest idea howthey're going to play out in 50
years, but, but we knowsomething is probably coming.
Scott Allender (35:33):
How do our healthcare systems need to adapt
to deal with this?
Clayton Aldern (35:39):
Well, continuing education is a great thing, and
it's already part of a lot ofmedical systems, right? Many
PCPs, actually, most doctors,right, are required to maintain
some kind of continuing medicaleducation over the course of
their careers. There's a wholecredit system, et cetera, et
cetera. That's good. We needthose types of continuing
(36:03):
education systems to integrateclimate change into their
curricula, right? Because one ofthe things we're not doing is
explicitly accounting for someof these effects and and that's
true in in medicine, it's truein economics, it's true in
policy making, right, left andright, we see examples of these
(36:25):
studies popping up wherebythere's a really serious and
reliable effect identified andquantified, and yet, while we
can point at all of thesedisparate effects cropping up in
literature as diverse as youknow, cognitive neuroscience and
(36:46):
behavioural economics andpsychology, it's rare that
there's this kind of integrativeaccount, that it's rare that we
take those learnings fromvarious fields, knit them
together in a manner that paintsa picture of the future that is
likely to come, and then thenensures that that picture is the
(37:10):
thing that we are preparing forin our medical systems. So, so
you know, how can we kind offuture proof medicine? I think
step one is, is just being veryclear about the fact that there
are risks that we're simplyeither not aware of yet or just
becoming aware of now, that areprobably going to become much
(37:33):
worse in the future. You know,to be blunt about it, right?
These are risks that aremanifesting already today, and
also are probably going to getworse. And so if we want to be
responsive to those types ofchanges, we we cannot be blind
to them, right? We need a clearaccounting of the effects that
are likely to materialise. Iwould also offer, you know, in
(37:57):
terms of future proofingmedicine, it's true that, you
know, there, there are a handfulof administrative changes that
would probably be useful here,and maybe continuing medical
education is one of them. And,yeah, maybe there, there are
probably some kind of, I don'tknow, I'm in the United States
right, there probably some kindof reimbursement schemes that
would be useful to implement.
But, but I want to, you know,push the question aside of
(38:19):
administration for a second, andinstead focus on, well, what
about the patient? What can theindividual do when it comes to
interacting with a medicalsystem to ensure that they are
future proof? Excuse me, theyare future proofing themselves
as much as possible in the faceof these emerging threats. And I
think the answer there lookssomewhat similar. I mean, it's
(38:40):
useful for individuals, right?
It's useful for all of us to beaware of some of the risks in
question, but we, you know, wecan't expect everyone to keep
tabs on every medical journalunder the sun, right? What we
can, I think, expect all of usto do is pay attention to our
(39:02):
own bodies in a way thatrequires, I think, some some
mindful presence, right, someacknowledgement of how we are
feeling at any given point intime, and perhaps to the extent
possible, a question around Howor why we might be feeling that
way, right? If I'm again, totake the bus example. If I run
(39:27):
to a bus and it's really warm,and I get on it and I'm
sweating, and the bus iscrowded, and, you know, there
are all these people around me,and we go over a bump, and
somebody, you know, maybejostles me a little bit, I'm
going to maybe have thisreaction wherein I'm feeling
aggravated, and, you know, on myworst days, maybe I would want
(39:48):
to push them back or something,right? It's in those moments
that I think we need to beattempting to pay the most
attention to what our bodies aredoing and what. Our bodies are
feeling like because if, if wecan recognise those moments, if
we can notice in ourselves that,wow, I am I'm feeling somewhat
(40:10):
aggravated right now, that's anopportunity for intervention.
That's an opportunity where wecan then notice, acknowledge,
and probably move on from theeffects in question, while
acknowledging that they'reprobably the result of some kind
of internal reaction to anexternal force. It's us not
(40:33):
being in control. And you know,what do we love more than
anything else? People love tofeel like they're in control.
And if you want any chance atreclaiming agency, you need to
pay attention to yourself. Youneed to pay attention to what it
is that you're feeling, and tothe extent possible, why you
might be feeling that way. Now,why do I bring that up? With
respect to the medical system?
It's probably not useful forsomething like the aggression
(40:57):
conversation, because you don'tgo to the doctor for that, but
you can pay attention to whatyour body is doing and how your
body is feeling in many otherwalks of life, you know, to to
raise a, you know, somewhattragic and extreme example. You
know, one of the things I coverin the book is the rise of this,
this, you know, free livingamoeba called nagleria Fowleri.
(41:21):
And nagleria is known as thebrain eating amoeba, right? And
you know, it, it lives in, youknow, kind of these freshwater
systems. It can basically livein a suspended state, you know,
kind of this, like state ofsuspended animation for a while,
until conditions are right forit to, you know, blossom into a
somewhat more active mode ofliving. And what do those
(41:43):
conditions look like? Well, theylook like warm water and sun
and, you know, things thatorganisms tend to like, that
live on Earth. So as the climatechanges, right? We see waters
warm, and we see more and morenagleria waking up, and lo and
behold. You know, these thingsare like if you get them in your
nose, which is the only way toget them, by the way, don't
(42:04):
worry, you're not going to, youknow, catch a brain eating
amoeba from drinking water outof your tap. These, these, these
organisms, you know,effectively, when, when, when
they, when they crawl up thatnasal cavity, and, you know,
worm their way along the nerve,you know, the nasal nerve, all
(42:24):
the way to the brain. You know,they're looking a lot like a
type of meningitis, for example.
They're looking a lot like akind of, you know, maybe
bacterial infection. But ofcourse, they're not going to be
detected like either of thosethings, because it's an amoeba,
it's not a virus, it's not abacteria. And so, you know,
(42:48):
where am I going with this? Thepoint is, if you go to a doctor
because you have an extremelybad headache and you know,
you're having trouble movingyour neck and you are having a
conversation with that Doc, andhe's throwing up a handful of
well, we need to test for thistype of meningitis, and we need
(43:10):
to test for this kind ofbacterial infection. If the
doctor in question is not awareof the risk of something like
nagleria Fowleri, they're notgoing to ask you if you were
recently swimming in warm, freshwater, because why would they
think to ask? It's incumbent onyou to be able to provide that
kind of information, right? It'sincumbent on you as a patient,
(43:32):
to be able to say, hey, you knowthis is crazy, but I know the
risk is extremely low, and yet,I just want to flag that I was
swimming in a lake recently. SoI don't know if it's also worth
checking for some parasites oranything like that, but, but
maybe that's a risk factor weneed to be taking account of.
(43:53):
And again, we shouldn't expectindividual patients to to, you
know, go to medical schooleffectively, right? Nobody can
keep track of every possiblerisk or threat that they may
face over the course of a givenday or the course of a given
year, but if we are aware of atleast some of the risk factors
in question and and are seriousabout paying attention to our
(44:18):
own behaviour and our in our andour own internal states, I think
we're going to do a much betterjob of navigating the medical
system when the time comes.
Sara Deschamps (44:30):
If the conversations we've been having
on The Evolving Leader havehelped you in any way, please
head over to Apple podcasts andleave us a rating and a review.
Thank you for listening. Nowlet's get back to the
conversation.
Jean Gomes (44:43):
I'd like to come, I guess, to come back to some of
the suggestions you finished thebook off with things that we can
practically do to to manageourselves in this environment
and and before I launch into thenext point, I just want to kind
of caveat it by saying, youknow, the. This point is a
little bit provocative, but yourbook is not like that at all.
Your book is very balanced interms of, it's not a dystopian
(45:06):
or Doom laden thing. It's verykind of balanced and meditation
on the realities and the youknow, to try and help people to
understand what's going on. Butone of the things that you said,
which I thought was quite pokey.
It says, here's how it is, weare lying to ourselves. Our core
lie is that people won'tactually feel the strain of a
couple of extra degrees ofwarming, that the only thing
(45:28):
acting on human behaviour is thebehaviour of other humans. And
you expand that by quoting theeconomist Solomon, has probably
pronounced that wrong ineconomics, people aren't trained
to think about the physicalworld. They're trained to think
about decision making and themind and incentives. There's
this belief that we get theincentives right and things
possible. So given what thiskind of new context that we're
(45:53):
in, how do we start to rethinkthat? Well,
Clayton Aldern (45:59):
in some sense, my answer to that question is
the same as my answer to theLatin question, which is to say
it really demands an awarenesson our behalf, right? I think
you know when we when we talkabout the lie that you just
named. The lie is that humansare infinitely adaptable, right?
(46:22):
We've discussed this already.
The lie is that people are goingto be able to people their way
out of this crisis, and, and,and one of the reasons it's so
easy to tell that lie is becauseit doesn't really feel like we
are subject to the whims of awild planet, right? It feels
(46:42):
like we are people with agency,with free will, navigating the
world as we so choose. And allthe stories that we have of
humanity are stories aboutdomineering nature. It's about
humankind progressing in such amanner that it is capable of
transcending the powers ofevolution and the constraints of
(47:04):
our planet, blah, blah, blah,blah, blah, and and, and, and.
So the you know, the story thatneeds to be rewritten, I think,
is the fact that, well, freewill is a little more
complicated than that, andactually, agency is a little
more complicated than that, andif we have all this evidence
that suggests environmentalfactors bear on our brains and
behaviour, well, then maybe weshould be asking some questions
(47:28):
about what it means to relate toour environment, right to be in
relation with our environment,as opposed To govern over.
Right, oversee or be, you know,somehow on our environment,
right? How do we move from adomineering mode of relation to
a somewhat more collaborativemode of relation in practice?
(47:50):
You know, again, I began bysaying that I think my answer to
this question is somewhatsimilar to my answer to the last
question it to me, comes back toawareness, and in particular,
you know, at the societal levelthat that looks somewhat simple,
actually, right? We have a lotof the tools that it would take
(48:11):
to build a societal awareness ofthe problem in question, right?
We, we have all the studies. Wehave a lot of the, you know,
cost benefit analyses that say,Hey, actually, you know, when it
comes to something likeproductivity, to take one
example, you know, heat past acertain point is a bad thing,
(48:34):
and here's how much it is goingto cost the global economy,
right? We have a lot of thesetypes of estimates. For example,
what's missing is thetranslation of those estimates,
the translation of thatknowledge base into something
like climate policy. Right now,the cost benefit analyses that
climate policy analysts use,that climate economists use,
(48:56):
they don't take the brain healtheffects of climate change into
account. They may take thehealth effects of climate change
into account in so far as weknow that, and have known for
decades that we're going to seeunder a warming world, you know
more incidences of you knowdiarrheal diseases, right? And
you know malaria, for example,but, but, you know, everything
(49:21):
that we've talked about thusfar, from PTSD to drops in
productivity to who knows whatthe heck is happening with
memory to the Gloria follower I,none of that stuff appears in
any of our climate, economiccost benefit analyses. And
that's, that's an issue, right?
Because it's, it's, it's, it'srelated to that same blind spot.
(49:43):
It's related to the blind spotthat says, well, actually the
fact that we are human per se,doesn't really matter. Like
we're talking about when we planthe economy, when we plan our
relationship with theenvironment, we're really just
talking about the outside world.
So let's focus. On those inputsand outputs. If, instead, if
instead, we, as we as climatepolicy makers, were serious
(50:06):
about our relationship with theenvironment, we would include in
our cost benefit analyses themanners in which that
environment is bearing directlyon everything that we've already
discussed and in absence ofdoing so, it's just, it's, it's
kind of unnecessarily difficultto justify climate action,
right? You're, you're basicallyleaving a bunch of benefits on
(50:27):
the table. Because you can, ifyou integrate those types of
effects into your analyses, youcan say things like, hey, this
solar farm over here is going toavert, you know, X, many
premature deaths due to, youknow, dementia manifestation y,
right? You can say, hey, if weeliminate this point source
(50:49):
emitter over here with that muchless smog, or with, you know
that with, with, with, you knowthat decrease in atmospheric
particulate matter, we're goingto see a corresponding increase
in educational attainment ratesfor students in the surrounding
(51:10):
school district, or somethinglike that. And right now, I
mean, those are kind of fancifulexamples, but the point is that
right now, we are not makingthose arguments. And I think
without making those arguments,it is necessarily making our
lives as people who care aboutclimate change and responding to
it more difficult. And
Jean Gomes (51:33):
I really love that you talk about sensing the world
is the most important part inmaking sense of it. And one of
the things that one of therecommendations, that you
explored, is around in order tocreate this connection between
ourselves and what's happeningthat you, you spend more time in
nature, and you, you outline theeconomic benefits that Japan got
(51:57):
from forest bathing. So we allwent as a team forest bathing as
soon as we kind of read that,and immediately you actually
feel something that is missing,even though you thought you were
out walking in nature and so on.
But this actual making thisdirect, can you talk a little
bit about some of the practicalthings as you bring the show to
a close that listeners can do totake this greater ownership of
(52:20):
their relationship with what'shappening.
Clayton Aldern (52:25):
Yeah, sure. You know, maybe a good place to
start would be with with areminder of what's happening
neurologically in some of thecases that we're talking about.
And so just very quickly, youknow, when we when we talk about
decision making. When we talkabout behaviour at large and
critical thinking, for example,often what we're talking about
(52:46):
is, is a balance betweenexecutive function as understood
through the lens of criticalthinking and emotion, right,
knee jerk reflexes, gutinstincts, right? There's a
there's a balance there, and theway that balance plays out is
somewhat straightforward in thebrain, and not everything in the
brain is actually localised to aregion. But if you zoom in on
(53:10):
this front matter, here, yourfrontal cortex and the real
tippy top evolutionarilyspeaking of brain development,
the prefrontal cortex, there's aregion called the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex, which issomewhat related to critical
thinking. And there's a regioncalled the ventromedial
prefrontal cortex, which issomewhat related to emotional
(53:31):
processing, right? It receives alot of inputs from what's called
your limbic system. That's wherethings like the amygdala hang
out. And so when you make adecision, that decision often
arises as a matter of aconversation between those two
regions, the dlpfc and thevmpfc. And you weigh, you know,
the rational response againstthe emotional response. And you
(53:53):
know you come to a decisionaccordingly, one of the things
that heat does is it basicallyover taxes that dlpfc. It means
that you know the executivefunction that they're that
you're used to being able toperform so proficiently.
Struggles a little bit again.
Remember, we're kind of addinganother bowling pin to our
juggling routine here, and sowith an overtaxed dlpfc,
(54:15):
effectively, you see that vmpfcbegin to govern more and more of
the decision making that'soccurring, right? We're
effectively seeing moreimpulsive decisions arise in
those instances, because we'reseeing, you know, kind of an
outsized effect of those limbicinputs on our decision making.
We're making more emotionaldecisions. Okay? What do we do
(54:38):
about that? Well, we justoutlined a circuit in the brain
that actually we know quite abit about. We know how that
circuit is disrupted in the caseof ADHD, for example. We know
how that circuit is disrupted inthe case of PTSD, and we also
know the. Manners in which wecan begin to work on restoring
(55:01):
losses of function when thatcircuitry is disrupted. Some of
those things look like whatwe've already talked about
mindfulness practices, forexample, right forest bathing,
perhaps being another, themanners in which we can tune to
or attune to our internalexperience as it relates to the
(55:21):
environment around us, turns outto be somewhat fundamental in
effectively rewiring those,those those executive decision
making functions, because one ofthe things that happens when,
when you, you know, blast thebrain with heat in addition to
(55:41):
this kind of over taxing of thatdorsolateral prefrontal cortex
is you, you basically see a lotof your your brain dynamics
become a little more randomised,right? You have all these
regions that are always talkingto one another, and they form
what's called functionalconnectivity networks, the
functional connectivity of theseregions, especially things like,
(56:02):
you know, the salience network,the thing that allows you to pay
attention to things in space anddetermine what's important,
determine what if anything is athreat in your environment,
right? Those types of networksbecome less functionally
connected to one another. Theybecome more randomised.
Mindfulness practices. You know,I'm not trying to be
(56:23):
particularly New Agey here. Ifyou if you look at the
neuroscience of mindfulness,right, the cognitive
neuroscience of themanifestation of these practices
in the brain, what you see is,again, a restoration of these
functional connectivitynetworks, you see that that
activity, instead of beingrandomised, start to take on
(56:44):
structure again, right? And yousee a rebalancing of the
imbalance that we describedearlier. And you know, there are
many modes to get to that kindof balanced state. Mindfulness
is one of them, right. Breathwork is another, right and
there, there are plenty ofstudies that have shown that
these effects are tangible andserious. I think what's missing
(57:07):
is, you know, simply theirinternalisation in our in our
everyday lives. So, you know, Idon't think that we are going to
as a society. Well, we'recertainly not going to avoid
cerebral malaria or nagleriaFowleri because we're forest
bathing, right? Some of the riskfactors here are are going to
(57:31):
need to be confronted throughthe band aids, right? Some of
the things are going to need tobe confronted by air filtration
systems, and, you know, wearinga nose plug if you go swimming
in a freshwater system, that'swarm. But many of the
behavioural effects, many ofthese kind of cognitive
relationships we have with ourenvironment, I think, can in
(57:53):
great part, at least be somewhatconfronted, right? At least be
somewhat addressed, acknowledgedon their own terms, is maybe the
way to phrase it, throughpractices of mindful awareness,
of breath work. You know, forestbathing is one. I would argue
that something like deep timecontemplation is another, right?
(58:15):
There are some nice practicesout there for grounding yourself
in the fact that the humanexperience on Earth is a
relatively short one relative tothe passage of time in the
universe. We don't have too muchtime to talk about that, but
there's, I think, some goodfodder there for kind of
(58:36):
grounding ourselves in themoment in which we have found
ourselves. Ultimately, I thinkit, you know, the theme for me
comes again, back to awareness.
It's awareness at a societallevel. It's awareness at an
individual level. And you know,within that individuality, it's,
(58:58):
you know, awareness both of whatis happening out there, but also
what is happening in here?
Jean Gomes (59:03):
Yeah, that's brilliant. What is your current
and future focus looking like?
What are you doing next?
Clayton Aldern (59:11):
Well, great question. Somewhat figuring that
out. I don't have an elevatorpitch for the next book. I
actually, I was at a functionlast night and and tried to give
it, and it took me about 16minutes to get through so
working on that, but to do myvery best, the short answer is
that this, this question ofmodelling the world. This, this
(59:34):
question of, what is it that anervous system does? What does
it mean for a brain to function?
What does it mean for anorganism to exist at all, to
persist in time? Some of thosequestions are confronted in the
book that we're talking abouttoday. They're a bit more
profound than I think I managedto address in the book. Most.
(59:57):
Most of the time in this text, Italk about people modelling
their environments as broadlyunderstood by things like the
homes they inhabit and thestreets that they walk on. The
human brain modelling itsimmediate environment is just
one little piece of the puzzleof what it means for us to
(01:00:21):
understand the world in terms ofthermodynamic systems that are
seeking to build generativemodels of one another. And that
core principle, it turns out,governs existence writ large,
and it governs it from the levelof the individual mitochondria
in a cell, all the way upthrough the organism, all the
(01:00:43):
way up through a species and anecosystem. You can understand
the forces of evolutioneffectively, as you know, if you
think about a species carvingout an eco niche as it
individuates As as a species, asit speciates as it were, right?
This is, this is effectively aspecies modelling its
(01:01:03):
environment. It is, it iscreating a space for itself in
which it is unsurprised by theworld around it. That principle
is, I think, a really usefultool for learning about the
universe writ large, and aboutthe implied rules, you know,
moral and otherwise of thatuniverse. And I'm interested in
(01:01:29):
thinking more about them. So,you know, the long story short
is, you know, I think thechapter about modelling is maybe
chapter seven in the book. Andyou know, the thing I'm working
on now is maybe making chapterseven an entire book Excellent.
Jean Gomes (01:01:49):
Well, I mean, I, for one, will be really looking
forward to that with a hugeamount of anticipation, because
I loved the way of nature. Andyou know, for those listeners,
it's not a climate changepolemic, it's a book that helps
you to make greater sense of whoyou are in this changing
(01:02:09):
environment, and from that pointof view, it's a huge
contribution to our owndevelopment as individuals and
leaders. So I thoroughlyrecommend it. And Peyton, I'm
absolutely delighted we've hadthis conversation, and I hope
that you'll come back and talkto us about your your next your
next book, and the work thatyou're doing around it. Yeah. So
(01:02:30):
thank you. Thank you so much.
Clayton Aldern (01:02:32):
Yeah, well, thanks for the conversation and
for for taking the time.
Jean Gomes (01:02:36):
Excellent. And so listeners, remember, the world
is changing. Are you?
Because of recent geopolitical realities, the
climate change agenda has becomea whole lot more complex, if
that were indeed possible. Butone thing's for sure, it will
continue to shape our world inmany unforeseen ways, in the
weight of nature. Theneuroscientist Clayton Page
Alden explores the impact it'shaving on us as the world gets
(00:25):
hotter. As he explains, as theenvironment changes, you should
expect to change too. It is,after all, the job of your brain
to model the world as it is andthe world is mutating. What is
fascinating and worrying inequal measure, is how climate
change will impact our mindset.
As the world gets hotter, thecost to humans will be the very
(00:47):
thing that we need to solve theproblem the loss of patience,
judgement and empathy.
Scientists have long observedthe correlation between
temperature spikes and violence,riots and irrationality. For
example, on final exam days,school students, chances of
graduating decrease by apercentage point for every extra
(01:11):
degree, the hotter is, thefaster time seems to go when
we're making decisions. In thisshow, Clayton Alden goes deeper,
looking at why, revealing afascinating dance between
internal stress and externalpressure. This includes the
influence of heat on serotoninlevels and depression and what
(01:32):
psychologists call the overinterpretation effect where we
wrongly anticipate malignmotives from others or
exaggerate felt harm on us. Wespent the last few decades
looking at climate change'simpact on the planet, but we
also need to urgently considerthe impact it's having on us.
(01:52):
Tune in for an importantconversation on The Evolving
Leader you
Scott Allender (02:15):
Hi friends, welcome to The Evolving Leader,
the show born from the beliefthat we need deeper, more
accountable and more humanleadership to confront the
world's biggest challenges. I'mScott Allender
Jean Gomes (02:25):
and I'm Jean Gomes.
Scott Allender (02:26):
How are you feeling today? My friend?
Jean Gomes (02:27):
Hot, angry, depressed, sense of futility and
grudging resentment. On aserious note. On a serious note,
I'm feeling the opposite of mostof those things. Despite what's
(02:49):
going on in the world right now,I'm feeling a huge amount of
optimism, because I'm seeing forevery trend, there's a counter
trend, and I'm seeing thatcounter trend starting to build
some momentum right now. So I'mfeeling a degree of hope, and
you know, the folks that webring onto the show are actually
going to propel that. So I'mfeeling really optimistic,
(03:10):
particularly about thisconversation, how you feeling,
Scott?
Scott Allender (03:11):
I'm feeling a mix. I'm feeling a bit of
tension. I think physically, I'mfeeling a bit activated. I'm
feeling partially distractedtoday, lots going on. I'm
feeling this constant tensionaround trying to balance staying
informed and staying mentallywell, and that's that's a new a
(03:32):
new challenge on a daily basis.
So just taking things as one dayat a time as I can, and being as
mindful and present as I can andwhat needs doing each day. A big
bright spot in this day is theconversation we're about to
have, because we've been waitingto have it for some time. We're
joined today by Clayton pagealldern, who is an award winning
journalist and data scientistcurrently working at the
(03:56):
intersection of climate change,environmental degradation,
neuroscience and mental health.
He's written extensively forpublications ranging from the
Atlantic, The Economist andenvironmental magazine, grist
and today, we are super eager toexplore the ideas and
implications for our audience inhis incredible new book, The
(04:17):
weight of nature. Clayton,welcome to The Evolving Leader.
Clayton Aldern (04:21):
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me.
Jean Gomes (04:23):
Clayton, welcome to the show. How are you feeling
today? I
Clayton Aldern (04:26):
am based in Seattle, so my day is just
getting started, which is tosuggest I'm sipping some green
tea and looking at,occasionally, a window that is
somehow providing a little bitof sunlight, which is a little
anomalous for Seattle, so I'mdoing fine,
Jean Gomes (04:45):
excellent. Well, before we get into the weight of
nature, which I was saying toyou beforehand, was absolutely
one of my top books of lastyear, it opened my eyes to a
whole bunch of things that Ihadn't understood. Can you give
us. Quick introduction to yourcareer and how you became
focused on your current work.
Clayton Aldern (05:05):
Yeah, happy to I tend to introduce myself these
days as as a recoveringneuroscientist, which is is, you
know, a nod to the fact that Idon't work in neuroscience these
days. It is my training. It'swhat I went to grad school for
(05:25):
and and yet, I've moved awayfrom the lab, and instead am
thinking about how tocommunicate findings from the
lab. That's the short answer,that the slightly longer answer
is, I was in grad school forneuroscience, and had wrapped it
up in a manner that feltsomewhat satisfying at the time.
Insofar as I was working in alab, I was a computational
(05:48):
neuroscientist, so that meant Ispent a lot of time looking at a
screen, modelling brainactivity, right? That felt a
little disconnected from realityafter a few months, to be
completely honest, and the longstory short, there is that I, in
2015 decided to leaveneuroscience per se, namely
(06:14):
because I had begun to receiveand review and internalise a
series of reports that hadstarted to trickle their way out
of the academy that were relatedto the relationship between heat
and violence, between, you know,something like a temperature
deflection and aggression,right, human behaviour. And some
(06:35):
of these reports were out of thePentagon, some of these reports
were out of Stanford. You know,these were people who I think we
would recognise as reputable,broadly speaking, in academic
literature, by and large, not tobe taken without a grain of
salt, but certainly writers onsome subjects that were worthy
(06:56):
of review. And taking a look atthese pieces was a little bit of
a shock at the time, because itseemed to suggest that, if you
clear away all the socioeconomics, if you, if you, if
you correct for all of thefactors that might influence
something like aggression, youknow, you can imagine, that's
(07:18):
things Like income, it's, it's,it's things like, you know, the
type of social environment inwhich you find yourself, right
you correct for all thosethings. There's still an effect
of temperature on behaviour, andthat, to me as a neuroscientist
at the time, felt a little bitunignorable, and it wasn't clear
(07:39):
why or how what could beentangled from the
socioeconomics? But it seemed tome to be worth asking that
question. And the story of thepast 10 years for me has
effectively been, how can weunderstand this influence of
environmental vectors onbehaviour writ large and
(08:02):
broadly, my my career, is afunction of trying to
communicate these relationshipsall the manners in which a
changing environment are, youknow, changing us from the
inside out.
Scott Allender (08:12):
So let's talk about the what you've discovered
in that because that's what's sofascinating about your book.
It's not just a book on what'shappening in nature and the
environment and the implicationsof climate change. But as you're
saying, how it's changing, ourpredicting brains, right? So you
even said, I think our brains, Igot your book right here.
(08:34):
Authors love when, when youquote them back to themselves.
So it is the job of our brain tomodel the world as it is, and
the world is mutating. So I'dlove to, sort of for you to
start to unpack that for us.
Clayton Aldern (08:46):
Yeah, yeah.
Happy to you know it's it'sworth taking a step back here
and reminding ourselves what itis that the brain does. Why do
we have brains? What a nervoussystems do? Well, they allow us
to sense and make sense of theworld. So in practice, what does
that mean? It means that if wecan delineate between an
(09:07):
environment and some set ofinternal states, if you can make
a distinction between an insideof something and an outside of
something, and that thing thatthat has an inside is alive, we
can start to describe somerules, thermodynamically
speaking, statisticallyspeaking, we can start to
(09:28):
describe from rule, some rulesthat characterise how that thing
behaves, how it exists at all.
And one of the most important ofthose rules is the fact that for
this thing to persist in time.
What it really needs to be doingis minimising the degree to
which it is surprised by itsenvironment, right? And in order
(09:49):
to do so, it needs tostatistically sample its
environment, and needs tounderstand the regularities of
its environment so it's notsurprised. By them, right? In
practice, I'm not surprised bythe fact that the sky is blue.
I'm not surprised by the factthat I have, you know, two hands
if, if I was, I wouldn't be ableto get anything done, but, but
(10:10):
brains, nervous systems, right?
The stuff that's on the insidetrying to understand the
outside, what it, what it whatit does is constructs a model of
that outside it builds a modelof that outside world, such that
as we navigate it, as weambulate, as we sniff around and
(10:32):
see, as we communicate withothers, we do so in a manner
that is unsurprising to us. Wedo so in a manner that ensures
we can navigate that worldsuccessfully and not be caught
unaware. And in other words,we're talking about a system, a
(10:52):
nervous system. We're talkingabout a system that allows an
organism to have consciousaccess to a generative model of
its environment. Okay, that'skind of the core position that
we have to start from here. Ifyou accept that premise, if you
accept the idea that what brainsdo is they model the environment
(11:12):
around them, and they allow theowner organism to have access to
this model so we can consciouslyunderstand our relationship with
our environment, and you alsoaccept the premise that the
environment is changing right?
Then it, of course, falls outthat as this environment changes
well, our model must change aswell. Our brain must change as
(11:34):
well, because it is the job ofthe brain to reflect changes in
the environment so we cannavigate that environment,
environment accordingly. And loand behold, here we are finding
ourselves in a rapidly changingworld. It shouldn't surprise us
at all that our brains arechanging in kind. It is their
job to reflect reality. And asScott you you know, quoted my
(11:59):
self back to me, right? Realityis changing. Reality is
mutating. The world is in flux.
And so, of course, this thingthat exists within us to reflect
that world indeed reflects thosechanges. That's the that's
that's the core premise here,
Jean Gomes (12:19):
yeah, and I think the thing that immediately stood
out for me when I was readingthe book this first kind of aha
moment, was that we've spent alot of time figuring out what's
happening to the environment,but we haven't really thought
about what is happening to us,what is happening to our brains
and bodies as a result of that.
And the book in part, what itdoes is it really considers a
(12:40):
very significant range ofimplications from how we, you
know, judgement and decisionmaking, our health and
relationships and our thepsychological and physiological
reactions, and we could spendseveral hours talking about some
of those things. So for our forour listeners, it'd be good to
(13:01):
just kind of, like, pick a fewof these that are, you know,
perhaps not things thatanybody's really thinking about.
When you talk to people and theygo, yeah, no, I that's that's
new to me. Can we run through afew of these?
Clayton Aldern (13:16):
Yeah, yeah.
Happy to you know, I think thequestion of memory is a useful
starting point insofar as thisis the kind of most obvious
manifestation of this modellingnotion, right? Because memories
are a manner in which you encodeinformation about the world. You
store information about theworld. They are a picture of
(13:36):
what's out there. Butimportantly, again, you know,
memories are static, right?
Memories reflect an associationthat you formed at some point in
your life between a series ofperceptual inputs and internal
thought processes and emotionsrelated to those inputs. But
it's, it's a picture of thepast, right? It's maybe a fuzzy
(13:59):
picture, but it's a picture ofthe past. Yet, as we suggested,
the world is changing, right? Welive in a world of environmental
flux, and so if we only everremembered, in fact, if we
remembered everything, we alsowouldn't be able to get anything
done. It'd be, it'd be, actuallyworse than this notion of being
surprised by the sky, forexample, it would be the, you
(14:24):
know, the character from theBorges story, in which you're
just stuck in this kind ofperpetual mode of remembering,
and so you can't move. And soactually, we need a process,
neurobiologically speaking, thatcompetes with memory, and this
is called forgetting. So Soforgetting is, is often
pathologized in neuroscience,right? We understand it as an
(14:46):
aberrant effect of age, forexample. Or if, if you know
something like Alzheimer'sdisease, right, some kind of
neurodegenerative conditioncomes to town, you see a
degradation of memory. And so weconsider forgetting to. A bad
thing, but forgetting isactually a really important
neuroplastic process thatcompetes with memory. And I
(15:09):
would argue that part of thereason it's so difficult to
internalise, right, to feel, tounderstand at this kind of core
emotional level, some of thechanges that we're witnessing in
the world is because there'sthis gap between the empirical
reality of the science all themanners in which the world is
changing, and how we encodethose changes within us. Because
(15:31):
it is incumbent on our model toupdate. It is incumbent on our
brains to forget what that pastlooked like in order to remember
what the reality of today lookslike. So So I would offer you
know, a starting point is tojust think about the fact that
there are all these cues aroundus basically whispering to our
(15:54):
brains that, oh, this is the waythe world has always, has always
looked. Don't worry about it.
Yet, you know, sure, maybeinsect populations have fallen
75% and you know how many years,but, but that's not what it
feels like, right? We're kind ofalways resetting our baselines.
And so a really obvious effectof something like a changing
climate, on, on our behaviour,on our felt experience, is, is,
(16:15):
is in the subtle manners inwhich we forget the way the
world used to look. So that's,that's kind of a gentle, nuanced
manner in which we can start toexplore these ideas. If you want
the the laundry list of how elsea changing environment bears on
our brains as you, as yousuggested, it's, it's, it's,
(16:36):
it's, it's a stark and kind ofgrim list, right? Because,
outside of the somewhat morenuanced discussions around
memory and language, forexample, we're talking about
really serious interventions onbehaviour. For example, we
talked very briefly about therelationship between heat and
(16:56):
violence earlier. This is a wellunderstood animalistic response.
It isn't unique to humans.
Again, any you know,effectively, anything with a
nervous system encounters anissue wherein it's metabolically
costly to maintain that nervoussystem at the point at which
it's supposed to be maintainedfor optimal health. Right? This
(17:18):
is homeostasis. Homeostasistakes energy. It takes a lot of
energy to cool the brain, and soas heat increases in our
environment, as ambienttemperature rises, that's an
additional cognitive load,effectively on our processing
power, right? It's basicallylike giving us if you imagine
(17:39):
cognition as kind of thisjuggling act, right? Heat acts
as another ball that you have toadd to the mix. And it's a
little bit harder to keep upwith your critical thinking
processes when you're addinganother ball to the mix, right?
And we see fingerprints of thatkind of relationship wherever we
look, right. So so temperaturedeflections are related to
(18:02):
everything from plummeting testscores and students to incidents
of hate speech online, right? Wesee more incidences of, you
know, union grievances, forexample, filed on hotter days as
as has been studied in the USPostal Service. We we see
(18:23):
immigration judges less likelyto side with asylum applicants
on hotter days. We so, so, soleft and right, right. We see
this manifestation of kind oftemperature, for example,
reaching in and kind of fiddlingwith the switches of our
behaviour, but it's, it's, it'smore than that, because there
(18:45):
are also things like ticks andmosquitoes, right? These, these
vectors of brain diseases likecerebral, cerebral malaria,
things like neuroborreliosis,right? And effect of Lyme
disease, we don't have to changeanything about our behaviour.
All we need to do is stay in thesame place and let the world
(19:07):
continue to burn. And thesevectors of brain disease expand
their habitable range, right?
They can live in more places,right? Rainfall patterns are
changing. Ecosystems arechanging. And so you see these
types of brain disease vectorsexpand where they can live. And
again, we don't need to doanything. We can just continue
living our lives, and the riskof encountering one of these
(19:30):
brain disease vectors is goingto increase for us. So so you
can imagine a whole additionalswath of manners in which we are
coming into contact with anenvironment that in its rapid
flux, is introducing, you know,new variables to the equation,
(19:51):
right, introducing additionalrisk factors that, frankly, we.
Were it not for a changingclimate, we wouldn't have to
think about and the reason Iphrase it like that is because
I, you know, I wrote this bookbecause I'm interested in
environmental change and thehuman brain. But this is not a
(20:14):
book about climate change perse, right? The fact of the
matter is, climate change is agood reason for us to pay
attention to these effects. It'ssomething that throws these
effects into relief, because wecan witness a change in the
climate, and then we can observea corresponding change in
behaviour, for example. But thefact that the climate is
(20:38):
changing is kind of immaterialto the core processes we're
talking about. You know, thisis, this is a book about the
brain. It's a book aboutbehaviour and cognition and and
these processes exist in absenceof some great climatological
force that is shifting in acertain direction, right?
They're with us all the time.
(20:58):
Climate change is what throwsthe conversation into relief.
But this is, this is really aconversation about what it means
to be a human at all. The factis, we are, we are sensitive to
our environments. We, of course,are embedded in and enmeshed in
our environments. And when thereare changes in those
environments, we see thosechanges reflected within our own
(21:20):
neurochemistry,
Jean Gomes (21:26):
there was something that stood out for me in that
you said we we can't aircondition our way out of the
problem. And obviously that partof that is just the
practicalities for you to cooleverything. But it was also
something that really struck me,which is when you're in a high
rise block in New York, andyou're in, you know, it's quite
(21:47):
cold, and you look out and youknow, it's humid and boiling,
somehow you still feel hot, andyou still get the kind of
physiological reaction changingyour mindset. Can you talk to us
about that?
Clayton Aldern (22:00):
Yeah, yeah, I can. And actually, it brings
this, you know, immigrationjudges paper to mind, because,
again, you know, these are the,you know, the finding in this
particular study of, you know, ahandful of, I think a couple
dozen US Immigration Courtjudges all around the country,
(22:20):
you basically found that whenyou compare judges to
themselves, and that's theimportant point here. It's not
the fact that there are moreaggressive in terms of rulings,
right? More aggressive judges inTexas versus Minnesota. The fact
is, when you compare judgesdecisions to their own past
(22:44):
decisions when you when you lookat the degree to which leniency
changes as a function oftemperature, you note that
indeed we find less lenientjudges showing up on hotter
days. Okay, so that's all welland good, fine. How does that
happen? Especially becausejudges often work in air
(23:07):
conditioned buildings, right?
So, so what? How? How can it bethat this effective temperature
creeps in and follows them towork? And you know the answer
is, we. We biologically aresomewhat slow beings. And what I
mean by that is it takes a whilefor us to acclimate. If you have
to run and catch a bus, and youget onto that bus, you're,
(23:30):
you're going to be, you know,breathing heavily for a while
because you just ran. In fact,you're going to be overheated
for a little while because youjust ran. And that's, you know,
a somewhat extreme example, thefact that you really exerted
yourself physically. And nowthere's this come down period
where you return to baseline.
Those types of come down periodscharacterise our experience all
(23:53):
day long, and you don't need torun to activate them. So the
fact that folks have, you know,maybe experienced a night of,
you know, unpleasant sleep thenight before because it was
warm, or the fact that it was,you know, particularly hot
morning and, you know, maybethere was a longer walk to work.
Those, those types ofenvironmental inputs matter over
(24:17):
the course of hours, right? Theydon't matter over the course of
weeks, but they matter over thecourse of hours, because it
takes people a while toacclimate, even if they've
entered an air conditioned spaceand and, you know, in addition
to that, I would offer in termsof the fact that we can't, you
know, air condition our way outof the problem, part of that is
(24:38):
a simple function of the matterthat humans are not infinitely
adaptable. We can adapt to somethings. And in fact, some of the
best estimates we have suggestthat, you know, people are
probably capable of physicallyadapting to something on the
order of half of theclimatological changes that are
kind of coming down the pikeover the next. 50 or 100 years,
(25:01):
that's only half, right? Whatabout the other half, you know?
And so sure we can air conditionthe heck out of society, and
maybe there's a band aidsolution there in that we would
expect, perhaps in the nearterm, to see fewer incidences
of, aggressive behaviour. Andfrankly, we would probably see
(25:25):
parity of test scores in manydistricts, right, wherein you
have, for example, poorerschools without air condition,
without air conditioning. Nowbeing air conditioned, lo and
behold, when that happens,there's always a bump in
performance, right? So we wouldsee these kinds of short term
(25:46):
effects creep in. But you know,given the global energy mix, for
example, more air conditioningright now in the world tends to
mean more fossil fuels. So inthe long term, climatologically
speaking, right? Environmentallyspeaking, that's probably not a
good idea, but furthermore, thatphysiological Band Aid is only
(26:07):
exactly that. It is, it is, itis a stop gap. It is not the
same thing as growing more sweatglands, for example, which takes
generations and and so you canimagine that, you know, yeah, we
could. We could listen, we couldzip ourselves into a space suit.
We could purchase a space suitfor everybody on earth and zip
(26:29):
them up and let the world, youknow, go to absolute heck. And
it's, you know, 200 degreesoutside, and everybody's happy
inside their suits. But theproblem is, at that point,
we've, you know, spent so muchmoney that there's, there's
nothing left over to feedourselves, right? We can, we can
adapt our way through theproblem. In so far as we can
(26:52):
throw money at technologicalsolutions that are indeed useful
in the short term, but at acertain point, there are trade
offs, and ultimately, some ofthe long term solutions look
very different.
Jean Gomes (27:05):
Yeah, so if we think about this, maybe tell me if
I've got this wrong. But if wethink about this, we can adapt
to the kind of 50% of the theconsequences of climate change
which are really about us, andbeing able to re effectively
model our picture of the world,and so it doesn't cause us a
(27:26):
metabolic overload or trauma orso on. But let's talk about the
the 50% that we can't cope with,and things like, you know, the
trauma that we might experiencefrom from environmental loss.
Clayton Aldern (27:38):
Yeah, no, that, that's a that's a great point,
you know, by way of example andand, you know, here, here's a,
here's a, here's a two tieredexample on trauma, right? So you
know, you're perhaps familiarwith the notion that something
like a hurricane or a wildfirecan cause PTSD, right? Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Unsurprisingly, if you as aperson are exposed to an extreme
(28:01):
trauma, right? A traumaticevent. It doesn't need to be a
matter of war fighting, right?
If you are exposed to atraumatic event such as an
environmental disaster, lo andbehold, you may end up with
symptomology reflective of posttraumatic stress disorder. So,
(28:23):
so, so that's kind of tier one,and we see it left and right. We
see it basically in the wake ofany kind of natural disaster
that rolls into town, you alwayssee PTSD rates skyrocket, and
that skyrocketing is basicallycontingent on one's exposure to
the disaster in question. So if,if you actually, you know, lost
property, or, you know, Godforbid, a family member, right,
(28:45):
if you were directly exposed tothe disaster, you're going to
see, you know, in a subpopulation of people, or rate of
PTSD, about three times that offolks who were indirectly
exposed to the disaster inquestion, maybe they knew
somebody who lost property or afamily member and and those
(29:06):
folks are going to have a rateof PTSD three times that of
folks who didn't experience thedisaster at all. Right, so there
is this scaling effect when itcomes to exposure to
environmental trauma and themanifestation of the trauma in
question by way of some kind ofneuropsychiatric condition.
Okay, so that's kind of tierone, tier two, and this is where
(29:30):
it starts to I think it reallycomplicated in terms of our
future outlook and our abilityto adapt, as you suggest, a lot
of the traumas that weexperience in life, and this is
also true of environmentaltrauma. Have, have, have a
heritable component, right?
We've, we've, you know, kind ofheard whisperings of this over
(29:52):
the past couple decades when wetalk about intergenerational
trauma. This is, you know, thetype of language that's used
when we study. Be folks likeHolocaust survivors and the
children thereof, or, you know,descendants of survivors of the
Rwandan genocide or something.
There's, there's this literatureabout intergenerational trauma
that would suggest that there'sa kind of mechanism that affords
(30:15):
a, you know, some kind ofbiological message passing
effectively, to encode a stressresponse to encode, you know,
some kind of trauma responseacross generations. How does
that happen? Do we see itmanifest in the case of
environmental trauma, etc, etc?
Unfortunately, the answerappears to be yes. So, by way of
example, we had, you know, astudy. We saw a study come out
(30:35):
of New York a couple years ago,in which cognitive
neuroscientist named Yoko Emmawas, was in 2014 in the middle
of this, this study of expectingmothers in New York City. And
she was, she was studying therelationship between stress and
pregnancy, and wanted to knowhow various inputs to, you know,
(30:58):
maternal life affected the thelives of the children in
question, and and this wasn'tabout environmental trauma per
se, or anything like that. Itwas, she was just wanting to
know, like, how do thesedifferent modes of stress affect
children when their mothers areexposed to these modes of stress
(31:20):
when they're carrying thechildren in question. And so
she's, you know, got this cohortof 400 mothers that she's
following around. And thenHurricane Sandy rolls into town,
right? Superstorm Sandy, think Isaid 2014 but maybe that was
2011 Superstorm Sandy rolls intotown, right? And all of a
sudden, there's kind of anatural experiment. Natural
(31:41):
experiment here, because thisis, this is one of the greatest
stressors that Dr Nomura couldimagine, right? And, and some of
the folks in her cohort werecarrying children, some of them
had already given birth, andindeed, she would recruit a few
more folks who, you know, hadyet to conceive at the point of
the storm. So, so So all of asudden you have this in a
natural division, wherein, youknow half of the people in her
(32:04):
study had had had children inutero when Hurricane Sandy came
to town, and you know half hadeither already given birth or
had yet to conceive. So, sothere were children who were
exposed to the storm in utero,and children who weren't what
she then did is followed thosekids over the first 10 years of
their lives. And lo and behold,as early as preschool, you see
(32:29):
in the children who were exposedto the storm in utero incidences
of depression, anxiety, conductdisorder, OCD, right, the types
of neuropsychiatric conditionsthat we want to be keeping an
eye out for in everyone, muchless very young children. You
saw these conditions manifestingat rates in the children who
(32:50):
were exposed to the storm, 20xthat of the other kids, 30x in
some cases, 40x when it comes tosome conditions, really, really
shocking effects and and, youknow, when we talk again about
intergenerational trauma, theargument here is, well, these
are basically epigenetic changesthat we're witnessing being
(33:12):
passed effectively in a nongenetic manner, right, in an
epigenetic manner, from frommother to foetus, and then,
unfortunately, theoretically,probably from child to their
offspring in the future, becauseepigenetic changes are, in fact,
heritable as well. And so, youknow, this is a situation in
(33:33):
which I think, I think we can,we can. We can look at it and
say, well, this makes sense. Wecan parse it. We can say, Yeah,
okay. You know, stress is isactually somewhat inoculating in
small exposures, right? We wantto be exposed to stress. Because
(33:53):
if we weren't right back tomodelling the world, if we
didn't know that the world was astressful place. And certainly
it is, you know, we wouldn't beable to get anything done. We
would be overwhelmed all thetime. It's actually, you know,
it's, there is such a thing asbiological resilience. We want
to be able to understand andreact to stressful situations
appropriately. And so exposureto stress, including in utero,
(34:17):
is probably a good thing insmall doses. The problem is
that, you know, everybody'severybody's got a breaking
point. And with, with, with theincrease in size and frequency
of storms like Sandy over time,we're going to see more people
reaching that breaking point andand right now, the science, it
probably isn't good enough to toto suggest, you know how many
(34:41):
people that's going to be and towhat extent folks are going to
be affected. And indeed, becausesome of this research is
emerging, whether or not we'regoing to see ripple effects
across further generations. Andso, you know, when I think
about. About this question ofadaptation, what it is that
(35:01):
we're doing as we orientourselves toward the future? You
know, part of my answer is justa kind of nervous shrug in that
we can characterise some ofthese effects, and we know a lot
about them. And then there are,there are emerging risks that
we're just beginning tounderstand that, frankly, we
(35:24):
haven't the faintest idea howthey're going to play out in 50
years, but, but we knowsomething is probably coming.
Scott Allender (35:33):
How do our healthcare systems need to adapt
to deal with this?
Clayton Aldern (35:39):
Well, continuing education is a great thing, and
it's already part of a lot ofmedical systems, right? Many
PCPs, actually, most doctors,right, are required to maintain
some kind of continuing medicaleducation over the course of
their careers. There's a wholecredit system, et cetera, et
cetera. That's good. We needthose types of continuing
(36:03):
education systems to integrateclimate change into their
curricula, right? Because one ofthe things we're not doing is
explicitly accounting for someof these effects and and that's
true in in medicine, it's truein economics, it's true in
policy making, right, left andright, we see examples of these
(36:25):
studies popping up wherebythere's a really serious and
reliable effect identified andquantified, and yet, while we
can point at all of thesedisparate effects cropping up in
literature as diverse as youknow, cognitive neuroscience and
(36:46):
behavioural economics andpsychology, it's rare that
there's this kind of integrativeaccount, that it's rare that we
take those learnings fromvarious fields, knit them
together in a manner that paintsa picture of the future that is
likely to come, and then thenensures that that picture is the
(37:10):
thing that we are preparing forin our medical systems. So, so
you know, how can we kind offuture proof medicine? I think
step one is, is just being veryclear about the fact that there
are risks that we're simplyeither not aware of yet or just
becoming aware of now, that areprobably going to become much
(37:33):
worse in the future. You know,to be blunt about it, right?
These are risks that aremanifesting already today, and
also are probably going to getworse. And so if we want to be
responsive to those types ofchanges, we we cannot be blind
to them, right? We need a clearaccounting of the effects that
are likely to materialise. Iwould also offer, you know, in
(37:57):
terms of future proofingmedicine, it's true that, you
know, there, there are a handfulof administrative changes that
would probably be useful here,and maybe continuing medical
education is one of them. And,yeah, maybe there, there are
probably some kind of, I don'tknow, I'm in the United States
right, there probably some kindof reimbursement schemes that
would be useful to implement.
But, but I want to, you know,push the question aside of
(38:19):
administration for a second, andinstead focus on, well, what
about the patient? What can theindividual do when it comes to
interacting with a medicalsystem to ensure that they are
future proof? Excuse me, theyare future proofing themselves
as much as possible in the faceof these emerging threats. And I
think the answer there lookssomewhat similar. I mean, it's
(38:40):
useful for individuals, right?
It's useful for all of us to beaware of some of the risks in
question, but we, you know, wecan't expect everyone to keep
tabs on every medical journalunder the sun, right? What we
can, I think, expect all of usto do is pay attention to our
(39:02):
own bodies in a way thatrequires, I think, some some
mindful presence, right, someacknowledgement of how we are
feeling at any given point intime, and perhaps to the extent
possible, a question around Howor why we might be feeling that
way, right? If I'm again, totake the bus example. If I run
(39:27):
to a bus and it's really warm,and I get on it and I'm
sweating, and the bus iscrowded, and, you know, there
are all these people around me,and we go over a bump, and
somebody, you know, maybejostles me a little bit, I'm
going to maybe have thisreaction wherein I'm feeling
aggravated, and, you know, on myworst days, maybe I would want
(39:48):
to push them back or something,right? It's in those moments
that I think we need to beattempting to pay the most
attention to what our bodies aredoing and what. Our bodies are
feeling like because if, if wecan recognise those moments, if
we can notice in ourselves that,wow, I am I'm feeling somewhat
(40:10):
aggravated right now, that's anopportunity for intervention.
That's an opportunity where wecan then notice, acknowledge,
and probably move on from theeffects in question, while
acknowledging that they'reprobably the result of some kind
of internal reaction to anexternal force. It's us not
(40:33):
being in control. And you know,what do we love more than
anything else? People love tofeel like they're in control.
And if you want any chance atreclaiming agency, you need to
pay attention to yourself. Youneed to pay attention to what it
is that you're feeling, and tothe extent possible, why you
might be feeling that way. Now,why do I bring that up? With
respect to the medical system?
It's probably not useful forsomething like the aggression
(40:57):
conversation, because you don'tgo to the doctor for that, but
you can pay attention to whatyour body is doing and how your
body is feeling in many otherwalks of life, you know, to to
raise a, you know, somewhattragic and extreme example. You
know, one of the things I coverin the book is the rise of this,
this, you know, free livingamoeba called nagleria Fowleri.
(41:21):
And nagleria is known as thebrain eating amoeba, right? And
you know, it, it lives in, youknow, kind of these freshwater
systems. It can basically livein a suspended state, you know,
kind of this, like state ofsuspended animation for a while,
until conditions are right forit to, you know, blossom into a
somewhat more active mode ofliving. And what do those
(41:43):
conditions look like? Well, theylook like warm water and sun
and, you know, things thatorganisms tend to like, that
live on Earth. So as the climatechanges, right? We see waters
warm, and we see more and morenagleria waking up, and lo and
behold. You know, these thingsare like if you get them in your
nose, which is the only way toget them, by the way, don't
(42:04):
worry, you're not going to, youknow, catch a brain eating
amoeba from drinking water outof your tap. These, these, these
organisms, you know,effectively, when, when, when
they, when they crawl up thatnasal cavity, and, you know,
worm their way along the nerve,you know, the nasal nerve, all
(42:24):
the way to the brain. You know,they're looking a lot like a
type of meningitis, for example.
They're looking a lot like akind of, you know, maybe
bacterial infection. But ofcourse, they're not going to be
detected like either of thosethings, because it's an amoeba,
it's not a virus, it's not abacteria. And so, you know,
(42:48):
where am I going with this? Thepoint is, if you go to a doctor
because you have an extremelybad headache and you know,
you're having trouble movingyour neck and you are having a
conversation with that Doc, andhe's throwing up a handful of
well, we need to test for thistype of meningitis, and we need
(43:10):
to test for this kind ofbacterial infection. If the
doctor in question is not awareof the risk of something like
nagleria Fowleri, they're notgoing to ask you if you were
recently swimming in warm, freshwater, because why would they
think to ask? It's incumbent onyou to be able to provide that
kind of information, right? It'sincumbent on you as a patient,
(43:32):
to be able to say, hey, you knowthis is crazy, but I know the
risk is extremely low, and yet,I just want to flag that I was
swimming in a lake recently. SoI don't know if it's also worth
checking for some parasites oranything like that, but, but
maybe that's a risk factor weneed to be taking account of.
(43:53):
And again, we shouldn't expectindividual patients to to, you
know, go to medical schooleffectively, right? Nobody can
keep track of every possiblerisk or threat that they may
face over the course of a givenday or the course of a given
year, but if we are aware of atleast some of the risk factors
in question and and are seriousabout paying attention to our
(44:18):
own behaviour and our in our andour own internal states, I think
we're going to do a much betterjob of navigating the medical
system when the time comes.
Sara Deschamps (44:30):
If the conversations we've been having
on The Evolving Leader havehelped you in any way, please
head over to Apple podcasts andleave us a rating and a review.
Thank you for listening. Nowlet's get back to the
conversation.
Jean Gomes (44:43):
I'd like to come, I guess, to come back to some of
the suggestions you finished thebook off with things that we can
practically do to to manageourselves in this environment
and and before I launch into thenext point, I just want to kind
of caveat it by saying, youknow, the. This point is a
little bit provocative, but yourbook is not like that at all.
Your book is very balanced interms of, it's not a dystopian
(45:06):
or Doom laden thing. It's verykind of balanced and meditation
on the realities and the youknow, to try and help people to
understand what's going on. Butone of the things that you said,
which I thought was quite pokey.
It says, here's how it is, weare lying to ourselves. Our core
lie is that people won'tactually feel the strain of a
couple of extra degrees ofwarming, that the only thing
(45:28):
acting on human behaviour is thebehaviour of other humans. And
you expand that by quoting theeconomist Solomon, has probably
pronounced that wrong ineconomics, people aren't trained
to think about the physicalworld. They're trained to think
about decision making and themind and incentives. There's
this belief that we get theincentives right and things
possible. So given what thiskind of new context that we're
(45:53):
in, how do we start to rethinkthat? Well,
Clayton Aldern (45:59):
in some sense, my answer to that question is
the same as my answer to theLatin question, which is to say
it really demands an awarenesson our behalf, right? I think
you know when we when we talkabout the lie that you just
named. The lie is that humansare infinitely adaptable, right?
(46:22):
We've discussed this already.
The lie is that people are goingto be able to people their way
out of this crisis, and, and,and one of the reasons it's so
easy to tell that lie is becauseit doesn't really feel like we
are subject to the whims of awild planet, right? It feels
(46:42):
like we are people with agency,with free will, navigating the
world as we so choose. And allthe stories that we have of
humanity are stories aboutdomineering nature. It's about
humankind progressing in such amanner that it is capable of
transcending the powers ofevolution and the constraints of
(47:04):
our planet, blah, blah, blah,blah, blah, and and, and, and.
So the you know, the story thatneeds to be rewritten, I think,
is the fact that, well, freewill is a little more
complicated than that, andactually, agency is a little
more complicated than that, andif we have all this evidence
that suggests environmentalfactors bear on our brains and
behaviour, well, then maybe weshould be asking some questions
(47:28):
about what it means to relate toour environment, right to be in
relation with our environment,as opposed To govern over.
Right, oversee or be, you know,somehow on our environment,
right? How do we move from adomineering mode of relation to
a somewhat more collaborativemode of relation in practice?
(47:50):
You know, again, I began bysaying that I think my answer to
this question is somewhatsimilar to my answer to the last
question it to me, comes back toawareness, and in particular,
you know, at the societal levelthat that looks somewhat simple,
actually, right? We have a lotof the tools that it would take
(48:11):
to build a societal awareness ofthe problem in question, right?
We, we have all the studies. Wehave a lot of the, you know,
cost benefit analyses that say,Hey, actually, you know, when it
comes to something likeproductivity, to take one
example, you know, heat past acertain point is a bad thing,
(48:34):
and here's how much it is goingto cost the global economy,
right? We have a lot of thesetypes of estimates. For example,
what's missing is thetranslation of those estimates,
the translation of thatknowledge base into something
like climate policy. Right now,the cost benefit analyses that
climate policy analysts use,that climate economists use,
(48:56):
they don't take the brain healtheffects of climate change into
account. They may take thehealth effects of climate change
into account in so far as weknow that, and have known for
decades that we're going to seeunder a warming world, you know
more incidences of you knowdiarrheal diseases, right? And
you know malaria, for example,but, but, you know, everything
(49:21):
that we've talked about thusfar, from PTSD to drops in
productivity to who knows whatthe heck is happening with
memory to the Gloria follower I,none of that stuff appears in
any of our climate, economiccost benefit analyses. And
that's, that's an issue, right?
Because it's, it's, it's, it'srelated to that same blind spot.
(49:43):
It's related to the blind spotthat says, well, actually the
fact that we are human per se,doesn't really matter. Like
we're talking about when we planthe economy, when we plan our
relationship with theenvironment, we're really just
talking about the outside world.
So let's focus. On those inputsand outputs. If, instead, if
instead, we, as we as climatepolicy makers, were serious
(50:06):
about our relationship with theenvironment, we would include in
our cost benefit analyses themanners in which that
environment is bearing directlyon everything that we've already
discussed and in absence ofdoing so, it's just, it's, it's
kind of unnecessarily difficultto justify climate action,
right? You're, you're basicallyleaving a bunch of benefits on
(50:27):
the table. Because you can, ifyou integrate those types of
effects into your analyses, youcan say things like, hey, this
solar farm over here is going toavert, you know, X, many
premature deaths due to, youknow, dementia manifestation y,
right? You can say, hey, if weeliminate this point source
(50:49):
emitter over here with that muchless smog, or with, you know
that with, with, with, you knowthat decrease in atmospheric
particulate matter, we're goingto see a corresponding increase
in educational attainment ratesfor students in the surrounding
(51:10):
school district, or somethinglike that. And right now, I
mean, those are kind of fancifulexamples, but the point is that
right now, we are not makingthose arguments. And I think
without making those arguments,it is necessarily making our
lives as people who care aboutclimate change and responding to
it more difficult. And
Jean Gomes (51:33):
I really love that you talk about sensing the world
is the most important part inmaking sense of it. And one of
the things that one of therecommendations, that you
explored, is around in order tocreate this connection between
ourselves and what's happeningthat you, you spend more time in
nature, and you, you outline theeconomic benefits that Japan got
(51:57):
from forest bathing. So we allwent as a team forest bathing as
soon as we kind of read that,and immediately you actually
feel something that is missing,even though you thought you were
out walking in nature and so on.
But this actual making thisdirect, can you talk a little
bit about some of the practicalthings as you bring the show to
a close that listeners can do totake this greater ownership of
(52:20):
their relationship with what'shappening.
Clayton Aldern (52:25):
Yeah, sure. You know, maybe a good place to
start would be with with areminder of what's happening
neurologically in some of thecases that we're talking about.
And so just very quickly, youknow, when we when we talk about
decision making. When we talkabout behaviour at large and
critical thinking, for example,often what we're talking about
(52:46):
is, is a balance betweenexecutive function as understood
through the lens of criticalthinking and emotion, right,
knee jerk reflexes, gutinstincts, right? There's a
there's a balance there, and theway that balance plays out is
somewhat straightforward in thebrain, and not everything in the
brain is actually localised to aregion. But if you zoom in on
(53:10):
this front matter, here, yourfrontal cortex and the real
tippy top evolutionarilyspeaking of brain development,
the prefrontal cortex, there's aregion called the dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex, which issomewhat related to critical
thinking. And there's a regioncalled the ventromedial
prefrontal cortex, which issomewhat related to emotional
(53:31):
processing, right? It receives alot of inputs from what's called
your limbic system. That's wherethings like the amygdala hang
out. And so when you make adecision, that decision often
arises as a matter of aconversation between those two
regions, the dlpfc and thevmpfc. And you weigh, you know,
the rational response againstthe emotional response. And you
(53:53):
know you come to a decisionaccordingly, one of the things
that heat does is it basicallyover taxes that dlpfc. It means
that you know the executivefunction that they're that
you're used to being able toperform so proficiently.
Struggles a little bit again.
Remember, we're kind of addinganother bowling pin to our
juggling routine here, and sowith an overtaxed dlpfc,
(54:15):
effectively, you see that vmpfcbegin to govern more and more of
the decision making that'soccurring, right? We're
effectively seeing moreimpulsive decisions arise in
those instances, because we'reseeing, you know, kind of an
outsized effect of those limbicinputs on our decision making.
We're making more emotionaldecisions. Okay? What do we do
(54:38):
about that? Well, we justoutlined a circuit in the brain
that actually we know quite abit about. We know how that
circuit is disrupted in the caseof ADHD, for example. We know
how that circuit is disrupted inthe case of PTSD, and we also
know the. Manners in which wecan begin to work on restoring
(55:01):
losses of function when thatcircuitry is disrupted. Some of
those things look like whatwe've already talked about
mindfulness practices, forexample, right forest bathing,
perhaps being another, themanners in which we can tune to
or attune to our internalexperience as it relates to the
(55:21):
environment around us, turns outto be somewhat fundamental in
effectively rewiring those,those those executive decision
making functions, because one ofthe things that happens when,
when you, you know, blast thebrain with heat in addition to
(55:41):
this kind of over taxing of thatdorsolateral prefrontal cortex
is you, you basically see a lotof your your brain dynamics
become a little more randomised,right? You have all these
regions that are always talkingto one another, and they form
what's called functionalconnectivity networks, the
functional connectivity of theseregions, especially things like,
(56:02):
you know, the salience network,the thing that allows you to pay
attention to things in space anddetermine what's important,
determine what if anything is athreat in your environment,
right? Those types of networksbecome less functionally
connected to one another. Theybecome more randomised.
Mindfulness practices. You know,I'm not trying to be
(56:23):
particularly New Agey here. Ifyou if you look at the
neuroscience of mindfulness,right, the cognitive
neuroscience of themanifestation of these practices
in the brain, what you see is,again, a restoration of these
functional connectivitynetworks, you see that that
activity, instead of beingrandomised, start to take on
(56:44):
structure again, right? And yousee a rebalancing of the
imbalance that we describedearlier. And you know, there are
many modes to get to that kindof balanced state. Mindfulness
is one of them, right. Breathwork is another, right and
there, there are plenty ofstudies that have shown that
these effects are tangible andserious. I think what's missing
(57:07):
is, you know, simply theirinternalisation in our in our
everyday lives. So, you know, Idon't think that we are going to
as a society. Well, we'recertainly not going to avoid
cerebral malaria or nagleriaFowleri because we're forest
bathing, right? Some of the riskfactors here are are going to
(57:31):
need to be confronted throughthe band aids, right? Some of
the things are going to need tobe confronted by air filtration
systems, and, you know, wearinga nose plug if you go swimming
in a freshwater system, that'swarm. But many of the
behavioural effects, many ofthese kind of cognitive
relationships we have with ourenvironment, I think, can in
(57:53):
great part, at least be somewhatconfronted, right? At least be
somewhat addressed, acknowledgedon their own terms, is maybe the
way to phrase it, throughpractices of mindful awareness,
of breath work. You know, forestbathing is one. I would argue
that something like deep timecontemplation is another, right?
(58:15):
There are some nice practicesout there for grounding yourself
in the fact that the humanexperience on Earth is a
relatively short one relative tothe passage of time in the
universe. We don't have too muchtime to talk about that, but
there's, I think, some goodfodder there for kind of
(58:36):
grounding ourselves in themoment in which we have found
ourselves. Ultimately, I thinkit, you know, the theme for me
comes again, back to awareness.
It's awareness at a societallevel. It's awareness at an
individual level. And you know,within that individuality, it's,
(58:58):
you know, awareness both of whatis happening out there, but also
what is happening in here?
Jean Gomes (59:03):
Yeah, that's brilliant. What is your current
and future focus looking like?
What are you doing next?
Clayton Aldern (59:11):
Well, great question. Somewhat figuring that
out. I don't have an elevatorpitch for the next book. I
actually, I was at a functionlast night and and tried to give
it, and it took me about 16minutes to get through so
working on that, but to do myvery best, the short answer is
that this, this question ofmodelling the world. This, this
(59:34):
question of, what is it that anervous system does? What does
it mean for a brain to function?
What does it mean for anorganism to exist at all, to
persist in time? Some of thosequestions are confronted in the
book that we're talking abouttoday. They're a bit more
profound than I think I managedto address in the book. Most.
(59:57):
Most of the time in this text, Italk about people modelling
their environments as broadlyunderstood by things like the
homes they inhabit and thestreets that they walk on. The
human brain modelling itsimmediate environment is just
one little piece of the puzzleof what it means for us to
(01:00:21):
understand the world in terms ofthermodynamic systems that are
seeking to build generativemodels of one another. And that
core principle, it turns out,governs existence writ large,
and it governs it from the levelof the individual mitochondria
in a cell, all the way upthrough the organism, all the
(01:00:43):
way up through a species and anecosystem. You can understand
the forces of evolutioneffectively, as you know, if you
think about a species carvingout an eco niche as it
individuates As as a species, asit speciates as it were, right?
This is, this is effectively aspecies modelling its
(01:01:03):
environment. It is, it iscreating a space for itself in
which it is unsurprised by theworld around it. That principle
is, I think, a really usefultool for learning about the
universe writ large, and aboutthe implied rules, you know,
moral and otherwise of thatuniverse. And I'm interested in
(01:01:29):
thinking more about them. So,you know, the long story short
is, you know, I think thechapter about modelling is maybe
chapter seven in the book. Andyou know, the thing I'm working
on now is maybe making chapterseven an entire book Excellent.
Jean Gomes (01:01:49):
Well, I mean, I, for one, will be really looking
forward to that with a hugeamount of anticipation, because
I loved the way of nature. Andyou know, for those listeners,
it's not a climate changepolemic, it's a book that helps
you to make greater sense of whoyou are in this changing
(01:02:09):
environment, and from that pointof view, it's a huge
contribution to our owndevelopment as individuals and
leaders. So I thoroughlyrecommend it. And Peyton, I'm
absolutely delighted we've hadthis conversation, and I hope
that you'll come back and talkto us about your your next your
next book, and the work thatyou're doing around it. Yeah. So
(01:02:30):
thank you. Thank you so much.
Clayton Aldern (01:02:32):
Yeah, well, thanks for the conversation and
for for taking the time.
Jean Gomes (01:02:36):
Excellent. And so listeners, remember, the world
is changing. Are you?
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