'How Climate Change is Changing Us' with Clayton Aldern

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)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 4:59 Can you give us an introduction to your career and how you became focussed on your current work?
• 8:12 You have written that ‘It is the job of our brain to model the world as it is, and the world is mutating’. Can you explain that for us?
• 12:19 In your book you lead us through a considerable range of implications that climate change has and will have on us in terms of physical and psychological impact. Can you talk us through some of these?
• 21:26 You’ve said that ‘we can’t air condition our way out of the problem’. Can you talk to us about that?
• 27:04 We can adapt to 50% of the consequences of climate change. Let’s talk about the 50% that we can’t cope with.
• 35:33 How our healthcare systems need to adapt to deal with this?
• 44:43 You write ‘Our core lie is that people won’t actually feel the strain of a couple of extra degrees of warming; that the only thing acting on human behaviour is the behaviour of other humans’. How can start to re-write how we think about this?
• 51:32 You talk about how sensing the world is the most important part of making sense of it, and in order to create this connection between ourselves and what’s happening you spend more time in nature.
• 59:04 What are you doing next?

Transcript

Jean Gomes: 0:03

Because of recent geopolitical realities, the climate change agenda has become a whole lot more complex, if that were indeed possible. But one thing's for sure, it will continue to shape our world in many unforeseen ways, in the weight of nature. The neuroscientist Clayton Page Alden explores the impact it's having on us as the world gets hotter. As he explains, as the environment changes, you should expect to change too. It is, after all, the job of your brain to model the world as it is and the world is mutating. What is fascinating and worrying in equal measure, is how climate change will impact our mindset. As the world gets hotter, the cost to humans will be the very thing that we need to solve the problem the loss of patience, judgement and empathy. Scientists have long observed the correlation between temperature spikes and violence, riots and irrationality. For example, on final exam days, school students, chances of graduating decrease by a percentage point for every extra degree, the hotter is, the faster time seems to go when we're making decisions. In this show, Clayton Alden goes deeper, looking at why, revealing a fascinating dance between internal stress and external pressure. This includes the influence of heat on serotonin levels and depression and what psychologists call the over interpretation effect where we wrongly anticipate malign motives from others or exaggerate felt harm on us. We spent the last few decades looking at climate change's impact on the planet, but we also need to urgently consider the impact it's having on us. Tune in for an important conversation on The Evolving Leader you

Scott Allender: 2:15

Hi friends, welcome to The Evolving Leader, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender

Jean Gomes: 2:25

and I'm Jean Gomes.

Scott Allender: 2:26

How are you feeling today? My friend?

Jean Gomes: 2:27

Hot, angry, depressed, sense of futility and grudging resentment. On a serious note. On a serious note, I'm feeling the opposite of most of those things. Despite what's going on in the world right now, I'm feeling a huge amount of optimism, because I'm seeing for every trend, there's a counter trend, and I'm seeing that counter trend starting to build some momentum right now. So I'm feeling a degree of hope, and you know, the folks that we bring onto the show are actually going to propel that. So I'm feeling really optimistic, particularly about this conversation, how you feeling, Scott?

Scott Allender: 3:11

I'm feeling a mix. I'm feeling a bit of tension. I think physically, I'm feeling a bit activated. I'm feeling partially distracted today, lots going on. I'm feeling this constant tension around trying to balance staying informed and staying mentally well, and that's that's a new a new challenge on a daily basis. So just taking things as one day at a time as I can, and being as mindful and present as I can and what needs doing each day. A big bright spot in this day is the conversation we're about to have, because we've been waiting to have it for some time. We're joined today by Clayton page alldern, who is an award winning journalist and data scientist currently working at the intersection of climate change, environmental degradation, neuroscience and mental health. He's written extensively for publications ranging from the Atlantic, The Economist and environmental magazine, grist and today, we are super eager to explore the ideas and implications for our audience in his incredible new book, The weight of nature. Clayton, welcome to The Evolving Leader.

Clayton Aldern: 4:21

Hey, Scott, thanks for having me.

Jean Gomes: 4:23

Clayton, welcome to the show. How are you feeling today? I

Clayton Aldern: 4:26

am based in Seattle, so my day is just getting started, which is to suggest I'm sipping some green tea and looking at, occasionally, a window that is somehow providing a little bit of sunlight, which is a little anomalous for Seattle, so I'm doing fine,

Jean Gomes: 4:45

excellent. Well, before we get into the weight of nature, which I was saying to you beforehand, was absolutely one of my top books of last year, it opened my eyes to a whole bunch of things that I hadn't understood. Can you give us. Quick introduction to your career and how you became focused on your current work.

Clayton Aldern: 5:05

Yeah, happy to I tend to introduce myself these days as as a recovering neuroscientist, which is is, you know, a nod to the fact that I don't work in neuroscience these days. It is my training. It's what I went to grad school for and and yet, I've moved away from the lab, and instead am thinking about how to communicate findings from the lab. That's the short answer, that the slightly longer answer is, I was in grad school for neuroscience, and had wrapped it up in a manner that felt somewhat satisfying at the time. Insofar as I was working in a lab, I was a computational neuroscientist, so that meant I spent a lot of time looking at a screen, modelling brain activity, right? That felt a little disconnected from reality after a few months, to be completely honest, and the long story short, there is that I, in 2015 decided to leave neuroscience per se, namely because I had begun to receive and review and internalise a series of reports that had started to trickle their way out of the academy that were related to the relationship between heat and violence, between, you know, something like a temperature deflection and aggression, right, human behaviour. And some of these reports were out of the Pentagon, 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 to be taken without a grain of salt, but certainly writers on some subjects that were worthy of review. And taking a look at these pieces was a little bit of a shock at the time, because it seemed to suggest that, if you clear away all the socio economics, if you, if you, if you correct for all of the factors that might influence something like aggression, you know, you can imagine, that's things Like income, it's, it's, it's things like, you know, the type of social environment in which you find yourself, right you correct for all those things. There's still an effect of temperature on behaviour, and that, to me as a neuroscientist at the time, felt a little bit unignorable, and it wasn't clear why or how what could be entangled from the socioeconomics? But it seemed to me to be worth asking that question. And the story of the past 10 years for me has effectively been, how can we understand this influence of environmental vectors on behaviour writ large and broadly, my my career, is a function of trying to communicate these relationships all the manners in which a changing environment are, you know, changing us from the inside out.

Scott Allender: 8:12

So let's talk about the what you've discovered in that because that's what's so fascinating about your book. It's not just a book on what's happening in nature and the environment and the implications of climate change. But as you're saying, how it's changing, our predicting brains, right? So you even said, I think our brains, I got your book right here. Authors love when, when you quote them back to themselves. So it is the job of our brain to model the world as it is, and the world is mutating. So I'd love to, sort of for you to start to unpack that for us.

Clayton Aldern: 8:46

Yeah, yeah. Happy to you know it's it's worth taking a step back here and reminding ourselves what it is that the brain does. Why do we have brains? What a nervous systems do? Well, they allow us to sense and make sense of the world. So in practice, what does that mean? It means that if we can delineate between an environment and some set of internal states, if you can make a distinction between an inside of something and an outside of something, and that thing that that has an inside is alive, we can start to describe some rules, thermodynamically speaking, statistically speaking, we can start to describe from rule, some rules that characterise how that thing behaves, how it exists at all. And one of the most important of those rules is the fact that for this thing to persist in time. What it really needs to be doing is minimising the degree to which it is surprised by its environment, right? And in order to do so, it needs to statistically sample its environment, and needs to understand the regularities of its environment so it's not surprised. By them, right? In practice, I'm not surprised by the fact that the sky is blue. I'm not surprised by the fact that I have, you know, two hands if, if I was, I wouldn't be able to get anything done, but, but brains, nervous systems, right? The stuff that's on the inside trying to understand the outside, what it, what it what it does is constructs a model of that outside it builds a model of that outside world, such that as we navigate it, as we ambulate, as we sniff around and see, as we communicate with others, we do so in a manner that is unsurprising to us. We do so in a manner that ensures we can navigate that world successfully and not be caught unaware. And in other words, we're talking about a system, a nervous system. We're talking about a system that allows an organism to have conscious access to a generative model of its environment. Okay, that's kind of the core position that we have to start from here. If you accept that premise, if you accept the idea that what brains do is they model the environment around them, and they allow the owner organism to have access to this model so we can consciously understand our relationship with our environment, and you also accept the premise that the environment is changing right? Then it, of course, falls out that as this environment changes well, our model must change as well. Our brain must change as well, because it is the job of the brain to reflect changes in the environment so we can navigate that environment, environment accordingly. And lo and behold, here we are finding ourselves in a rapidly changing world. It shouldn't surprise us at all that our brains are changing in kind. It is their job to reflect reality. And as Scott you you know, quoted my self back to me, right? Reality is changing. Reality is mutating. The world is in flux. And so, of course, this thing that exists within us to reflect that world indeed reflects those changes. 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 reading the book this first kind of aha moment, was that we've spent a lot 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 it does is it really considers a very significant range of implications from how we, you know, judgement and decision making, our health and relationships and our the psychological and physiological reactions, and we could spend several hours talking about some of those things. So for our for our listeners, it'd be good to just kind of, like, pick a few of these that are, you know, perhaps not things that anybody's really thinking about. When you talk to people and they go, yeah, no, I that's that's new to me. Can we run through a few of these?

Clayton Aldern: 13:16

Yeah, yeah. Happy to you know, I think the question of memory is a useful starting point insofar as this is the kind of most obvious manifestation of this modelling notion, right? Because memories are a manner in which you encode information about the world. You store information about the world. They are a picture of what's out there. But importantly, again, you know, memories are static, right? Memories reflect an association that you formed at some point in your life between a series of perceptual inputs and internal thought processes and emotions related to those inputs. But it's, it's a picture of the past, right? It's maybe a fuzzy picture, but it's a picture of the past. Yet, as we suggested, the world is changing, right? We live in a world of environmental flux, and so if we only ever remembered, in fact, if we remembered everything, we also wouldn't be able to get anything done. It'd be, it'd be, actually worse than this notion of being surprised by the sky, for example, it would be the, you know, the character from the Borges story, in which you're just stuck in this kind of perpetual mode of remembering, and so you can't move. And so actually, we need a process, neurobiologically speaking, that competes with memory, and this is called forgetting. So So forgetting is, is often pathologized in neuroscience, right? We understand it as an aberrant effect of age, for example. Or if, if you know something like Alzheimer's disease, right, some kind of neurodegenerative condition comes to town, you see a degradation of memory. And so we consider forgetting to. A bad thing, but forgetting is actually a really important neuroplastic process that competes with memory. And I would argue that part of the reason it's so difficult to internalise, right, to feel, to understand at this kind of core emotional level, some of the changes that we're witnessing in the world is because there's this gap between the empirical reality of the science all the manners in which the world is changing, and how we encode those changes within us. Because it is incumbent on our model to update. It is incumbent on our brains to forget what that past looked like in order to remember what the reality of today looks like. So So I would offer you know, a starting point is to just think about the fact that there are all these cues around us basically whispering to our brains that, oh, this is the way the world has always, has always looked. Don't worry about it. Yet, you know, sure, maybe insect populations have fallen 75% and you know how many years, but, but that's not what it feels like, right? We're kind of always resetting our baselines. And so a really obvious effect of something like a changing climate, on, on our behaviour, on our felt experience, is, is, is in the subtle manners in which 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 to explore these ideas. If you want the the laundry list of how else a changing environment bears on our brains as you, as you suggested, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a stark and kind of grim list, right? Because, outside of the somewhat more nuanced discussions around memory and language, for example, we're talking about really serious interventions on behaviour. For example, we talked very briefly about the relationship between heat and violence earlier. This is a well understood animalistic response. It isn't unique to humans. Again, any you know, effectively, anything with a nervous system encounters an issue wherein it's metabolically costly to maintain that nervous system at the point at which it's supposed to be maintained for optimal health. Right? This is homeostasis. Homeostasis takes energy. It takes a lot of energy to cool the brain, and so as heat increases in our environment, as ambient temperature rises, that's an additional cognitive load, effectively on our processing power, right? It's basically like giving us if you imagine cognition as kind of this juggling act, right? Heat acts as another ball that you have to add to the mix. And it's a little bit harder to keep up with your critical thinking processes when you're adding another ball to the mix, right? And we see fingerprints of that kind of relationship wherever we look, right. So so temperature deflections are related to everything from plummeting test scores and students to incidents of hate speech online, right? We see more incidences of, you know, union grievances, for example, filed on hotter days as as has been studied in the US Postal Service. We we see immigration judges less likely to side with asylum applicants on hotter days. We so, so, so left and right, right. We see this manifestation of kind of temperature, for example, reaching in and kind of fiddling with the switches of our behaviour, but it's, it's, it's more than that, because there are also things like ticks and mosquitoes, right? These, these vectors of brain diseases like cerebral, cerebral malaria, things like neuroborreliosis, right? And effect of Lyme disease, we don't have to change anything about our behaviour. All we need to do is stay in the same place and let the world continue to burn. And these vectors of brain disease expand their habitable range, right? They can live in more places, right? Rainfall patterns are changing. Ecosystems are changing. And so you see these types of brain disease vectors expand where they can live. And again, we don't need to do anything. We can just continue living our lives, and the risk of encountering one of these brain disease vectors is going to increase for us. So so you can imagine a whole additional swath of manners in which we are coming into contact with an environment that in its rapid flux, is introducing, you know, new variables to the equation, right, introducing additional risk factors that, frankly, we. Were it not for a changing climate, we wouldn't have to think about and the reason I phrase it like that is because I, you know, I wrote this book because I'm interested in environmental change and the human brain. But this is not a book about climate change per se, right? The fact of the matter is, climate change is a good reason for us to pay attention to these effects. It's something that throws these effects into relief, because we can witness a change in the climate, and then we can observe a corresponding change in behaviour, for example. But the fact that the climate is changing is kind of immaterial to the core processes we're talking about. You know, this is, this is a book about the brain. It's a book about behaviour and cognition and and these processes exist in absence of some great climatological force that is shifting in a certain direction, right? They're with us all the time. Climate change is what throws the conversation into relief. But this is, this is really a conversation about what it means to be a human at all. The fact is, we are, we are sensitive to our environments. We, of course, are embedded in and enmeshed in our environments. And when there are changes in those environments, we see those changes reflected within our own neurochemistry,

Jean Gomes: 21:26

there was something that stood out for me in that you said we we can't air condition our way out of the problem. And obviously that part of that is just the practicalities for you to cool everything. But it was also something that really struck me, which is when you're in a high rise block in New York, and you're in, you know, it's quite cold, and you look out and you know, it's humid and boiling, somehow you still feel hot, and you still get the kind of physiological reaction changing your mindset. Can you talk to us about that?

Clayton Aldern: 22:00

Yeah, yeah, I can. And actually, it brings this, you know, immigration judges paper to mind, because, again, you know, these are the, you know, the finding in this particular study of, you know, a handful of, I think a couple dozen US Immigration Court judges all around the country, you basically found that when you compare judges to themselves, and that's the important point here. It's not the fact that there are more aggressive in terms of rulings, right? More aggressive judges in Texas versus Minnesota. The fact is, when you compare judges decisions to their own past decisions when you when you look at the degree to which leniency changes as a function of temperature, you note that indeed we find less lenient judges showing up on hotter days. Okay, so that's all well and good, fine. How does that happen? Especially because judges often work in air conditioned buildings, right? So, so what? How? How can it be that this effective temperature creeps in and follows them to work? And you know the answer is, we. We biologically are somewhat slow beings. And what I mean by that is it takes a while for us to acclimate. If you have to run and catch a bus, and you get onto that bus, you're, 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 you just ran. And that's, you know, a somewhat extreme example, the fact that you really exerted yourself physically. And now there's this come down period where you return to baseline. Those types of come down periods characterise our experience all day long, and you don't need to run to activate them. So the fact that folks have, you know, maybe experienced a night of, you know, unpleasant sleep the night before because it was warm, or the fact that it was, you know, particularly hot morning and, you know, maybe there was a longer walk to work. Those, those types of environmental inputs matter over the course of hours, right? They don't matter over the course of weeks, but they matter over the course of hours, because it takes people a while to acclimate, even if they've entered an air conditioned space and and, you know, in addition to that, I would offer in terms of the fact that we can't, you know, air condition our way out of the problem, part of that is a simple function of the matter that humans are not infinitely adaptable. We can adapt to some things. And in fact, some of the best estimates we have suggest that, you know, people are probably capable of physically adapting to something on the order of half of the climatological changes that are kind of coming down the pike over the next. 50 or 100 years, that's only half, right? What about the other half, you know? And so sure we can air condition the heck out of society, and maybe there's a band aid solution there in that we would expect, perhaps in the near term, to see fewer incidences of, aggressive behaviour. And frankly, we would probably see parity of test scores in many districts, right, wherein you have, for example, poorer schools without air condition, without air conditioning. Now being air conditioned, lo and behold, when that happens, there's always a bump in performance, right? So we would see these kinds of short term effects creep in. But you know, given the global energy mix, for example, more air conditioning right now in the world tends to mean more fossil fuels. So in the long term, climatologically speaking, right? Environmentally speaking, that's probably not a good idea, but furthermore, that physiological Band Aid is only exactly that. It is, it is, it is a stop gap. It is not the same thing as growing more sweat glands, for example, which takes generations and and so you can imagine that, you know, yeah, we could. We could listen, we could zip ourselves into a space suit. We could purchase a space suit for everybody on earth and zip them up and let the world, you know, go to absolute heck. And it's, you know, 200 degrees outside, and everybody's happy inside their suits. But the problem is, at that point, we've, you know, spent so much money that there's, there's nothing left over to feed ourselves, right? We can, we can adapt our way through the problem. In so far as we can throw money at technological solutions that are indeed useful in the short term, but at a certain point, there are trade offs, and ultimately, some of the 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 we think about this, we can adapt to the kind of 50% of the the consequences of climate change which are really about us, and being able to re effectively model our picture of the world, and so it doesn't cause us a metabolic overload or trauma or so 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 experience from from environmental loss.

Clayton Aldern: 27:38

Yeah, no, that, that's a that's a great point, you know, by way of example and and, you know, here, here's a, here's a, here's a two tiered example on trauma, right? So you know, you're perhaps familiar with the notion that something like a hurricane or a wildfire can cause PTSD, right? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Unsurprisingly, if you as a person are exposed to an extreme trauma, right? A traumatic event. It doesn't need to be a matter of war fighting, right? If you are exposed to a traumatic event such as an environmental disaster, lo and behold, you may end up with symptomology reflective of post traumatic stress disorder. So, so, so that's kind of tier one, and we see it left and right. We see it basically in the wake of any kind of natural disaster that rolls into town, you always see PTSD rates skyrocket, and that skyrocketing is basically contingent on one's exposure to the disaster in question. So if, if you actually, you know, lost property, or, you know, God forbid, a family member, right, if you were directly exposed to the disaster, you're going to see, you know, in a sub population of people, or rate of PTSD, about three times that of folks who were indirectly exposed to the disaster in question, maybe they knew somebody who lost property or a family member and and those folks are going to have a rate of PTSD three times that of folks who didn't experience the disaster at all. Right, so there is this scaling effect when it comes to exposure to environmental trauma and the manifestation of the trauma in question by way of some kind of neuropsychiatric condition. Okay, so that's kind of tier one, tier two, and this is where it starts to I think it really complicated in terms of our future outlook and our ability to adapt, as you suggest, a lot of the traumas that we experience in life, and this is also true of environmental trauma. Have, have, have a heritable component, right? We've, we've, you know, kind of heard whisperings of this over the past couple decades when we talk about intergenerational trauma. This is, you know, the type of language that's used when we study. Be folks like Holocaust survivors and the children thereof, or, you know, descendants of survivors of the Rwandan genocide or something. There's, there's this literature about intergenerational trauma that would suggest that there's a kind of mechanism that affords a, you know, some kind of biological message passing effectively, to encode a stress response to encode, you know, some kind of trauma response across generations. How does that happen? Do we see it manifest in the case of environmental trauma, etc, etc? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be yes. So, by way of example, we had, you know, a study. We saw a study come out of New York a couple years ago, in which cognitive neuroscientist named Yoko Emma was, was in 2014 in the middle of this, this study of expecting mothers in New York City. And she was, she was studying the relationship between stress and pregnancy, and wanted to know how various inputs to, you know, maternal life affected the the lives of the children in question, and and this wasn't about environmental trauma per se, or anything like that. It was, she was just wanting to know, like, how do these different modes of stress affect children when their mothers are exposed to these modes of stress when they're carrying the children in question. And so she's, you know, got this cohort of 400 mothers that she's following around. And then Hurricane Sandy rolls into town, right? Superstorm Sandy, think I said 2014 but maybe that was 2011 Superstorm Sandy rolls into town, right? And all of a sudden, there's kind of a natural experiment. Natural experiment here, because this is, this is one of the greatest stressors that Dr Nomura could imagine, right? And, and some of the folks in her cohort were carrying children, some of them had already given birth, and indeed, she would recruit a few more folks who, you know, had yet to conceive at the point of the storm. So, so So all of a sudden you have this in a natural division, wherein, you know half of the people in her study had had had children in utero when Hurricane Sandy came to town, and you know half had either already given birth or had yet to conceive. So, so there were children who were exposed to the storm in utero, and children who weren't what she then did is followed those kids over the first 10 years of their lives. And lo and behold, as early as preschool, you see in the children who were exposed to the storm in utero incidences of depression, anxiety, conduct disorder, OCD, right, the types of neuropsychiatric conditions that we want to be keeping an eye out for in everyone, much less very young children. You saw these conditions manifesting at rates in the children who were exposed to the storm, 20x that of the other kids, 30x in some cases, 40x when it comes to some conditions, really, really shocking effects and and, you know, when we talk again about intergenerational trauma, the argument here is, well, these are basically epigenetic changes that we're witnessing being passed effectively in a non genetic manner, right, in an epigenetic manner, from from mother to foetus, and then, unfortunately, theoretically, probably from child to their offspring in the future, because epigenetic changes are, in fact, heritable as well. And so, you know, this is a situation in which I think, I think we can, we can. We can look at it and say, well, this makes sense. We can parse it. We can say, Yeah, okay. You know, stress is is actually somewhat inoculating in small exposures, right? We want to be exposed to stress. Because if we weren't right back to modelling the world, if we didn't know that the world was a stressful place. And certainly it is, you know, we wouldn't be able to get anything done. We would be overwhelmed all the time. It's actually, you know, it's, there is such a thing as biological resilience. We want to be able to understand and react to stressful situations appropriately. And so exposure to stress, including in utero, is probably a good thing in small doses. The problem is that, you know, everybody's everybody's got a breaking point. And with, with, with the increase in size and frequency of storms like Sandy over time, we're going to see more people reaching that breaking point and and right now, the science, it probably isn't good enough to to to suggest, you know how many people that's going to be and to what extent folks are going to be affected. And indeed, because some of this research is emerging, whether or not we're going to see ripple effects across further generations. And so, you know, when I think about. About this question of adaptation, what it is that we're doing as we orient ourselves toward the future? You know, part of my answer is just a kind of nervous shrug in that we can characterise some of these effects, and we know a lot about them. And then there are, there are emerging risks that we're just beginning to understand that, frankly, we haven't the faintest idea how they're going to play out in 50 years, but, but we know something 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 of medical systems, right? Many PCPs, actually, most doctors, right, are required to maintain some kind of continuing medical education over the course of their careers. There's a whole credit system, et cetera, et cetera. That's good. We need those types of continuing education systems to integrate climate change into their curricula, right? Because one of the things we're not doing is explicitly accounting for some of these effects and and that's true in in medicine, it's true in economics, it's true in policy making, right, left and right, we see examples of these studies popping up whereby there's a really serious and reliable effect identified and quantified, and yet, while we can point at all of these disparate effects cropping up in literature as diverse as you know, cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics and psychology, it's rare that there's this kind of integrative account, that it's rare that we take those learnings from various fields, knit them together in a manner that paints a picture of the future that is likely to come, and then then ensures that that picture is the thing that we are preparing for in our medical systems. So, so you know, how can we kind of future proof medicine? I think step one is, is just being very clear about the fact that there are risks that we're simply either not aware of yet or just becoming aware of now, that are probably going to become much worse in the future. You know, to be blunt about it, right? These are risks that are manifesting already today, and also are probably going to get worse. And so if we want to be responsive to those types of changes, we we cannot be blind to them, right? We need a clear accounting of the effects that are likely to materialise. I would also offer, you know, in terms of future proofing medicine, it's true that, you know, there, there are a handful of 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't know, I'm in the United States right, there probably some kind of reimbursement schemes that would be useful to implement. But, but I want to, you know, push the question aside of administration for a second, and instead focus on, well, what about the patient? What can the individual do when it comes to interacting with a medical system to ensure that they are future proof? Excuse me, they are future proofing themselves as much as possible in the face of these emerging threats. And I think the answer there looks somewhat similar. I mean, it's useful for individuals, right? It's useful for all of us to be aware of some of the risks in question, but we, you know, we can't expect everyone to keep tabs on every medical journal under the sun, right? What we can, I think, expect all of us to do is pay attention to our own bodies in a way that requires, I think, some some mindful presence, right, some acknowledgement of how we are feeling at any given point in time, and perhaps to the extent possible, a question around How or why we might be feeling that way, right? If I'm again, to take the bus example. If I run to a bus and it's really warm, and I get on it and I'm sweating, and the bus is crowded, and, you know, there are all these people around me, and we go over a bump, and somebody, you know, maybe jostles me a little bit, I'm going to maybe have this reaction wherein I'm feeling aggravated, and, you know, on my worst days, maybe I would want to push them back or something, right? It's in those moments that I think we need to be attempting to pay the most attention to what our bodies are doing and what. Our bodies are feeling like because if, if we can recognise those moments, if we can notice in ourselves that, wow, I am I'm feeling somewhat aggravated right now, that's an opportunity for intervention. That's an opportunity where we can then notice, acknowledge, and probably move on from the effects in question, while acknowledging that they're probably the result of some kind of internal reaction to an external force. It's us not being in control. And you know, what do we love more than anything else? People love to feel like they're in control. And if you want any chance at reclaiming agency, you need to pay attention to yourself. You need to pay attention to what it is that you're feeling, and to the 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 for something like the aggression conversation, because you don't go to the doctor for that, but you can pay attention to what your body is doing and how your body is feeling in many other walks of life, you know, to to raise a, you know, somewhat tragic and extreme example. You know, one of the things I cover in the book is the rise of this, this, you know, free living amoeba called nagleria Fowleri. And nagleria is known as the brain eating amoeba, right? And you know, it, it lives in, you know, kind of these freshwater systems. It can basically live in a suspended state, you know, kind of this, like state of suspended animation for a while, until conditions are right for it to, you know, blossom into a somewhat more active mode of living. And what do those conditions look like? Well, they look like warm water and sun and, you know, things that organisms tend to like, that live on Earth. So as the climate changes, right? We see waters warm, and we see more and more nagleria waking up, and lo and behold. You know, these things are like if you get them in your nose, which is the only way to get them, by the way, don't worry, you're not going to, you know, catch a brain eating amoeba from drinking water out of your tap. These, these, these organisms, you know, effectively, when, when, when they, when they crawl up that nasal cavity, and, you know, worm their way along the nerve, you know, the nasal nerve, all 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 a kind of, you know, maybe bacterial infection. But of course, they're not going to be detected like either of those things, because it's an amoeba, it's not a virus, it's not a bacteria. And so, you know, where am I going with this? The point is, if you go to a doctor because you have an extremely bad headache and you know, you're having trouble moving your neck and you are having a conversation with that Doc, and he's throwing up a handful of well, we need to test for this type of meningitis, and we need to test for this kind of bacterial infection. If the doctor in question is not aware of the risk of something like nagleria Fowleri, they're not going to ask you if you were recently swimming in warm, fresh water, because why would they think to ask? It's incumbent on you to be able to provide that kind of information, right? It's incumbent on you as a patient, to be able to say, hey, you know this 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. So I don't know if it's also worth checking for some parasites or anything like that, but, but maybe that's a risk factor we need to be taking account of. And again, we shouldn't expect individual patients to to, you know, go to medical school effectively, right? Nobody can keep track of every possible risk or threat that they may face over the course of a given day or the course of a given year, but if we are aware of at least some of the risk factors in question and and are serious about paying attention to our own behaviour and our in our and our own internal states, I think we're going to do a much better job of navigating the medical system when the time comes.

Sara Deschamps: 44:30

If the conversations we've been having on The Evolving Leader have helped you in any way, please head over to Apple podcasts and leave us a rating and a review. Thank you for listening. Now let'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 the book off with things that we can practically do to to manage ourselves in this environment and and before I launch into the next point, I just want to kind of caveat it by saying, you know, the. This point is a little bit provocative, but your book is not like that at all. Your book is very balanced in terms of, it's not a dystopian or Doom laden thing. It's very kind of balanced and meditation on the realities and the you know, to try and help people to understand what's going on. But one of the things that you said, which I thought was quite pokey. It says, here's how it is, we are lying to ourselves. Our core lie is that people won't actually feel the strain of a couple of extra degrees of warming, that the only thing acting on human behaviour is the behaviour of other humans. And you expand that by quoting the economist Solomon, has probably pronounced that wrong in economics, people aren't trained to think about the physical world. They're trained to think about decision making and the mind and incentives. There's this belief that we get the incentives right and things possible. So given what this kind of new context that we're in, how do we start to rethink that? Well,

Clayton Aldern: 45:59

in some sense, my answer to that question is the same as my answer to the Latin question, which is to say it really demands an awareness on our behalf, right? I think you know when we when we talk about the lie that you just named. The lie is that humans are infinitely adaptable, right? We've discussed this already. The lie is that people are going to 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 because it doesn't really feel like we are subject to the whims of a wild planet, right? It feels like we are people with agency, with free will, navigating the world as we so choose. And all the stories that we have of humanity are stories about domineering nature. It's about humankind progressing in such a manner that it is capable of transcending the powers of evolution and the constraints of our planet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and and, and, and. So the you know, the story that needs to be rewritten, I think, is the fact that, well, free will is a little more complicated than that, and actually, agency is a little more complicated than that, and if we have all this evidence that suggests environmental factors bear on our brains and behaviour, well, then maybe we should be asking some questions about what it means to relate to our 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 a domineering mode of relation to a somewhat more collaborative mode of relation in practice? You know, again, I began by saying that I think my answer to this question is somewhat similar to my answer to the last question it to me, comes back to awareness, and in particular, you know, at the societal level that that looks somewhat simple, actually, right? We have a lot of the tools that it would take to build a societal awareness of the problem in question, right? We, we have all the studies. We have a lot of the, you know, cost benefit analyses that say, Hey, actually, you know, when it comes to something like productivity, to take one example, you know, heat past a certain point is a bad thing, and here's how much it is going to cost the global economy, right? We have a lot of these types of estimates. For example, what's missing is the translation of those estimates, the translation of that knowledge base into something like climate policy. Right now, the cost benefit analyses that climate policy analysts use, that climate economists use, they don't take the brain health effects of climate change into account. They may take the health effects of climate change into account in so far as we know that, and have known for decades that we're going to see under a warming world, you know more incidences of you know diarrheal diseases, right? And you know malaria, for example, but, but, you know, everything that we've talked about thus far, from PTSD to drops in productivity to who knows what the heck is happening with memory to the Gloria follower I, none of that stuff appears in any of our climate, economic cost benefit analyses. And that's, that's an issue, right? Because it's, it's, it's, it's related to that same blind spot. It's related to the blind spot that says, well, actually the fact that we are human per se, doesn't really matter. Like we're talking about when we plan the economy, when we plan our relationship with the environment, we're really just talking about the outside world. So let's focus. On those inputs and outputs. If, instead, if instead, we, as we as climate policy makers, were serious about our relationship with the environment, we would include in our cost benefit analyses the manners in which that environment is bearing directly on everything that we've already discussed and in absence of doing so, it's just, it's, it's kind of unnecessarily difficult to justify climate action, right? You're, you're basically leaving a bunch of benefits on the table. Because you can, if you integrate those types of effects into your analyses, you can say things like, hey, this solar farm over here is going to avert, you know, X, many premature deaths due to, you know, dementia manifestation y, right? You can say, hey, if we eliminate this point source emitter over here with that much less smog, or with, you know that with, with, with, you know that decrease in atmospheric particulate matter, we're going to see a corresponding increase in educational attainment rates for students in the surrounding school district, or something like that. And right now, I mean, those are kind of fanciful examples, but the point is that right now, we are not making those arguments. And I think without making those arguments, it is necessarily making our lives as people who care about climate 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 in making sense of it. And one of the things that one of the recommendations, that you explored, is around in order to create this connection between ourselves and what's happening that you, you spend more time in nature, and you, you outline the economic benefits that Japan got from forest bathing. So we all went 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 this direct, can you talk a little bit about some of the practical things as you bring the show to a close that listeners can do to take this greater ownership of their relationship with what's happening.

Clayton Aldern: 52:25

Yeah, sure. You know, maybe a good place to start would be with with a reminder of what's happening neurologically in some of the cases that we're talking about. And so just very quickly, you know, when we when we talk about decision making. When we talk about behaviour at large and critical thinking, for example, often what we're talking about is, is a balance between executive function as understood through the lens of critical thinking and emotion, right, knee jerk reflexes, gut instincts, right? There's a there's a balance there, and the way that balance plays out is somewhat straightforward in the brain, and not everything in the brain is actually localised to a region. But if you zoom in on this front matter, here, your frontal cortex and the real tippy top evolutionarily speaking of brain development, the prefrontal cortex, there's a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is somewhat related to critical thinking. And there's a region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is somewhat related to emotional processing, right? It receives a lot of inputs from what's called your limbic system. That's where things like the amygdala hang out. And so when you make a decision, that decision often arises as a matter of a conversation between those two regions, the dlpfc and the vmpfc. And you weigh, you know, the rational response against the emotional response. And you know you come to a decision accordingly, one of the things that heat does is it basically over taxes that dlpfc. It means that you know the executive function that they're that you're used to being able to perform so proficiently. Struggles a little bit again. Remember, we're kind of adding another bowling pin to our juggling routine here, and so with an overtaxed dlpfc, effectively, you see that vmpfc begin to govern more and more of the decision making that's occurring, right? We're effectively seeing more impulsive decisions arise in those instances, because we're seeing, you know, kind of an outsized effect of those limbic inputs on our decision making. We're making more emotional decisions. Okay? What do we do about that? Well, we just outlined a circuit in the brain that actually we know quite a bit about. We know how that circuit is disrupted in the case of ADHD, for example. We know how that circuit is disrupted in the case of PTSD, and we also know the. Manners in which we can begin to work on restoring losses of function when that circuitry is disrupted. Some of those things look like what we've already talked about mindfulness practices, for example, right forest bathing, perhaps being another, the manners in which we can tune to or attune to our internal experience as it relates to the environment around us, turns out to be somewhat fundamental in effectively rewiring those, those those executive decision making functions, because one of the things that happens when, when you, you know, blast the brain with heat in addition to this kind of over taxing of that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is you, you basically see a lot of your your brain dynamics become a little more randomised, right? You have all these regions that are always talking to one another, and they form what's called functional connectivity networks, the functional connectivity of these regions, especially things like, you know, the salience network, the thing that allows you to pay attention to things in space and determine what's important, determine what if anything is a threat in your environment, right? Those types of networks become less functionally connected to one another. They become more randomised. Mindfulness practices. You know, I'm not trying to be particularly New Agey here. If you if you look at the neuroscience of mindfulness, right, the cognitive neuroscience of the manifestation of these practices in the brain, what you see is, again, a restoration of these functional connectivity networks, you see that that activity, instead of being randomised, start to take on structure again, right? And you see a rebalancing of the imbalance that we described earlier. And you know, there are many modes to get to that kind of balanced state. Mindfulness is one of them, right. Breath work is another, right and there, there are plenty of studies that have shown that these effects are tangible and serious. I think what's missing is, you know, simply their internalisation in our in our everyday lives. So, you know, I don't think that we are going to as a society. Well, we're certainly not going to avoid cerebral malaria or nagleria Fowleri because we're forest bathing, right? Some of the risk factors here are are going to need to be confronted through the band aids, right? Some of the things are going to need to be confronted by air filtration systems, and, you know, wearing a nose plug if you go swimming in a freshwater system, that's warm. But many of the behavioural effects, many of these kind of cognitive relationships we have with our environment, I think, can in great part, at least be somewhat confronted, right? At least be somewhat addressed, acknowledged on their own terms, is maybe the way to phrase it, through practices of mindful awareness, of breath work. You know, forest bathing is one. I would argue that something like deep time contemplation is another, right? There are some nice practices out there for grounding yourself in the fact that the human experience on Earth is a relatively short one relative to the passage of time in the universe. We don't have too much time to talk about that, but there's, I think, some good fodder there for kind of grounding ourselves in the moment in which we have found ourselves. Ultimately, I think it, you know, the theme for me comes again, back to awareness. It's awareness at a societal level. It's awareness at an individual level. And you know, within that individuality, it's, you know, awareness both of what is 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 elevator pitch for the next book. I actually, I was at a function last night and and tried to give it, and it took me about 16 minutes to get through so working on that, but to do my very best, the short answer is that this, this question of modelling the world. This, this question of, what is it that a nervous system does? What does it mean for a brain to function? What does it mean for an organism to exist at all, to persist in time? Some of those questions are confronted in the book that we're talking about today. They're a bit more profound than I think I managed to address in the book. Most. Most of the time in this text, I talk about people modelling their environments as broadly understood by things like the homes they inhabit and the streets that they walk on. The human brain modelling its immediate environment is just one little piece of the puzzle of what it means for us to understand the world in terms of thermodynamic systems that are seeking to build generative models of one another. And that core principle, it turns out, governs existence writ large, and it governs it from the level of the individual mitochondria in a cell, all the way up through the organism, all the way up through a species and an ecosystem. You can understand the forces of evolution effectively, as you know, if you think about a species carving out an eco niche as it individuates As as a species, as it speciates as it were, right? This is, this is effectively a species modelling its environment. It is, it is creating a space for itself in which it is unsurprised by the world around it. That principle is, I think, a really useful tool for learning about the universe writ large, and about the implied rules, you know, moral and otherwise of that universe. And I'm interested in thinking more about them. So, you know, the long story short is, you know, I think the chapter about modelling is maybe chapter seven in the book. And you know, the thing I'm working on now is maybe making chapter seven an entire book Excellent.

Jean Gomes: 1:01:49

Well, I mean, I, for one, will be really looking forward to that with a huge amount of anticipation, because I loved the way of nature. And you know, for those listeners, it's not a climate change polemic, it's a book that helps you to make greater sense of who you are in this changing environment, and from that point of view, it's a huge contribution to our own development as individuals and leaders. So I thoroughly recommend it. And Peyton, I'm absolutely delighted we've had this conversation, and I hope that you'll come back and talk to us about your your next your next book, and the work that you're doing around it. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you so much.

Clayton Aldern: 1:02:32

Yeah, well, thanks for the conversation and for for taking the time.

Jean Gomes: 1:02:36

Excellent. And so listeners, remember, the world is changing. Are you?