Your Brain On Climate
Episodes
How to talk about the climate emergency
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new campaign, the National Emergency Briefing, thinks (rightly) there's a climate emergency going on. They want Keir Starmer to go on TV and te...
Into the Manosphere
16 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There's a vast online universe where men hang out and hate on women. This is the 'Manosphere', a place home to hucksters, spivs, scam a...
Spooky 👻
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It's Halloween, when everyone is allowed to be strange for a day. A good time to ask: like the best ghost stories, why does climate change someti...
Is Climate Anxiety real?
15 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Well... is it? Nearly half of young people say the future of the planet brings them mental distress. Not just young people either. More and more peopl...
Change Blindness
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change: fast in a geological sense, but slow in a second-by-second human-perception sense. Our brains stop paying attention to things that cha...
Don’t Fear The Reaper, with Molly Conisbee
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I'm afraid that you are going to die. Sorry. You can imagine afterlives and amass great hordes of wealth, but you're still made of human s...
Optimism Bias
29 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Thing about humans is, we like to look on the bright side of life. Without optimism, we'd not have evolved out of the trees in the first place. Â ...
Violence, with Peter Schwartzstein
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change sucks, not least when it causes violence - which it does more than you'd think. In a hundred ways it can add stress and trauma to ...
Laughing Matter
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Comedy opens the mind and helps us cope with the sheer strangeness of being alive. But is climate change a suitable topic for comedy? In this micro ep...
They F*** You Up, Your Mum & Dad - with Nina Alexandersen and Sophia Cheng
13 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How should you bring up baby in the age of climate breakdown? Should you tell them what's happening or not? And given how messed up is the planet...
Somewhere, with Karl Dudman
13 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We vote in our self interest, right? So how come people living on islands disappearing because of climate change - and they know it - keep voting for ...
Kill All Pests
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I'm out in the garden looking for that pile of jobby I found the other day, and it made me think back to my chat in episode 17 with Erica McAlist...
Bullsh*t, with Mike Berners-Lee
11 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An episode all about the subtle art of talking bollocks. We live in a golden age of bullshit. It can seem that our politics is riddled with it. Corpo...
You Disgust Me
27 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this bite-sized edition we look back at perhaps my favouritest episode ever - episode 9 about disgust, with Yoel Inbar. We all have a gag reflex. ...
I Contain Multitudes, with Sarah Stein Lubrano
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An episode all about cognitive dissonance. Ever feel like there are two yous in the same head? The one that cares about the planet, and the one that ...
Running Up That Hill
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this YBOC microdose, a hark back to my inspirational chat with ultrarunner and climate activist Damian Hall, who dispensed his wisdom about how to ...
Confirmation Bias, with Adam Harris
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Or: why we all hear what we want to hear, and disregard the rest. Confirmation bias is hardwired into human brains, and without it we'd never get...
The Conservative Lag
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is social change so hard - particularly right now? Part of the reason lies in pluralistic ignorance - the social phenomena that helps to explains ...
(Getting Your Head Around) the End of the World, with Laurie Laybourn
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're reasonably good at imagining what nuclear war would be like (although it'd probably be even worse than that). But it's not the s...
Stories of Action, with Kris de Meyer
12 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you want someone to change their mind, it's best if they persuade themselves. And they're much more likely to do that if they actually *d...
Common Sense, with Dannagal Young
01 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Common sense? Ain't nothing common about it. Populists - like Donald Trump - love to appeal to 'common sense', while pushing ideas as...
The neutrality myth, with Lydia Messling
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is climate science 'neutral'? Should it be? Are humans even capable of being neutral about anything? In this new-format episode, I dig into ...
Mental heat, with Alessandro Massazza
30 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When it gets hot, we all get a bit stroppy: think 'shouting at people on the internet' stroppy. But that's only the tip of the (melting...
Long Time, with Ella Saltmarshe
27 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Time. You work on a human timescale, but the planet doesn't. Sometimes we can think long term but mostly real life gets in the way: but the dec...
Luck, with Will Snell and Anita Sangha
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You are so much more lucky than you think, even if you think you're not. Most of us are dead proud of the good things we've done, and we tel...
Values Action Gap, with Gail Hochachka
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Well you SAY you care about climate change, but you don't, do you? There's you, driving a car (!!!)Â or not putting that plastic bottle in ...
Mindfulness, with Jamie Bristow
31 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mindfulness: a technique for training your brain to reflect on what it thinks and why. It can help us make smarter decisions, and can even get the H...
Conversations, with Alex Evans
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Or: how chinwags can save the world. Imagine I could give you a superpower. The ability to make people trust you who currently don't. To help the...
Success, with Simon Mundie
22 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
So much of our silly short lives is spent chasing after trophies or money or glory. Success! But it's never really enough. We just want more trop...
Biophilia, with Lauren Hall Ruddell
22 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Frazzled? Go for a walk in the woods. It'll calm you down, fill your nose with lovely smells, and reset your eyes to room temperature. But why? ...
(Dis)trusting Climate Science, with Laur Hesse Fisher
29 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Some people think climate science is made up. This annoys other people. But calling each other dullards is unhelpful, and it misses the deeper que...
We, with Jonathan Rowson
29 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
WE need to take action on climate change. WE need a revolution. WE need to unite and tackle the problem. Etc. But who is this "we"? Poli...
Behaviour Change, with Lorraine Whitmarsh
27 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Are we responsible for how we behave? If so, should we feel bad about it? And if the answer to those two is 'yes' and 'yes' respec...
Endurance, with Damian Hall
27 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Try running for a few miles, and then a few miles more, and then several hundred few miles more. That's proper endurance that is, the kind demons...
Liberalism, with Christopher Shaw
26 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The climate crisis needs all the ideas and imagination it can get. But today's guest says that liberalism - the system many of us live in, which ...
Decolonisation, with Ayesha Siddiqi
20 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our ideas about climate change are filtered through layers of Stuff, and for us in the West quite a lot of that Stuff is inseparable from being gits t...
Comedy, with Stuart Goldsmith
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The death of everything: no ROFLing matter. Right? Well probably yes. But can chuckles save the planet? Does laughing at humans being silly confus...
Honesty, with Rupert Read
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You can't handle the truth! Or maybe you can. But does the truth set us free, or bum us out? Do we all have a duty to say it like we see it - par...
Negotiation, with Camilla Born
23 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's all very well demanding that everything happens NOW, but we're actually going to do - or not - about climate change is all about negoti...
Flies (and Fleas), with Erica McAlister
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Yup, buzz-buzz-swat-buggers. Now, I can't guarantee you're going to come out of this one in love with flies (and fleas), but maybe you'...
Bystander Effect, with Gerdien de Vries
18 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Yes you probably WOULD walk by on the other side, wouldn't you, and don't say you wouldn't, because you would. Alas, a trio of brain ...
Foresight, with Adam Bulley
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Time travel! No not like Marty McFly, but in our heads. Backwards via memories, albeit imperfectly. And forwards, to make plans for the future and t...
Metaphor, with Simon Lancaster
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
All I need to say to you is "Your Brain on Climate is a lovely cake of a podcast" and you'll drool and tell all your friends to subscri...
Play, with Lucy Hawthorne
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We play when we're kids to try new things and learn how the world works, and when we think no-one's looking we do it as adults too. Play&apo...
Consciousness, with Anil Seth
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Right then. Everything you perceive - including what climate change is to you - is a construction of your brain. And your brain is winging it. T...
Schadenfreude, with Aaron Balick
11 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We love it when someone gets what's coming to them - whether it's an individual we know personally and dislike, someone from a group we hate...
(Super)Heroes, with Al Kennedy
22 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When things get scary, we like hero(+ine)s. We kind of automatically create them - like there was always a hero-shaped hole in our stories that was ju...
Disgust, with Yoel Inbar
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What disgusts you? For starters, I bet, other people's oozings, or rotten meat, or other such things that hint at the Unclean. But you might also...
Psychogeography, with Philippa Holloway
21 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We are the places we live, and the places we live are us. Places made by oil, coal, and gas, by roads, and by industry. Where the choices we make ab...
Pluralistic Ignorance, with Deborah Prentice
12 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
An episode all about one of the weirdest but most important of all human brain-oddnesses: pluralistic ignorance. When you think something and lots of ...
Connection, with Alison Crowther
05 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Being alive can be a lonely business, as can trying to do something about climate change. But how important to our brains is connecting with others? ...
Conflict, with Ian Leslie
28 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ever found yourself yelling at someone you love and thinking: hang on, what are we even fighting about? Or embroiled in a blood-pressure-raising ding-...
Change, with Andrew Simms
21 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Everything changes and everything stays the same. Imagine being a squishy human brain trying to navigate that. Add on a barrage of advertising and soc...
Grief, with Ro Randall
14 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When we lose someone or something we love, our brains want to grieve. Why? What's going on when grieve - when we do it well, or don't do i...
Food, with Kimberley Wilson
07 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Food: yum! It keeps us alive and keeps our brains healthy (or unhealthy, all-too-often). And the food that we eat - what it is and where it comes from...
Risk, with Adam Corner
18 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this debut episode of Your Brain On Climate, Dave talks all things RISK with Dr Adam Corner (@ajcorner). How do our brains understand risk? Are we ...