The crucial next task for the human brain

Can we even imagine a solution to the climate crisis?

The world’s most pressing task demands all our mental power. (Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash)

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, announced last month that they were able to capture a phrase from a Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1),” from signals picked up by electrodes attached to the brains of 29 patients at Albany Medical Center, in upstate New York. Think of it like this: The patients’ brain waves became a cover band for Pink Floyd, recreating the music they were hearing: “All in all, it was just a brick in the wall,” the brains beamed.

You may consider this a remarkable advance in neurotechnology, but I’d say it’s life imitating art, sort of: I recall a comic book story from the 1960s about a malevolent mindreader who could detect what people were thinking by touching an electrode to the wrist of an unsuspecting mark. The story so haunted me that as an adolescent I would try to clear my mind when a nurse was taking my pulse, just in case there was an electrode concealed in the nurse’s hand. Probably at that age I was just hoping to avoid the embarrassment of anybody figuring out that I was always thinking about sex.

Whatever the motivation, you can’t literally create a blank mind. But the human brain is quite happy to reject new information. In fact, we are hard-wired to what American neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean in the 1960s labeled the reptilian brain — the basal ganglia and brainstem. That part of our anatomy enables us to function almost automatically on matters we know well or have come to accept as true, MacLean argued, which was an evolutionary advantage for homo sapiens: Learning activity requires the brain to use more energy, and our ancestors needed that energy instead to outrun predators on the savannah. In prehistoric times, the reptilian brain was quite useful.

In 2023, not so much. Today, our understanding of the brain has advanced since MacLean laid out his brain science theories, but his outline remains helpful in understanding why it’s so hard to change a political allegiance, and why we’re resistant to new ideas: It’s because our reptilian brain defaults to what we think we know, rather than bothering to absorb new input.

So what the Berkeley scientists were able to track from the electrodes on those 29 patients’ brains was what the patients were perceiving, not what they were learning. If there was a patient who loved the Bach cello suites, he didn’t suddenly develop an affinity for Pink Floyd and channel it out to the scientists’ computers. That would have required engagement of the higher-order parts of the brain — in the neocortex, in MacLean’s analysis, which enables abstraction and reasoning. Who wants to work that hard?

Why this matters at this moment is because the world is changing quickly, and millions of lives are at risk if we can’t change with it. We need to rise above the reptilian brain, but too much of our political culture and our media diet instead reveals and rewards intellectual laziness.

There’s no greater example of the challenge than climate change. This week the United Nations warned that “there is a rapidly narrowing window” to avert disastrous consequences of climate change. But while we have the technology to save the planet, and while most nations on earth signed the 2015 Paris climate accord that promised to implement the needed changes, almost every country is falling far short of its commitments. Absent a much more energetic response, the earth’s blanket of pollution caused by burning fossil fuels will catastrophically change human life before this century ends, the U.N. has said: Tens of millions of people — or maybe hundreds of millions — will die from respiratory disease, hunger, natural disasters and wars caused by competition for ever more scarce resources.

How bad things may get is seen in how awful they are now — in the  wildfires and floods, heatwaves and powerful storms that have become commonplace around the world. You would think that after witnessing the flooding in Hong Kong and Greece, the wildfires in Canada, Europe and Maui and the earth’s hottest summer on record that people might demand that politicians embrace a positive agenda to protect the earth. But that would require such a lot of effort.

Plenty of politicians and their media sycophants in this country still insist that climate change is just a liberal fixation, a ploy to take away individual freedom. Fox News has devoted hours of programming to combating the judgment of many experts that the Maui wildfires spread in no small part because of the effects of climate change. The hosts of “The Five,” one of the right-wing network’s most popular shows, even asserted last month that the Maui wildfires spread because the power utility there had been distracted by “the green agenda.” That is, Fox blamed the fight against climate change, not climate change itself, for the Maui disaster. Reptilian brains at work!

It’s a wonder, against such hostility to intellectual honesty, that any progress has been made on the crisis. No nation has done as much as the Paris accords envisioned might be accomplished by now, but the Biden administration last year, remarkably, pushed through the nation’s first comprehensive legislation to fight climate change, in the (oddly-named) Inflation Reduction Act. Just now, though, the influential House Freedom Caucus is demanding that some parts of the law be rescinded as a condition of averting a government shutdown next month.

Climate is an issue that perfectly illuminates America’s partisan divide: Eight in ten Democrats consider climate change a major threat to the country’s well-being, but only 23 percent of Republicans agree, Pew Research reported last month.

In light of that reality, and despite the clear peril — it has been millions of years, literally, since there was so much carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere — it is sometimes hard to envision how the earth can recover. Yet it may be in just such a scenario that it is useful to recall a notion attributed to the 20^thcentury American poet Lucille Hopkins: “We cannot create what we can’t imagine.”

Can we imagine the world stepping back from climate disaster? The U.N. report is not hopeless. It notes the tens of billions of dollars a year that wealthy countries are channeling to developing nations to aid the shift away from fossil fuels, and it reminds us that the rise in global greenhouse gases has slowed since the Paris accords. The report doesn’t scold nations individually as much as exhort them collectively.

So much more is needed, though: a sharper decrease in pollution from coal, natural gas and oil, and a rise in renewable energy sources, including wind and solar. And perhaps a trillion dollars to aid the transition in poorer nations, from the richer countries that created the greatest share of the crisis. Without that response, the impact of a warming planet seems likely to become unmanageable — and, at the moment, unimaginable.

Yet since we know how to solve the climate crisis technologically, the task at hand is fundamentally an exercise in human reason — that is, using our well-developed brains to marshal the efforts of all the world’s nations toward fixing their most pressing shared problem. It’s a bigger challenge than turning a brain into a rock band, certainly, and it will require nothing less than all the capacity we have: political, technological, financial and, indeed, mental. Think on that, and see what the higher functions of your brain yields.

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