Episode 33
Ann-Christine Duhaime is a senior pediatric neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Center for the Environment and Health. In addition, she is Nicholas T. Zervas Distinguished Professor of Neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School and Faculty Associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She is the author of Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis, published by Harvard University Press in 2022.
It was our great pleasure to talk to Dr. Duhaime about some of the key points in her book, including how the human brain has evolved to process rewards for certain behavior, why the relative recency of climate change has impacted how our brains have responded to the present threat of climate change, and how the response to climate change going forward — either at the individual or at the political or national level — should take into account how the human brain responds to less visible threats.