Understanding How Our Brains Function to Create Better Futures

A big part of creating the different futures that we so desperately need, is understanding the way our brain functions, so we can train it and therefore ourselves to do better.

There is a part of our brains called the hippocampus, which stores our memories. These memories are what our brain draws from to edit and create vivid dreams when we sleep, but also our ability to imagine, because imagination, or the ability to dream of new ideas, is rooted in our memories and the experiences that we’ve had that ultimately create or limit our ability of what to imagine in the first place.

Then you also have cortisol, a stress hormone released in our brain when faced with perceived threats or stressful situations, which impacts our hippocampus in different ways. In small doses, cortisol can actually increase short-term memory as an evolutionary trait that teaches us how to react to certain immediate threats in order to survive, but prolonged levels of high cortisol have been shown to severely reduce our ability to remember new things or draw from our memory at all, and even shrink the physical size of our hippocampus.

In many ways, we’re all sort of experiencing prolonged high cortisol level exposure, with algorithms that reward divisive, pot-stirring negative content more than others, news feeds that hyper fixate on the plethora of negative things happening in the world, or media and entertainment that plays out vivid examples of the apocalypse with asteroids, zombies, or serial killers always present. This prolonged stress state elevates our cortisol and keeps us in a flight, fight, or freeze response, feeding our hippocampus negative experiences which form memories, which we then draw from to react in an endless loop of stress. So if that’s all we program our brains with, when we hear news of elevated political tensions, or new data on rising ocean temperatures, or a fire that threatens another community, our brain naturally associates that with the apocalypse and we doom spiral, often creating reactionary selfish responses that only further that cycle.

If you took someone who binges Joe Rogan, Fox News, or YouTube videos about global cabals running the world and climate change hoaxes, and asked them to imagine an equitable, abundant, clean-energy future…they would have a really hard time doing that, because they have nothing to drawn on there, and without the ability to imagine something different, there is no way to take action to create something different.

Instead, if we look towards all of the amazing things happening in the world, we create memories from these positive thing happening. Those positive memories can then be processed and edited by our hippocampus to create dreams and imagination of different, better futures, and then when something happens that triggers our brain to release cortisol, that stress hormone, we already have a rich, diverse, positive set of memories and possibilities to drawn from that allows us to react in ways that create a better future, instead of continuing the downward spiral towards negative ones.

By feeding our hippocampus stories of success, progress, and examples of things we may consider to be wildly outrageous and even impossibly utopian science fiction scenarios, it allows us to imagine and dream of a better future, and that is the first step towards taking action in creating one.

So when people say “A just transition towards clean energy? In your dreams!” Or “Sustainable logging can’t be reality, it’s just a pipe dream”, or “End capitalism? Keep dreaming!” I say cuss yeah - dream on!

#science #education #betterfutures #robhopkins #inspiration #climate #climatechange #nature #climatecrisis #brain #joerogan #rogan #foxnews #thinkdifferently