Why Isn’t the Brain Green? asks Jon Gertner in the feature article of the “Green Issue” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. The issue is worth a visit alone for the striking photos, where the Momix Dance Troupe form vivid images of the head and the brain. But Green Lantern is going to come in handy.

So who wants to know why the brain isn’t green? CRED – Center for Research on Environmental Decisions – where they use behavioral research and decision science to understand “the green mind” (or lack thereof). As seems de rigeur today, any topic where we don’t act on the information available and seem to make irrational decisions is the target of this new decision science.

CRED has the primary objective of studying how perceptions of risk and uncertainty shape our responses to climate change and other weather phenomena like hurricanes and droughts. The goal… is to finance laboratory and field experiments in North America, South America, Europe and Africa and then place the findings within an environmental context.

So what are the problems? We’re bad at long-term decision making; we see environmental problems as far away from our everyday lives; we seem to have a “finite pool of worry” and make an occasional decision to help the environment while continuing on with our overall lifestyle.

Continue reading “Is Your Brain Green?”