Wars exert a grievous global assault on the brain.

Environmentalists and anti-war activists share a common goal in reducing war’s carbon footprint.

Preserving brain health hinges on the discovery of links involving unrelated harmful forces.

If we have any chance of prevailing against the life challenges we currently face (multiple wars, global warming, environmental pollution, and so on), we must train our brains in new ways of observing and thinking.

What’s needed is to hone our ability to discover underappreciated links between seemingly unrelated forces. The brain, with its billions of neuronal connections, seems ideally suited for doing that, since every neuron is at least potentially influenced and is influencing an unknown number of other neurons.

Using the brain as our model, what’s required is a recognition of the need to “up our game” when it comes to understanding causation and interrelation.

Take the factors already recognized as contributing to global warming.

Increased heat leads to dryness, fires, and smoke, which, in combination, damage the brain. Only recently have wars been added to the litany of contributors to global warming and brain damage. When you thought of global warming, did wars, as significant contributing factors, come to mind? Probably not, since the science supporting the relationship is recent.

Take the current war in the Middle East, initially involving Israel, the United States, and Iran. So far, the drain on the global carbon budget is happening faster than the annual carbon emission of the 84 lowest carbon-emitting countries in the world, resulting in a greater accumulation of CO2 in much less time (5 million tons of CO2 released in just 14 days of war). Destroyed buildings comprise the largest element of the estimated carbon cost; the burning of fossil fuels is the second-highest cost. “Every missile strike is another down payment on a hotter, more unstable planet,” according to Patrick Bigger, a research director at the Climate and Community Institute and a co-author of the war-carbon study on the current war in........

© Psychology Today