BW: So to be at the peak of your game, you have to learn to manage the extremities of your emotional reactions?
DG: Well, it means that you would need to upgrade your ability to handle stressful emotions.
BW: On your Harvard predoctoral traveling fellowship, you studied in India, focusing on ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asian religions. You did your doctoral research on meditation as an intervention in stress arousal. Your first book was called “The Varieties of Meditative Experience,” later republished as “The Meditative Mind.” So do you think meditation is important to our emotional and physical health? To our emotional intelligence?
DG: Oh yes. I think there is a very large amount of conversion data on meditation across all brands and all varieties. There is a generic benefit, I think, largely because it helps people get into a parasympathetic nervous system state, which is restorative as the body’s recuperative mode, as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which gets us into the stress-arousal spectrum. In this mode, the immune system becomes more robust, blood pressure falls — which is good for both immune and cardiovasicular systems.
I think that if you are a daily meditator, you let your body get into a way of being that it can reconstitute itself instead of being driven over the edge by constant stress arousal.
BW: Last year, you turned your attention to the environment with your book “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything.” What do you mean by “ecological intelligence”?
DG: Ecological intelligence is the phrase I use for the human capacity to live sustainably within one’s ecosystem. This is an ability that humans have had to have since the beginning of evolution, which has been finely and exquisitely honed in different parts of the world by native peoples, but which has become progressively destroyed or incapacitated with the rise of what is called the Anthropocene age. Geologists tell us this began with the industrial revolution, and is marked by the first time in history where the activities of one species are systematically degrading the global systems that support life. These are the side effects of everyday operations of our systems of construction, energy, transportation industry and commerce.
These have unfortunate byproducts that are attacking the planet, and the irony is that the reason we seem oblivious to this is built into the brain. We have a neural blind spot for the Anthropocene age, which is a design flaw in our brains. This means that mainly our brain’s alarm system, the amygdala-related circuits, is fine-tuned for the threats of the preceding geological age, the Holocene age, where humans roamed savannahs and lived in jungles and caves, and the threats to life were immediate. We are finely tuned to be startled by a rustle in the woods on a dark night or by a growl. That helped us survive for hundreds of thousands of years, but the dangers we face now are actually beyond our immediate perceptual system. They are too macro. We don’t have any senses for global warming. They are too micro. We have nothing that can detect the toxicity of industrial chemicals. We are oblivious to the actual dangers we face in this age.
BW: You hear a lot that cellphones cause cancer or are potentially dangerous, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to keep using my cellphone. The danger of cancer caused by my cell feels very distant and unreal. Is this what you mean, in a way?
DG: If we hear, for example, our cellphones may pose a cancer risk, it doesn’t do anything for us like a bear running toward us. First of all, the danger seems very remote. We tell ourselves it can take decades for a cancer to develop. The other reason is we have zero sensory apparatus to detect it, so it is very hard to trigger the brain’s alarm system for distant and imperceptible dangers. This is the same problem we have with carbon. Global warming sounds terrible, but [we think], “Gee, it’s a nice day today,” so we shrug it off. It’s been proven impossible to get global governments to unite on this issue, and I think it’s largely for this reason. Our brain is just not equipped to cope with it very well.
BW: So how do we overcome that?
DG: In “Ecological Intelligence,” I propose a way to overcome that, and it’s made possible by the emergence of new information systems, which can act as a kind of “data prosthetic” for the human brain. It is now possible, through a new science called industrial ecology, to look at any product we are going to buy and analyze it in terms of its total environmental health and social impacts during its entire life cycle. It’s a life-cycle assessment.
So for example, it breaks a drinking glass down to 1,959 discrete steps. A step might be when you add one more chemical to the mix of sand and other chemicals that you are going to heat at 2,000 degrees for a day or two to render glass. It looks at the product as a process that only ends when that glass finally becomes something else over an immense amount of time, and this gives us a very precise matrix for comparing one glass to another, or one iPad to another similar product. This new mathematics gives us data that has real consequence and gives us a way to grasp the actual consequences of our individual decisions in the Anthropocene age … to the extent that more and more of us start voting with our dollars on products that are genuinely sustainable and not just some green-washed label, it creates an economic imperative for companies to improve how they do things. A systemic market force like this can create a virtuous cycle where our accumulative buying decisions create a compelling business case for companies to look into their supply chain and look for better and better alternatives in a continual upgrade. Because it is exactly commercial human activity which is driving the Anthropocene crisis.
I think a systemic force like this is one of the few things that can actually put on the brakes and hopefully get us moving in the other direction, toward more sustainable ways of living. It will take a market force to create a whole range of sustainable improvements over what we have now. What we have now is a legacy from the dinosaur age, when we had no idea what the consequences were. So basically everything has to be reinvented, which is a great entrepreneurial opportunity.
BW: Can you sum up for us three things we can all do to bring about a marketplace that works for a sustainable environment?
DG: First, make the effort to know the consequences of what you are about to buy. Second, you buy according to these guidelines. The third is to go viral and tell as many people as you can about what you’ve done.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2011 issue of Brain World Magazine.
