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Climate change is affecting human brain function
Though we’ve known for a while that environmental factors can alter the way our brains function, researchers have only just begun to examine the links between climate change and neuroscience.
Since the 1940s, scientists have known from conducting studies on mice that changing environmental factors can profoundly impact the development and plasticity of the brain.
More recently, due to the exacerbation of the climate crisis and the threat to our survival that it poses, they’ve begun examining the effects of global warming on human cognitive function.
As it turns out, the ecological emergency is messing with our minds.
Publishing their findings in Nature Climate Change, the international team of researchers warns that air pollution and increasingly extreme weather events — such as heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and floods — are altering the structure and overall health of the very organ that governs our thoughts.
