00:05:27 · Roman Krznaric
[00:05:27] S1: So I have pretty good news about the human brain, actually. Um, I think if you look inside our heads, neuroscientists will tell us. I mean, this is more my terminology, that we have inside our brains both a marshmallow brain and an acorn brain. Okay, so the marshmallow brain is the part of our neuroanatomy, which is all about short-term thinking and instant gratification, immediate rewards, and it lives right at the front of our heads in the a bit called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And I call it the marshmallow brain because it's named after this famous psychology experiment you know may have heard of from the 1960s called the marshmallow test, where kids had a marshmallow put in front of them. And if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes, they were rewarded with a second marshmallow. And of course, the famous finding was the majority of kids couldn't resist the snack and snatched it up. But that is not the whole story of who we are, because we also have another part of our brain, which I call the acorn brain, which is all about uh long-term thinking and planning and strategizing. Did I say the marshmallow brain lives in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex? No, that's the way the acorn brain is, right at the front of our heads. Um, and that's about this longer view that we have this capacity where we we've evolved with this. And it's a newer part of our brain. It's only a couple of million years old, unlike the marshmallow brain, which is about 80 million years old, and we share that with rats and other creatures. Um and so there's always a struggle going on between the marshmallow and the acorn, right? Do we upgrade to the latest iPhone or do we plant a seed in the ground for posterity? You know, do we go out for a gourmet meal tonight or save for our pensions for tomorrow? And that's quite normal. I think there's this struggle going on. The good news bit really is not just that we've got the acorn brain, but actually it's pretty well developed in human beings compared to other creatures. So a chimpanzee might get a stick, strip off the leaves, and turn it into a tool to put into a termite hole. But they'll never make a dozen of those tools and set them aside for next week. And that's an amazing thing about human beings.
00:07:20 · Roman Krznaric, Cameron McLain
The acorn brain in action, we see it everywhere from building the Great Wall of China to the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, where those who planted the first plantation that the foundation stones knew that cathedral probably would not be finished within their lifetimes. That's sometimes called cathedral thinking, as you probably know. Um, and so human beings are good at this stuff. And but we could be a lot better, and there's a whole load of forces which, of course, drive us towards short-termism, too. [00:07:46] S0: Let's talk more about some of those amazing ideas from the past, amazing examples of the past of cathedral thinking. Because it you, I think, have studied quite a few of these examples where we have historically been very good at cathedral thinking.
00:07:58 · Roman Krznaric
[00:07:58] S1: Yeah, I've been sort of gathering them for years and years in my obsessive way. Right. So there are examples like the Great Wall of China, sort of infrastructure projects or the building of canals and bridges, the Channel Tunnel, right? It's designed to last for you know 250 years. Um, and I think as well as the sort of infrastructure and buildings and stuff, one one of my favorite examples actually is from the Victorian era. Um, and these were the sewers that were built in London um starting in the late 1850s. So there was this famous event in 1858, sounds obscure, called the Great Stink. Okay. When there was a long, hot summer that year, and raw sewage was always being dumped in the River Thames at that time. Tens of thousands of people were dying of cholera and diphtheria every year. And the smell was so bad in 1858 that members of Parliament in the in the Palace of Westminster, right on the river, couldn't breathe, they had to wear masks, and that's when they passed the emergency legislation to build the sewers. Okay. And the guy who was presiding over the building of the sewers, a guy called Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who was the chief engineer, him and 22,000 workers under his control, um, they built the sewers over a period of 19 years, and what he did is he made the sewers twice as big as they needed to be for the population at the time, and he used very expensive bricks and this new kind of cement called Portland cement, also very expensive but long-lasting. And that's why those sewers are still in use today. So it's not really cathedral thinking, it's more like sewer thinking. But I think it gives you a sense of our potential to go beyond the here and now. And we do it, you know, the James Webb Space Telescope took 30 years to build. I mean, there's all sorts of examples of the Svalbard global seed vault, which you may not have heard of, but it's collecting millions of seeds in an indestructible rock bunker in the Arctic Circle. It's designed to last for a thousand years. So we're pretty good at this stuff, even though we are prone to snatching the marshmallow.
00:09:53 · Cameron McLain
[00:09:53] S0: Are there more examples from today where you do actually see this in action? So the Svalbard one is fantastic, I think. It's been in the in the news recently, and there's a great television series about it, actually, as well. Um, but but they they seem kind of few and far between, these projects.
00:10:07 · Roman Krznaric
[00:10:07] S1: They are. You know, you find them partly in the environmental world, so like large-scale tree planting projects like the Green Belt movement, which emerged in Kenya in the 1970s, still going today, and they planted tens of millions of trees. Um, you know, and of course, a tree is the shade, in effect, is for future generations, right? You're not going to enjoy it yourself. In fact, I used to work as a gardener. I used to be an academic, uh, was a political scientist, but I left that to become a gardener. Right. Um, just to put my hands in the soil and switch my life a bit. And, you know, when you plant trees, and I was working in an Oxford College garden, being paid £6.31 an hour, not very lucrative, but it felt amazing planting seeds or saplings that you knew were going to still be there in £100, 200, 300 years' time. Um, and it isn't very, you know, common today because we do live in a world which is driven by short-termism, in the sense that, you know, of course, companies are looking at their quarterly reports, they're looking at their share prices, you know, politicians are looking at the opinion polls and the latest social media posts, we're looking at our phones, we're clicking the buy now button. But in fact, it's actually not such a new problem, this kind of short-term thinking. It actually goes back. You know, I love history and learning from history. And if you think about the invention of the clock, right? The mechanical clock, which was it's quite new, not much older than the printing press, like 13th century. Okay. The first clocks used to only chime once an hour, or maybe every 15 minutes. It wasn't until 1600 that clocks had minute uh our hands, it wasn't until 1800 they had minute hands. And basically, over the centuries, time's been sliced up and sped up more and more and more and more. And the more we do that, you know, like with nanosecond speech shared trading and so on, the more we're losing sight of the future. So there's all these kind of forces which I think are taking us away from our acorn brain potential.
00:11:56 · Cameron McLain, Roman Krznaric
[00:11:56] S0: Am I right in thinking the Egyptians had a different type of hour depending on the other? [00:12:02] S1: Yeah, the Egyptians were crazy or also brilliant, depending on how you think about it. So the Egyptians split the day between dawn and dusk into 12 equal segments, 12 hours. And that idea spread across Europe, but particularly in northern Europe, as the winter days came and the the days got shorter and shorter, then so did the hours. So there was no standard hour. You couldn't, you know, pay someone an hourly wage. Well, I guess you could, but it was gonna change for a year. And it wasn't until those mechanical clocks in the 13th century that you had this idea of the standardized hour. And in a way, that was one of the key moments when humans started to dominate nature, right? We said, right, we're gonna leave this nature thing. We're not gonna live by the movement of the sun and stars and moon. Um, we're going to live by something we've invented ourselves: hours, minutes, and seconds. [00:12:49] S0: Let's go back a little bit to that transition you made from teaching at Oxford colleges to doing the gardening. What was that like personally for you?