Mon Dec 01 02:30:00 UTC 2025: Okay, here’s a summary of the text and a rewritten news article based on it:

Summary:

The article is an interview with Rachit Dubey, an assistant professor at UCLA, whose research focuses on how the human mind processes and adapts to climate change. Dubey explains that the normalization of crises like climate change, pandemics, and inequality leads to apathy and disengagement. He argues that our psychological adaptation to gradually worsening conditions, the “boiling frog” effect, is a liability because we lose the emotional signal that would drive action. He suggests using binary data (yes/no) rather than continuous data (numerical scales) for climate communication to highlight the shift in conditions. Dubey also discusses his new Computational Cognitive Policy Lab at UCLA, which uses interdisciplinary methods to study how cognition affects our response to existential threats and how to translate findings into policy.

News Article:

Human Minds “Sleepwalking” Into Climate Disaster, UCLA Professor Warns

Los Angeles, CA – December 1, 2025 – In an exclusive interview with The Hindu’s e-Paper, Rachit Dubey, an assistant professor at UCLA specializing in cognitive science and climate change adaptation, has issued a stark warning about humanity’s response to the escalating climate crisis. Dubey argues that our brains are “sleepwalking into disaster” because we are psychologically normalizing extreme weather events and environmental degradation, leading to inaction.

“Normalization happens when our minds recalibrate to new conditions so quickly that extraordinary circumstances start feeling ordinary,” Dubey explained. He uses the example of increasing wildfires in California and severe air pollution in Delhi, saying events that would have been shocking in the 1990s are now considered normal to someone growing up today.

Dubey cautions that the human ability to adapt, normally a strength, becomes a liability when facing unprecedented and accelerating global changes. The ‘boiling frog’ phenomenon is a key part of the problem. Much like a frog who doesn’t realize the temperature of a pot is slowly rising, humans adapt to climate change over time so that small increments of warming are normalized.

Dubey is concerned that this psychological adaptation is overshadowing the physical limits of adaptation. While governments were once optimistic that humans would act once the effects of climate change were undeniable, he argues, psychological tendencies normalize a catastrophic situation into something more manageable.

To combat this, Dubey suggests using binary data – clear “yes or no” indicators like whether a lake freezes each winter – to highlight the drastic changes in conditions that would normally not be noticed by humans.

Dubey recently launched the Computational Cognitive Policy Lab at UCLA, dedicated to researching how our minds process long-term problems and how to translate those findings into effective policy solutions. The lab is exploring whether normalization extends to other domains such as AI dependency.

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