Open Cognitive Loop: Weekly Climate Word

To help us make more sense of our feelings and some of our possibly shared but usually unspoken experiences with the climate crisis, every week I’m going to highlight a word or concept I’ve come across in my research, especially the ones that help me make the most sense of my own anxiety and grief.

I came across the concept of open cognitive loops and cognitive closure through the work of psychologist Robert Cialdini. As a professor, Cialdini would start class with questions that he’d answer at the end of his lecture. One day, he ran out of time and was surprised that his students refused to leave without the answers; they’d rather be late for their next class than be stuck with an unresolved question looping in their minds for the next week. Cialdini’s students wanted him to answer the questions—or close the loop—so they could stop thinking about them and spend that mental energy elsewhere. (Instead, Cialdini began asking questions at the end of his lectures to keep his students thinking.) 

Open cognitive loops and cognitive closure are not new concepts for many of us. People talk about seeking and finding closure on a regular basis, usually when referring to a damaged relationship or bad experience they want to stop thinking about. People also describe ruminating on a thought—or even worse—getting stuck in a thought spiral. But these psychology terms aren’t usually associated with the climate crisis. (Feedback loop is definitely a climate crisis term, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.) 

For people born before 1995, open cognitive loops were the “to be continued” scenarios on a sitcom season finale—pre-streaming days. In the same way that Cialdini used the open loop to keep his students’ brains engaged between lectures, sitcom creators used the open loop to keep the public engaged with their shows during the long months between seasons. That lack of closure kept people talking and theorizing until new episodes finally aired. (Please don’t get me started on the wait between seasons 2 and 3 of The Office.) I use open loops in my writing-life to keep myself engaged with pieces, especially ones I’m struggling to make progress on. When I start to run out of time during a productive writing session, I will sometimes force myself to stop writing mid-sentence. That open cognitive loop keeps my brain engaged with the writing and makes me feel a little desperate to return to my work. 

While a lack of cognitive closure in the sitcom, lecture, and writing examples can test our patience and be frustrating, it is still an overall enjoyable experience with delayed gratification. And that’s because the stakes are relatively low. In comparison, the cognitive loops that open when we dig deep into the climate crisis are catastrophically uncomfortable without the promise of any clear conflict resolution. And while these loops also involve a highly anticipated “will-they/won’t they” storyline, the stakes are much higher, maybe as high as they’ve ever been. 

The climate crisis is an enormous and complicated problem; its solutions are also enormous and complicated. When we allow the climate crisis space in our brain, we are opening a cognitive loop that will never close. We’re talking about a problem that encompasses the entire atmosphere surrounding the whole planet; a problem that involves timelines spanning way beyond our own lives. Even if we change our perspective and learn to think beyond the short timeframe of human temporality, closure is unlikely. 

I am not saying that thinking about the climate crisis is hopeless because we will never completely fix it. I am definitely saying that thinking about the climate crisis is important, and it needs to be done every day by everyone because we will never completely fix it. No matter what we do at this point—go cold turkey on oil and gas, ban all plastics, take a deep and horrible dive into eco-fascism—the consequences of the climate crisis are here to stay—for a while at least (like centuries). 

So even if we don’t want to entertain it in our brains, even if we want to avoid that unresolved conflict, the climate crisis will still find its way into our minds. It will either be an open cognitive loop in our consciousness that we engage with regularly. Or it will be an open cognitive loop in our subconscious, making its own rules about engagement. 

When it comes to thinking about the climate crisis, our goal shouldn’t be cognitive closure. Our goal should be coexisting with an open cognitive loop because it will bring us back to these thoughts, these conversations, this work, and our communities every day.