Overcoming the Action Gap

Jul 27

6 min read

Updated: Aug 18

Sir David Attenborough spent over seventy years proving it. Neuroscience is now explaining why. And a new kind of tool, impact games built directly from deep research and rigorous science, may be the most powerful vehicle yet.

"No one will protect what they don't care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced."

- Sir David Attenborough

Lone person walks across a shallow tidal flat at a hazy beach, with distant walkers, dogs, and mountains under a pale sky.

Go out at low tide. Find a sandflat. From a distance, like nothing. Crouch down.

Beneath your feet, bamboo worms are aerating the substrate. Cockles are filtering the water. Bacteria are locking carbon into sediment at rates that rival tropical rainforest.

The birds working the tideline depend entirely on what is living in this sand.

These ecosystems cover coastlines across the entire planet, and they are quietly doing some of the most important biological work on earth, regulating carbon, cleaning water, sustaining life.

Imagine you now read a news report that a developer wants to fill it in and build a heliport.

What happens next depends entirely on whether you have been there.

If you haven't visited the sandflat, you process it as information. Troubling, perhaps. But the sandflat stays abstract in your mind. That is semantic memory: knowledge without a time and place.

If you have crouched over that sand, if you looked things up afterwards, the heliport proposal hits differently. That is episodic memory: knowledge filed under that summer afternoon, the sand under your feet, the fascinating animals you observed, the smell of the ocean. Something that you felt. Something you care about.

The information is identical. The experience is not. And that difference is what determines whether people act.

Semantic memory is how most scientific knowledge reaches people. Think about your typical university lecture. The brain then tries to encode abstract information as a concrete memory. Students, build mental images from dry text, construct narratives around data, anchor intangible concepts to things they already know through analogy, storytelling, and visualisation. They are tricks the mind uses on itself, attempts to convert semantic knowledge into something more episodic, more like something that happened.

Below is an example of semantic memory (abstract facts you can't see or touch) being converted into episodic memory by attaching feelings, and wordplay to give it meaning. This makes the concept far easier to recall.

Diagram explaining the difference between semantic memory and episodic memory in learning and behaviour change.

The example above is an ingenious workaround. But every so often, a new medium arrives that makes absorbing information easier.

The Power of narrative storytelling

Plastic bottles and cups float on dark blue polluted water.

The scientific paper carried knowledge across centuries. The documentary carried it into living rooms.

Like the memory tricks above, TV converts abstract information into something you can see, hear, sequence and understand more easily. A 3D animation of how DNA undergoes replication is easier to grasp than a diagram on a page.

The invention of television gave researchers something they had never had before: a way to carry their findings beyond the page and into many lives of millions in an influential way

Perhaps no one has demonstrated this more powerfully than Sir David Attenborough.

When Blue Planet II aired in 2017, it translated the science of marine plastic pollution that researchers had documented rigorously for decades into something that tens of millions of people could witness and feel: albatrosses feeding plastic to their chicks, sperm whales carrying their dead calves, coral reefs in slow collapse.

Close-up of a whale underwater in blue ocean, its huge dark body filling the frame with sunlight shimmering above.

The UK banned plastic straws and the EU followed with sweeping single-use plastic restrictions, with ministers in both cases citing Blue Planet II. In 2019 more than 170 countries pledged to significantly reduce plastics at the UN Environment Assembly.

For the first time, people could really feel and understand the effects on an emotional level.

Documentaries are not the ceiling. They are the second step. You watched. You felt. But you did not interact with them, and that is where impact games begin.

"Science gives us the knowledge. Documentaries give us understanding. Impact games give us the experience of deciding."

— Melanie Langlotz, Executive Director, Geo Applied Realities

From papers to documentaries to impact games

84% of people say they care about humanity and the planet but less than 10% make meaningful changes to their behaviour. The problem isn't lack of information. It's lack of practice. The gap, between what people know and what they do, is precisely what impact games and simulations are designed to close.

"We are not fighting a knowledge gap, we’re fighting an action gap."

— Melanie Langlotz, Executive Director, Geo Applied Realities

Built directly from peer-reviewed research and real-world scientific data, impact games let you live the future. Your choices within the simulation reveal how small actions ripple across time, offering profound insights into the world you are helping to shape. And because impact games are grounded in rigorous science, they can do something groundbreaking: the way players behave inside them becomes a source of research in its own right, generating new insights that feed back into the science they were built from. And it turns out, that when people play, something profound is happening within the brain.

Your brain is a game engine

Every time you make a decision, your brain runs a simulation first, a rapid, unconscious prediction of what will happen next, built from your previous experiences. You are in effect modelling the world and then testing your model against reality. Games, it turns out, are a direct extension of that process.

The late Eleanor Maguire of UCL demonstrated how the brain encodes experience. Her study of London taxi drivers revealed that successfully memorising 25,000 streets physically restructured the brain, growing measurable grey matter in the posterior hippocampus, with volume correlating directly with years of experience. Crucially, she also found that people with hippocampal damage could not imagine future events. Memory is the substrate from which the brain models what might happen next.

"The whole point of the brain is future planning. We create models of the future by recruiting our memories of the past."

— Eleanor Maguire, UCL

That architecture makes no distinction between real and simulated experience. Alvaro Pascual-Leone demonstrated this at Harvard: volunteers who only imagined practising a piano exercise showed the same motor cortex changes as those who physically played piano.

"Video games are like an external version of the mind. When we understand things and plan actions we run game-like role-playing simulations in our heads. In a sense, our mind is a game engine.”

— James Paul Gee, Games & Learning Researcher

If imagining an action carries so much neurological weight, consider what happens in a simulation like Foldit, the protein-folding puzzle where players develop intuition for molecular stability, hydrogen bonds, and hydrophobic interactions, practising something that could never be rehearsed in a real lab.

"To your brain, there is no difference between simulation and reality when it comes to learning."

— Miranda Verswijvelen. PhD, E-Learning Expert & Narrative Designer, Geo Applied Realities

The abstract becomes tangible

Simulations let us practice beyond our senses. We can balance planets in orbit or fast-forward a coastline through a century of rising seas, making environment, energy and sustainability something we feel, not just read about.

We can walk alongside indigenous cultures or step into a moment of history, deepening our grasp of culture, history and inclusive society, of place, memory and belonging.

We can till a field through a drought or trace a river to its source, learning how fragile our natural resources and agriculture really are.

We can prototype a spacecraft or stress-test a technology before it exists, living inside the risks and promise of industry, space and emerging technology.

We can respond to a wildfire or coordinate a flood evacuation, building instinct for climate and emergency preparedness before a real crisis demands it.

And we can step into another life entirely, sharpening our understanding of human rights, wellbeing and health by living, briefly, as someone else.

The experience we couldn’t grasp. Until now.

Climate change does not announce itself in a single dramatic event. Biodiversity loss is largely invisible. A glacier looks permanent until you see it over large time scales.

You cannot protect something when you can’t practise how.

Now you can.

The future is playable.

Aerial view of branching tidal creeks etched in tan mudflats, with green shoreline at top and bottom, no people.

Resources

Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S. J., & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(8), 4398–4403. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.070039597

Pascual-Leone, A., Nguyet, D., Cohen, L. G., Brasil-Neto, J. P., Cammarota, A., & Hallett, M. (1995). Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills. Journal of Neurophysiology, 74(3), 1037–1045. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.1995.74.3.1037