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Why do some people change, while others double down? In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly talks with journalist and author Lewis Raven Wallace about the deeper mechanics of political transformation. Drawing on neuroscience, trauma research, and stories of people who have broken with deeply held ideologies, Wallace argues that real change rarely happens through debate or persuasion. Instead, transformation grows out of relationships, shared struggle, cognitive dissonance, and practice. Together, Kelly and Lewis explore what organizers can learn from the science of neuroplasticity, the role of rupture and confrontation, and why movements need to focus less on “changing minds” and more on creating conditions where people can unlearn harmful beliefs and step into collective action.

Music: Son Monarcas, David Celeste, and Daniel Fridell

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. We are living in a moment when people are being pulled toward cruelty, conspiracy theories, and resignation. If organizers want to move beyond just preaching to the converted and actually shift the terrain, we have to understand how real change happens: how someone moves from defensiveness to reflection, from agreement to action, from isolation to shared risk. So how can we transform ourselves, and what conditions can help facilitate transformation in others?

Today we’ll dig into these questions with Lewis Raven Wallace, an award-winning independent journalist and the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity and Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change from Within. In Radical Unlearning, Lewis blends interviews and insights from scientific research to explore how people break with deeply held beliefs — not just at the level of opinion, but at the level of identity, habit, and relationships.

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KH: Lewis Raven Wallace, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Lewis Raven Wallace: Hi Kelly, thanks for having me.

KH: How are you doing, friend?

LRV: I am okay. Yeah, we’ve had some exciting winter weather here in the South and a lot of unexpected developments because of that. And I’m just chilling with my puppy dog and my pig outside working hard.

KH: That sounds delightful. It is about 34 degrees outside, here in Chicago, so I am indoors, with nary a pig in sight, but I am so happy to be in conversation with you today.

LRV: Thank you, me too.

KH: So, for our listeners who may be unfamiliar with your work, can you say a bit about who you are and what you do?

LRV: Sure. So I work as a journalist and a writer. I’ve been an activist since the late 1990s. I currently work as the Abolition Journalism Fellow for Interrupting Criminalization, which is the organization founded by Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie. I support journalists, media makers, activists on the ground to build information infrastructure for the movement against policing and criminalization. And I’m also an author, I have a couple of books. One of them is about the myth of objectivity in journalism, it’s called The View from Somewhere. And my newer book is called Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change From Within.

KH: It’s such a timely book, on a topic that leftist activists and organizers really need to explore more deeply. Now, having read the book, I know I’m about to ask a question that doesn’t exactly have a fixed answer. But to help frame this conversation for our audience, can you talk about what the phrase “radical unlearning” means to you?

LRV: So first of all, thank you for understanding and appreciating my dislike for fixed definitions. It’s a tough one, but I landed on the framework of radical unlearning because I got interested in deep change in ideas. And that was actually spurred by when I was touring with my first book, The View from Somewhere, there was almost always someone in the audience who would ask, “Okay, but if we don’t have objective journalism, if we don’t have facts that everyone agrees are credible, then how do we change people’s minds?”

And there were a couple of assumptions wrapped up in that question that I thought were interesting. One was sort of the “us and them” assumption. There’s those people over there who have the wrong idea and then there’s us over here who have the right idea, and the thing we need to do is change their mind. But then the other thing was the assumption that facts change people’s minds. And there’s a lot of research and also just anecdotal evidence that learning new facts doesn’t lead to deep change.

So I got interested in radical change within people. What does it take to uproot deeply held beliefs and ideologies? And that question developed into the book project, Radical Unlearning. Unlearning eventually became my frame because I wasn’t really satisfied with changing minds as a framework, I guess. It felt a little too superficial because I wasn’t just talking about changing your opinion on a discrete particular thing. I was interested in when you have a deeply held belief or have internalized a whole worldview or ideological system, what does it take to disrupt that, to replace it with new ideas? And also importantly with new behaviors.

So not just thoughts and opinions and everything at the level of the head and the brain, but our practices, our ways of being in the world, our assumptions. These are the material[s] of unlearning. And so for me, Radical Unlearning is kind of getting to the root of our fundamental beliefs and disrupting them and replacing them with new ways of thinking, being and acting.

KH: Thank you for that. You’re describing something much deeper than opinion — something that reaches into worldview and behavior. That’s where it starts to feel like identity. Why do some narratives fuse so tightly with our sense of self that they feel indistinguishable from identity itself?

LRV: So some of that actually has to do with this really interesting neuroscience of how we learn and how we become who we are. I learned about this distinction in my research between implicit memory and explicit memory.

So, explicit memory is something that you kind of know that you know. I don’t know, Valentine’s Day takes place on February 14th. That’s like an explicit factoid that I can access from a certain place in my memory. Implicit memory is the kind of information that play out in our reactions, our reflexes, our ways of relating to people, our assumptions, our language systems. So I think implicit memory is a better way of getting at ideology and assumptions about the world. You can change what you think about a discrete fact, like the world is round, the world is flat. But a more sort of comprehensive understanding of what is my body in the world, or how do I relate to gravity? That’s more what implicit memory holds.

And so that’s where we learn how to love, we learn how to communicate, we learn how to behave a lot through memories that we don’t experience as something that you could go and retrieve from your brain. So it’s very somatic, it’s very full body. And the way that those ideas get implanted in us is through repetitive experiences that turn these ideas into habits, norms, ways of being, you might call it belief systems. But I think it’s more … To me it’s closer to ideology or worldview.

KH: So if ideology is carried in implicit memory — in our reflexes and patterns of relating — then it makes sense that deep change would require more than exposure to new information. As you mapped these stories, what did you find was structurally necessary for unlearning? Were there elements that showed up again and again?

LRV: The first thing and the kind of central thing that I came across as I began to look into stories of unlearning was love and relationships. So nobody had a story about unlearning that didn’t include a connection with other people. Some form of loving connection, of connection where it is not necessarily romantic love, it could be parental or familial love, it could be community. But the kind of embodied and affective experience of connection with others is really, really key and central to, I think both learning and unlearning. We become who we are, form our identities through relationship. And when we un-form or reform them, it’s pretty much always through relationship. So if I had to say one thing that the book is about, I would say it’s that.

The story in the book moves chapter by chapter through different kinds of conditions. And so the first one of those is a chapter that’s about love and kind of the neuroscience of love. Like what’s happening in our brains, in our nervous systems when we experience love that actually physiologically makes us more mentally flexible and capable of change. Which I just thought was really cool that there is this sort of growing body of neurological scientific evidence for that.

But then I also looked at other kinds of interventions that have to do with experiences of cognitive dissonance, of confusion, of confrontation, somatic experiences. And the book explores and unfolds through all of those looking both at this science of unlearning and neuroscience and this concept of neuroplasticity, the idea that our minds can and do change. But then unpacking the ways that just people, we, can create conditions for neuroplasticity.

KH: What you’re saying really challenges a kind of default political posture — the idea that change comes from proving someone wrong. In my experience, transformation tends to happen in relationship, in shared work, in moments where people are emotionally and materially invested in one another.

So how does the science of neuroplasticity help us understand that process? And how might that reorient our approach to political transformation?

LRW: So a lot of the study of this that I found to be really applicable to political transformation and activism is actually about trauma. Looking at people who experience PTSD or especially complex PTSD. So the kind of PTSD that you get if you experience prolonged abuse or neglect in childhood. So again, these are deeply held habits, beliefs, ideologies that sort of manifest as this is how I know how to be in relationship, this is how I know how to react, this is what my body does when I’m triggered.

And psychologists as well as practitioners, therapists and people doing all manner of different kinds of healing work with trauma survivors have learned that there are all these different ways that people can heal. But many of those ways are not only through the mind, right? They’re accessed through changing our habits and behaviors, through shifting our relationships with people and through different types of therapies that also some of them have an element of mystery to them, right? Hypnosis, meditation, therapeutic treatments that involve light and sound, and all these kind of engage the full bodiness of our neurological systems that we actually … The nervous system is not just in the brain, it extends throughout our entire bodies.

But it’s not a one-way street, the nervous system sends messages out through our entire bodies. But the body can also send messages back to the nervous system and cause automatic reactions. That’s often what is happening when we talk about somebody being triggered or somebody being activated. A PTSD trigger is not the same thing as a defensive reaction in a political context. But it has a really close physiological relationship. And so I ended up sort of transferring some of that research onto the question of like, how do we approach defensiveness or mental, emotional, spiritual blocks when we’re trying to unlearn or when we’re trying to have transformative conversations? Or get to a place of political transformation collectively. That there’s just a lot that we can learn from trauma practitioners, trauma therapy and trauma science about that. Because trauma is sort of the most extreme version of the casual day-to-day defensiveness, polarization, expressions of I’m not open to this. It’s like a pretty similar physiological reaction in the body just at a smaller scale.

KH: What you’re describing makes it sound like the patterns we encounter in political life — defensiveness, shutdown, rigidity — aren’t just about ideas. They’re embodied responses.........

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