
Evidence suggests that brain activity shifts to increase wisdom as we age - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/the-wisdom-of-the-aging-brain
======
dominotw
>he religious traditions of India and China, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and
Daoism, were thinking about wisdom, emphasizing the regulation of emotion—or
emotional balance—as key to it.

What ? This is so misguided. Buddhists are not trying to 'regulate emotions'
they are trying to understand what causes internal conflicts and nature of
thought.

The western image of the monk suppressing all emotions via meditation is so
absurd( even if that was possible by some miracle). Meditation is examination
not supression or control.

>“We looked at wisdom and its synonyms, like sagacity, and antonyms, like
foolishness, folly,” says Jeste. “We wanted to find out how many times those
words were used and more importantly in what context in the Gita.”

They defined what wisdom means and went looking for it. Classic case of
confirmation bias. Their definition of wisdom is so generic (eg:: having
pragmatic knowledge of life) that there is no way it could have failed to
confirm what they were looking for.

It gets more silly

>Following Baltes’ death in 2006, Staudinger has come to differentiate between
so-called general and personal wisdom.

Stopped reading after this.

~~~
larubbio
> Meditation is examination not supression or control.

Just one clarification on this. I recently listened to a talk by Bikhu Bodhi
[1] where he said meditation was partially about the suppression of emotion,
He then quickly clarified that suppression is different from repression. In
suppression you investigate the root cause and work to understand and
eliminate that and once done you have suppressed the emotion that springs from
it.

So I think to express it in an operational analogy, suppression is finding and
eliminating the root cause of an outage, repression would be turning of the
alarm and pretending the site isn't down.

[1] [http://bodhimonastery.org/the-buddhas-teaching-as-it-
is.html](http://bodhimonastery.org/the-buddhas-teaching-as-it-is.html)

------
anoplus
Maybe one gets more socially conscious with age as he realizes how much he
depends on society? And as for learning efficiency, to appreciate it, don't
forget that as you mature, you also need to "unlearn" old paths. But that
doesn't imply loss of plasticity.

Reminds me of an old Charles Simonyi's interview where he illustrated his
cognitive shift over the years:

[https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-
work-...](https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-charles-
simonyi/)

------
visarga
The more we live, the better we can approximate the priors for the probability
of what is happening to us. These priors disentangle the apparent randomness
of day to day life and represent the meaning we give our experiences. Even
artificial neural nets can do that, why no humans?

------
danieltillett
I wish. At best you learn to avoid some class of mistakes at the expense of
seeing everything through the lens of experience. I would trade my "wisdom" in
heartbeat to have back the raw computational power and mental flexibility of
my youth.

~~~
ThomPete
Wisdom gives you other things that aren't just replacing computational powers.
It gives you an ability to understand the world in a very different way, to
put you more in control of it, to make you more grounded, less erratic.

But each to their own of course.

~~~
danieltillett
I don’t feel any more grounded or less erratic than I did when I was 20, but I
certainly am dumber. I am not saying that wisdom is not a useful tool (how
many time do you really need to make the same mistake), but that I would be
more than happy to give it up for my youthful brain.

------
known
We tend to understand the nuances of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)
as we age

~~~
Natsu
Understanding them tends to lead to overconfidence and being more affected, in
general, actually. We might improve by gaining experience in compensating for
them, though.

~~~
meowface
They should add an entry for the "bias awareness" bias. :)

~~~
Natsu
It's been a while since I read the list, but I believe there _is_ something
like that.

~~~
lkbm
Sounds like the bias blind spot:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot)

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r0muald
Why is Nautilus content still allowed on HN? I really have a hard time
ignoring the daily presence of this kind of "scientific" pieces on the front
page.

~~~
pessimizer
Everything is allowed on HN that's not spam and gets upvoted. The reason
Nautilus shows up here is because it started off being really high-quality
before taking a nose-dive to quasi-TED Talk levels.

"Wisdom comes from a balance of activity in brain regions." is one of the
stupidest things I've ever heard; this article might be better on Deepak
Chopra's site. I relate to your annoyance.

------
carapace
A fool never learns.

A man learns from his mistakes.

A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

------
ComodoHacker
> increase wisdom as we age

Unfortunately, this happens not to all of us.

~~~
epoxyhockey
And, doubly unfortunate that most believe that they are wise, whether or not
they are.

------
louprado
This makes some sense, but if it were true then simplistic right-wing societal
beliefs would appeal more to young people (e.g., the poor are lazy,homeless
people are losers who drink too much, etc.). Then as one ages we would become
more centrists or leftists.

My general observation finds the opposite to be true.

