Evidence suggests that brain activity shifts to increase wisdom as we age

http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/the-wisdom-of-the-aging-brain

by dnetesn • 10 years ago

83 23 10 years ago

known• 10 years ago

We tend to understand the nuances of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases as we age

Natsu2• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

thedevil• 10 years ago

Can you back this up with an example or explanation? It seems like a counter intuitive claim

By learning about biases, I've been able to spot a lot of my own. I don't see how that makes me more overconfident (I was already arrogant) or more prone to bias. And I'd much rather argue with someone else who is familiar with cognitive biases.

Edit: and just for fun, you could say I'm just showing commitment/consistency bias since I've already invested time to learn about biases.

Joeri• 10 years ago

I would argue that you start to see the nuance of everything. Everything becomes shades of gray. Also, you get used to things that go wrong to the point that you care less.

pixl97• 10 years ago

We are still trapped in our own reality tunnel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel

ComodoHacker• 10 years ago

increase wisdom as we age

Unfortunately, this happens not to all of us.

epoxyhockey• 10 years ago

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

visarga• 10 years ago

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?

danieltillett2• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

danieltillett2• 10 years ago

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.

r0muald• 10 years ago

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.

jonsen• 10 years ago

Read this one. You might end up wiser.

pessimizer• 10 years ago

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.

anoplus• 10 years ago

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-...

louprado• 10 years ago

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.

dominotw• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

choosername• 10 years ago

not trying to 'regulate emotions'

Well, regulation as meant in system control theory fits, perhaps. I understand that involves to meassure and to act (or actuate) if any values don't fit in a grand scheme of things. Sytem control theory is not as spiritual, but it involves study as well, i.e trying to understand what ...

The western image of the monk suppressing all emotions via meditation is so absurd

I'm not sure I ever noticed that. There's the search for enlightment and then there's the pain from unfulfilled desires.

carapace• 10 years ago

A fool never learns.

A man learns from his mistakes.

A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

Evidence suggests that brain activity shifts to increase wisdom as we age

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