THE LIFE OF YOUR BRAIN: EXPLAINING WISDOM

Wisdom is the good news. Wisdom has been associated with advanced age in the popular lore of all societies and through history. Wisdom is the precious gift of aging. But can wisdom withstand the assault of neuroerosion, and for how long?
This raises a question about the nature of wisdom. In our culture we use the word frequently and reverently. But has wisdom ever been sufficiently defined? Its neural basis understood? Can the phenomenon of wisdom be understood in principle in biological and neurological terms, or is it too elusive and multifaceted to be tackled with any degree of scientific precision?
Without claiming any particular wisdom of my own, I believe I can contribute to this understanding by enlarging on my earlier introspections, which help elucidate the nature of wisdom, or at least one important aspect thereof. The train of thought and the argument developed in this book will flow from this introspection and this insight.
With age, the number of real-life cognitive tasks requiring a painfully effortful, deliberate creation of new mental constructs seems to be diminishing. Instead, problem-solving (in the broadest sense) takes increasingly the form of pattern recognition. This means that with age we accumulate an increasing number of cognitive templates. Consequently, a growing number of future cognitive challenges is increasingly likely to be relatively readily covered by a preexisting template, or will require only a slight modification of a previously formed mental template. Increasingly, decision-making takes the form of pattern recognition rather than of problem-solving. As the work by Herbert Simon and others has shown, pattern recognition is the most powerful mechanism of successful cognition.
Evolution has resulted in a multilayered brain design, consisting of old subcortical structures and a relatively young cortex with a particularly young subdivision appropriately called the neocortex. The cortex of the brain is in turn divided into two hemispheres: right and left. The passage from problem-solving to pattern recognition changes the way these different parts of the brain contribute to the process. Firstly, cognition becomes more exclusively neocortical in nature and increasingly independent of subcortical machinery and of the machinery contained in the old cortex. Secondly, the balance of our use of the two hemispheres of the brain shifts. As I will show, in neural terms this probably means a decreasing reliance on the right hemisphere of the brain and an increasing reliance on the left cerebral hemisphere.
In neuroscientific literature, the cognitive templates that enable us to engage in pattern recognition are often called attractors. An attractor is a concise constellation of neurons (nerve cells critical for processing information in the brain) with strong connections among them. A unique property of an attractor is. that a very broad range of inputs will activate the same neural constellation, the attractor, automatically and easily. In a nutshell, this is the mechanism of pattern recognition.
I believe that those of us who have been able to form a large number of such cognitive templates, each capturing the essence of a large number of pertinent experiences, have acquired “wisdom,” or at least a certain crucial ingredient thereof. (As I write this, I hear the indignant howling of critics from various corners of science, humanities, and social activism, accusing me of scandalously gross oversimplification, so I am hedging my bets).
By the very nature of the neural processes involved, “wisdom” (at least in my admittedly narrow definition of it) pays dividends in old age by allowing relatively effortless decision-making requiring only modest neural resources. That is, modest as long as the templates have been preserved as neural entities. Up to a point, wisdom and its kin qualities, competence and expertise, may be impermeable to neuroerosion.
But before we delve into the brain mechanisms of the cognitive gains in aging, we need to dispense with several preliminaries. We need to examine the nature of wisdom as a psychological and social phenomenon. We need to establish to our satisfaction, whether it is truly the case that a powerful mind may persevere and, to a point, prevail and triumph, even in the face of neuroerosion.
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