The road to wisdom really is paved with years
by Miki SaxonImage credit: maxbrown
I used to be a whiz at names and phone numbers, but not any more. I excuse these lapses with jokes about accessing data with only 1 K of RAM or that my brain is so stuffed that it’s hard to keep track of minor details.
Well, lo and behold, it’s true.
A recent article in the NY Times explains that in older (that’s me:) brains.
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers. …much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number.”
What the researchers did was to have both young and older people read text that had extra words thrown in as a distraction; then they asked questions related to the added words. While the younger folks read faster than the older readers, they didn’t process the distracting words.
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”
But the best part, both for quieting fears about memory loss and bolstering ego, was the comment about what this means.
Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.
“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”
What about you? Where are you on the road to wisdom?
