The Wisdom Paradox Read online

  By contrast, some individuals have relatively nondescript beginnings—in extreme cases are even dismissed as mediocre or worse—only to show indisputable wisdom later. This is often the case with political leaders. The Roman emperor Claudius, the first post-war chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer, and the slain Egyptian president Anwar Sādāt can arguably serve as the cases in point.

  More mundanely, we all know people with a “flash-in-the-pan” kind of unrealized brilliance, and we all know people who are somewhat ordinary yet supremely competent at what they do in their own quiet ways.

  Wisdom and Problem-Solving

  So genius and wisdom, and by extension talent and competence, do not always travel together, and in fact they often don’t. Most people seem to recognize the difference between these highly desirable traits. Sternberg has studied how people from various walks of life perceive the relationship between creativity and wisdom. It turns out that most of his subjects viewed these traits as being positively but very weakly linked, and in some instances even as being negatively, inversely linked. Interestingly, the same study shows that both “wisdom” and “creativity” were viewed by the subjects as being better correlated with “intelligence” than with each other. This suggests to me that the very construct of “intelligence” is, in the minds of most people, an attempt to capture a sum total of many aspects of the mind, rather than a particular, distinctive aspect of the mind.

  The belief that novelty-seeking is the attribute of youth and that wisdom is the attribute of old age seems to be shared by a lot of people. Psychologists J. Heckhausen, R. Dixon, and P. Baltes conducted a fascinating experiment in which they asked their subjects which human attributes appear at what age. Most subjects believed that curiosity and the ability to think clearly become dominant attributes for people in their twenties and that wisdom becomes a dominant attribute for people in their fifties. When asked to rank various attributes in terms of their desirability, wisdom was ranked among the most desirable traits. In a similar study, Marion Perlmutter and her colleagues found that most people associate wisdom with advanced age more than with anything else. This amounts to an interesting syllogism: If people believe that wisdom is the privilege of old age and also regard wisdom as one of the most desirable traits, then they also must believe that aging has its benefits, its positive side, and its unique and valuable assets.

  In the minds of most people competence, like wisdom, is also the fruit of maturity. Understanding wisdom as an extreme degree of competence is consonant with the approach taken by psychologists Paul Baltes and Jacqui Smith, who define wisdom as “expert knowledge,” a highly developed ability to deal with the “fundamental pragmatics of life” involving “important but uncertain matters of life.” They place “rich factual knowledge” and “rich procedural knowledge” among the important prerequisites of wisdom and point out that the accumulation of such knowledge by definition requires a long life.

  Following Sternberg’s prudent (and wise!) admonition, I will refrain from discussing the concept of wisdom in all its richness. I will forgo the existential, self-actualizing, and moral aspects of wisdom, so cogently considered by Erikson, Jung, Kohut, and others. I will limit the scope of this book to one aspect of wisdom: the enhanced capacity for problem-solving. This admittedly narrow, morally agnostic approach allows a few villains into the book, along with many heroes. While realizing the limitations of this approach, I feel that it is a big enough slice of an infinitely rich concept to tackle in one book. Problem-solving is the one aspect of wisdom that we are most prepared to explore through neuroscience.

  If wisdom and competence (or expertise) increase with age in all their aspects, then how does one reconcile this with the common assumption that one’s mental powers decline with age? Or, to turn it around, if our memory and mental focus decline with age, then how is it possible that our wisdom and competence grow? What sets wisdom and competence apart from other manifestations of the mind and allows them to survive the ravages of aging?

  5

  PATTERN POWER

  Kinds of Wisdom

  What are the neural mechanisms that allow wisdom, competence, and expertise to withstand the detrimental effects of aging and, up to a point, of neurological illness on the brain? To begin our exploration of the subject, we need to further examine the concepts of pattern and pattern recognition, and of their role in our mental world. By “pattern recognition” we mean the organism’s ability to recognize a new object or a new problem as a member of an already familiar class of objects or problems. The capacity for pattern recognition is fundamental to our mental world, as discussed briefly in the “day in the life of the brain” scenario. Without this ability, every object and every problem would be a totally de novo encounter and we would be unable to bring any of our prior experience to bear on how we deal with these objects or problems. The work by the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and others has shown that pattern recognition is among the most powerful, perhaps the foremost mechanism of successful problem-solving.

  The ability to recognize certain patterns is present very early in life, and other patterns are learned at much later stages. Most, and probably all, mammalian species have a relatively ready-to-use capacity for certain kinds of pattern recognition built into their brains. Does this mean that mammalian brains (including the human brain) contain “hard-wired” or “pre-wired” pattern-recognition devices? The answer to this question is probably less a matter of “yes or no” and more a matter of “to what extent.”

  Research has shown that even the most elementary pattern-recognition brain machinery requires some “finishing touches” to be provided by the environment in order to become fully functional. When such finishing touches (usually in the form of early environmental exposure to the appropriate sensory stimuli) are lacking, even the most basic pattern-recognition brain machinery fails to become fully operational. So most pattern-recognition processes are a blend of hereditary and environmental factors. But the relative contribution of nature and nurture varies from one kind of pattern recognition to another and involves vastly different time scales—from millions of years to merely years.

  Certain kinds of pattern-recognition devices stored in our brains capture the “wisdom” reflecting the collective experience of all the mammalians over millions of years. Following the famous neuroscientist Joaquin Fuster, let’s call this kind of wisdom “phyletic,” or “wisdom of the phylum.”2

  This kind of wisdom was essential for the survival of so many species over millions of years that it is genetically encoded to a substantial degree. Or to be more precise and to avoid the teleological note that crept into the previous sentence, those species had a better chance of survival whose brains contained the “phyletic wisdom” in a relatively “ready-to-use” form. I am talking here about the emotional reactions that we all still have, such as the fear of snakes, the fear of precipices, the feeling of joy at seeing the sun at dawn, and the avoidance of fire. Research has shown, however, that even such basic reactions do not come completely formed and ready to use. They require some environmental exposure to the appropriate triggering stimuli at very early developmental stages.

  Another example of such relatively ready-to-use (but still requiring environmental honing at early stages of development) pattern-recognition devices, or to use Fuster’s expression “phyletic memory,” are the neurons in the visual cortex tuned to respond to particular simple features in the environment. They fire when a line at a particular slope, an angle, or a contrast appears in the visual field. It is tempting to believe that the phyletic memory of the latter kind enables members of a particular species, or possibly of a whole cluster of species, to engage in sensory discriminations particularly critical for their survival. The world consists of a myriad of physical attributes engaging various senses, some of which we share with other species and some of which we don’t (like ultraviolet vision or very high-frequency hearing). Not all of these attributes are equally important for various s
pecies—quite the contrary. Different species, or groups of species, depend for their survival on different kinds of information about the world they inhabit. So it stands to reason that they benefit from different repertoires of phyletic memories, and even different repertoires of sensory systems.

  The Wisdom of Culture

  Now consider a very different level of pattern-recognition devices: those crystallized in human culture. The word “wisdom” is not commonly used to characterize a group of people, let alone a whole species. But it can be, and by that reckoning we are a wise species. Each of us has at his or her disposal a rich assortment of patterns that are proffered to us on a silver platter called culture.

  As we already know, the capacity for pattern formation and pattern recognition is not unique to humans. It is shared by every other species capable of learning. What sets us apart as humans is the powerful capacity for transmitting the repertoire of these patterns from individual to individual and from generation to generation through culture. In a rudimentary form this ability is present in the higher primates. Chimpanzees isolated from other members of their species are known to sometimes engage in unique behaviors suggesting nongenetic transmission of knowledge. Such behaviors are often interpreted as the evidence of rudimentary “culture.” As a firm believer in evolutionary continuities, I tend to accept this interpretation. But even if we embrace the premise that they are worthy of the name, the primate “cultures” are inherently limited, since direct imitation is the only mechanism of knowledge transmission at their disposal. Without the availability of symbolic systems, its reach is rather humble.

  In other species, pattern formation is an “everyone-for-himself” affair, and every member of the species is a cognitive Robinson Crusoe of sorts, in need of constructing his own mental world to model his island. Under this scenario, the pattern-formation potential is constrained by the computational power of a single individual brain and by the time span of a single individual life. With no or very little cumulative effect across individuals, this potential is rather modest. But we see the beginnings of the empowering effects of cultural, nongenetic knowledge transmission in great apes, chimpanzees, and gorillas, who are able to learn a rudimentary “sign language” taught them by their human handlers, yet are unable to construct such a language on their own. Cultural influence is able to exceed the generative power of an individual brain!

  Unlike other species, we humans are spared the hardship of discovering our world from scratch. Instead, we benefit from the incremental effect of knowledge accumulated gradually by society through millennia. This knowledge is stored and communicated through various cultural devices in symbolic form and is transmitted from generation to generation. Access to this knowledge automatically empowers the cognition of every individual member of human society by making it privy to society’s cumulative, collective wisdom. If wisdom is defined as the availability of a rich repertoire of patterns enabling us to recognize new situations and new problems as familiar, then we truly are a wise species.

  Much of what comprises human culture is a way of storing and communicating this collective wisdom from generation to generation. This allows each of us to come into the possession of wisdom, the discovery of which far exceeds the computational capacity of any single brain. This is a unique asset of human society and a powerful tool that has been crucial in propelling our success as a species. The cultural devices for knowledge transmission rely on a vast variety of symbolic systems, of which language is only one. But among them, language plays a special, hugely important role. It is a meta-device from which most other cultural devices flow. In addition to natural languages, we have at our disposal more specialized “languages,” like mathematics or musical notation.

  All these symbolic systems, languages, and quasi-languages are powerful tools of conveying specific information across time and space. We know about the city-states of Ancient Greece and their wars with the Persian Empire from Herodotus’s treatises. We know about the Roman imperial conquests from Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars and Josephus Flavius’s Judaic Wars. And we know about the Chinese-Mongolian empire of Kublai Khan because Marco Polo wrote about it.3

  Language allows us to generate both true and false statements, as well as statements of unknown truth value. As it turns out, this generative latitude of language makes it an extremely adaptive and powerful device for modeling not only what is, but also what will be, what could be, and what we want and do not want to be.

  Since language does not have built-in “generative truth filters” in a narrow sense, it becomes a particularly powerful tool of intentionality, extrapolation, and goal formation. The capacity for creating symbolic models not of the world as it is, but of the world as you want it to be, interplays with the so-called executive functions of the brain’s frontal lobes to create truly goal-driven behavior. The emergence of the human ability to create mental models of the future, of the world as we want it to be and not merely as it is, probably represents the combined result of the development of the executive functions vested in the frontal lobes and of language.

  Yet, language has certain built-in “truth filters” in a broad sense, and certain rules of languages model the natural laws governing our material world. We often reject certain statements as violating the rules of language not because they are unintelligible, but because their content violates some of the fundamental natural laws. For instance, the statement “I will go to the movies yesterday” is not unintelligible; it would be a perfectly legitimate statement in a world with a bidirectional flow of time, as the statement “I tripped and fell up” would be perfectly meaningful in a world with an opposite, or random, directionality of gravity.

  Language is much more than the means of recording specific knowledge. Language also shapes our cognition by imposing certain patterns on the world. Without these patterns, the world around us would be an overwhelming kaleidoscope of disparate impressions. Each of us acquires a rich collection of patterns that represent the collective wisdom of society, and this spares us the hardship of discovering the crucial patterns de novo.

  By learning the use and the meaning of words as children, we acquire more than a communication tool. We also acquire a taxonomy, a way of categorizing the virtual infinity of things, events, and impressions that is the world, and thus of making our world stable and manageable. Knowledge of word meaning is part of our system of patterns enabling us to recognize new things as members of familiar classes. By learning the lexical and conceptual structure of language, we acquire an understanding of complex hierarchical relations among things. And by learning the grammatical structure of language, we acquire the taxonomy of possible relations among things. No single lifetime would be long enough to work out all these categories and relations “from scratch.” By coming into possession of this linguistic treasure trove, we come into possession of the knowledge and wisdom of generations. With the ever-improving ability to glean the intricate workings of the brain’s microcircuitry, a time may come when we will be able to identify attractor-like phenomena in real biological brains, different attractors corresponding to different units of language: words, grammatical clauses, and such. Failure to utilize the “collective wisdom” implicit in language catastrophically cripples one’s mental life. It has been long suspected, for instance, that the failure of language to exert its organizing influence on the senses plays a role in schizophrenia and contributes to the inner chaos of a schizophrenic mind.

  Language embodies our collective experience of centuries and millennia and instructs us which distinctions are salient in the world and which are not. But by its very essence, wisdom is not merely declarative; it is prescriptive. The classic question addressed to a sage is less often “What is?” and more often “What shall we do?” Linguists have long been commenting on the predicative nature of language. Representation of actions associated with various things and attributes is central to the structure of language. Language as a pattern-recognition device enables us to do more
than classify things. It enables us to decide how to act with respect to them.

  Is language a “veridical” device? That is, does it contain the one and only “true” classification of the things around us? This would be a very difficult proposition to defend. Any large set of objects or attributes permits a proportionately large number of alternative classifications. The classification implicit in natural language reflects the attributes most salient for our cultures and species. Languages developed in the societies of talking dogs or talking dolphins (let alone talking ants or talking bacteria) would parse the same physical world in very different ways. Different wisdoms for different species indeed! So, above all, language is a pragmatic device.

  The wisdom of the species inherent in language is neither genetic nor hardwired. Like its neural medium, the neocortex, language is a flexible device, readily capable of accommodating change. Unlike the phyletic memory, language condenses the wisdom of the species reflecting mere millennia of existence as opposed to millions of years, still very much a work in progress.

  Needless to say, language involves a multitude of brain processes and cognitive operations. Among them, the closest to “hard wiring” is found in speech-sound production. It appears that infants are born with the ability to produce a vast array of speech sounds, and that this array is the same across all languages and cultures. With an immersion into a particular linguistic environment, a Darwinian process of sorts plays itself out: Certain articulations are reinforced, and others become lost. This is why an immersion into a linguistic environment before age twelve or thereabouts results in an accent-free command of language, and an immersion at a later age leaves one with an accent. So even at this most basic level of language development, a complex interaction of hereditary and environmental factors takes place.