Free Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain by Barbara Strauch

fascinated with the possibility of scientifically deconstructing the building blocks of wisdom and spent years on what became known as the Berlin Wisdom Project. That project searched for wisdom anywhere it could, including the study of proverbs such as the Serenity Prayer (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference”).
    In the end, Baltes and his colleagues settled on a series of hypothetical questions about life choices, the right answers to which, they believed, equaled wisdom. The answers rested largely on the ability to consider variables—to look at the big, messy picture. For example, one question might be: What’s the best way to get to Chicago?
    Responding off the tops of their heads, some might answer quickly, saying something like, “Get on a plane.”
    But a few would take the time to consider the variables—the messy picture—and ask more questions to narrow the possibilities: “Well, tell me, how many people are going? How much time do you have to get there? How much do you want to spend? How long will you stay?”
    And while such hypothetical questions might seem simplistic, they nevertheless illustrate the complex ways our brains operate day in and day out. Considering the various ramifications of a situation, Baltes believed, means you have a brain that takes the measured, long—and wise—view.
    After many years of such testing, Baltes and colleagues, while allowing that it’s possible to be wise and young, decided that those who scored the highest on this sort of question and were, therefore, in their terms, the wisest were around sixty-five years old—and that peak was reached after a fairly long trek along the middle-aged “plateau” of sustained wisdom-ness.
    Following in Baltes’s footsteps more recently, Monika Ardelt, a sociology professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, has put together an intriguing scale that determines how wise a person is by his ability to cope in the actual world. She measures a person’s wisdom according to how well he performs in three dimensions: cognitive, which she describes as the “desire to know the truth and be able to look at gray and not see everything in black and white,” as well as the ability to “make important decisions despite life’s unpredictability”; refl ective, the ability and willingness to look at different perspectives; and affective , the level of sympathy and compassion for others.
    Ardelt has now matched outcomes on her measures against a set of data from Harvard University, which has been tracking a group of 150 men for more than forty years. Although she is still refining her findings, Ardelt told me that she’s found distinct correlations between high scores on two different three-dimensional wisdom measures at midlife and in old age, and certain personality traits found in the Harvard study.
    In an in-depth study of eight long-term participants, the most decisive factor that predicted wisdom was their level of self-centeredness. By her measure and Harvard’s, it was those who focused on something outside themselves who turned out to be the most wise, a message, of course, that we’ve been told—and often ignored—for centuries.
    “It was really striking,” Ardelt told me. “Those who were high-high (wise at both fifty and eighty) also scored very low on self-centeredness. They cared about others. They were giving in some way or another. And those who were primarily concerned about themselves, or their standing in the community, scored very low on the wisdom scale.”
    Ardelt believes such wisdom comes directly from taking a broader perspective over time. Clearly, as she says, there are still “a lot of old fools” out there. Wisdom does not always develop automatically. And, as she puts it, we live in a society that, rather than rewarding those who are selfless—who teach or care for others—instead glorifies