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

those who think mostly of their own gain—those who seek money for money’s sake, for instance.
    “We could have a society that fosters wisdom more,” she said, a bit ruefully.
    For the most part, die-hard neuroscientists have regarded this kind of discussion as squishy nonsense. But that’s changing rapidly. Some are finding what they now call wisdom deep in the brain’s very structure and workings—and in the midst of middle age.
    In particular, many equate wisdom with an increased capacity, as we age, to recognize patterns and anticipate situations, to predict a likely future, and to act appropriately. As Neil Charness, who studies expertise, puts it, human brains are “pattern recognizers par excellence.
    “Humans are not called homo sapiens sapiens—knowing man—for nothing,” Charness says. “We can size up what is going on and figure out what course of action is most promising and we use hundreds of millions of patterns to guide the process.”
    John Gabrieli, the neuroscientist at MIT, says it helps to understand this signature talent by thinking of something as simple as an apple. Even if the apple is only an outline on paper, or painted purple, or has big bites taken out of it, we still recognize it as an apple because that’s how our brains are set up. It might not look like a standard apple, but our brains, through years of building up connections, become quite good at recognizing even vaguely similar patterns and drawing appropriate conclusions. Studies have found that we handle situations better when we know something about the situation beforehand, when we recognize at least part of a pattern we’ve seen before, which is more likely to occur for a middle-aged brain than for a younger one. “It’s stunning how well a brain can recognize patterns,” Gabrieli says. “And particularly at middle age, we have small declines, but we have huge gains” in this ability to see connections.
    In our own worlds, while we may take this for granted, we often have a sense that we can see patterns and grasp underlying concepts with greater ease. Elkhonon Goldberg, a professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, calls these established brain patterns “cognitive templates” and believes they’re behind an older brain’s ability to better predict and navigate life. Not long ago, Goldberg—at the “ripe middle age” of fifty-seven—decided to take stock of his own brain and the results were fairly good. Indeed, as he writes in The Wisdom Paradox, he began to realize that while he might have a harder time at strenuous mental workouts, he was also increasingly capable of a kind of “mental magic.”
    “Something rather intriguing is happening in my mind that did not happen in the past,” he writes. “Frequently, when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary. The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. . . . I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight. . . . Is it perchance that coveted attribute . . . wisdom?”
    If an older brain is confronted with new information, it might take longer for it to assimilate it and use it well. But faced with information that in some way—even a very small way—relates to what’s already known, the middle-aged brain works quicker and smarter, discerning patterns and jumping to the logical endpoint.
    A friend of mine who has been a doctor for more than thirty years said she can now often instantly evaluate a situation, making it easier to come up with effective solutions. “When I walk into a hospital room now, there’s a lot in my head already,” she said. “I can still be surprised. But in a lot of cases I can foresee what will happen and that helps a lot to figure out what to do, what will work best.”

The Gist of It All
    In many ways, of course,