Illustration by Steve Burnett

First off, the usual apologies for the long radio silence. As some of you know, I was teaching this semester at both Columbia University and New York University, and things got predictably hectic in the final weeks of the term. But I want to congratulate a fantastic group of students at both places, and hope you have an opportunity to see their work, either in the scientific literature or in the popular media, in the not too distant future. Now, I’m going to try to weave some fascinating recent research on hand-washing, age-related cognitive declines, and Neanderthal hanky-panky into a web of wisdom.

Did you wash your hands before reading this blog?

The most recent (May 14, 2010) issue of Science is especially juicy in research articles touching upon wisdom. The shortest, and in many ways most provocative, is a study by Spike Lee (no, not that one) and Norbert Schwarz at the University of Michigan, who designed a clever experiment to see if washing one’s hands after a decision reduced the need for post-decision rationalization. One aim of the study was to see if ritual (or metaphoric) hand-washing did more than just “attenuate” moral angst or guilt, and in fact could reduce what is known as “cognitive dissonance”—the need to rationalize a choice when one is forced to choose between two similarly attractive (or, presumably, two similarly distasteful) options, which is certainly the case in many decisions demanding wisdom.

As usual, the decisions in these experiment involved relatively trivial choices (selecting a music CD or a flavor of jam), made by relatively young brains (college undergraduates). But because the experiment was cleverly disguised as a consumer survey, some participants “tested” a liquid soap or antiseptic wipe after making their decisions, while others did not. In both instances, hand washing or wiping “significantly reduced” the need to justify one’s prior decision. In other words, participants literally seemed to wash their hands of a difficult choice after making it. Lee and Schwarz conclude that “the psychological impact of physical cleansing extends beyond the moral domain.” So the next time you face a tough decision, you might want to wash your hands. Whether it’s psychology or mere metaphor, it seems to make a difference.

A second, highly technical article by a group of European researchers reports a significant finding about the cognitive impairments associated with aging. As I describe in Wisdom, Paul Baltes and other psychologists identified a narrow window for the exercise of wisdom—after the accumulation of lifetime experience and knowledge, but before the inevitable cognitive declines of advancing age begin to set in. Those declines have traditionally been assumed to be the simple wear and tear of age on the cognitive machinery; memory falters because the parts of the brain essential to memory, including the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, function less crisply with the passage of time.

But an alternative explanation of cognitive decline—known as epigenetics, which this experiment addresses—is gaining empirical momentum. Epigenetics refers to the way environmental (or “life”) experiences can alter the way genes are turned on or off in the body, including in the brain (many cancers, for example, develop or accelerate due to epigenetic changes in cells, and I did an article for Newsweek in 2009 chronicling the development of new drugs that use epigenetic approaches to correct these changes). In the Science report, researchers based mainly in Gottingen, Germany showed that age-associated memory impairment in mice could in part be associated with epigenetic changes in hippocampal cells; in short, the DNA in these memory cells became entangled in its packaging, to the point where genes were inappropriately turned off and the mice were unable to consolidate memories after performing learning tasks. As I mention in the Newsweek article, understanding the basis of this process has already resulted in the FDA approval of several new “epigenetic” drugs to treat cancer, with many more on the way, and the German work hints at similar possibilities. Mice treated with an epigenetic “drug” regained the ability to turn on genes induced by learning experiences and recovered their cognitive abilities. This is early, but exciting, work suggesting that some cognitive declines associated with aging are potentially reversible.

Finally, this same issue of Science included a report revealing the complete Neanderthal genome, including clear genetic evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans must have mated perhaps 60,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East.

When I reported on this project several years ago for National Geographic, I became curious about prehistoric origins of wisdom, and indeed, in an early draft of my last book, I had a chapter (which we ultimately cut for space) on the evolution of wisdom. The important concept here is group number.

One of the most adventurous and provocative theories on human evolution—and, by extension, on the evolution of wisdom—is the “social brain hypothesis,” first proposed by Robin I. M. Dunbar in the 1990s and recently updated by Dunbar and his colleagues at Oxford University. Dunbar is perhaps best known for the “Dunbar number,” his calculation that the human brain has the capacity to manage at most 150 different social relationships. But he has always been keenly interested in the interplay of cognitive function and group size—that is, how the functioning of our brains is affected by the size of our social group.

The core idea of the social brain hypothesis is that humans, like apes, need to attend to social relations to keep their group functioning smoothly, and that humans, unlike apes, evolved language “to service social bonds in a more generic sense by providing a substitute for social grooming, the main mechanism that our fellow primates use for bonding social relationships.” The critical need for language arose, Dunbar believes, as a function of both increasing primate brain size and increasing group size. By developing language to complement their relatively larger brains (where, it should be noted, most of the newer growth occurred in the neocortex), humans were able to maintain larger social groups, with all the cultural advantages (and baggage) that come with a larger group. I’ll elaborate on this in a future post, but Neanderthal groups are believed to have been fairly small, while prehistoric human groups were probably larger, and this difference in group size could have exerted subtle but important selective pressures improving social cognition in modern humans. Okay, it’s a bit of stretch to call it wisdom, but maybe proto-wisdom in the form of cooperation, group effort, and cultural knowledge—all of which increased the odds of survival for modern humans.

Hand-washing, failing memory, Neanderthal-human canoodling: all send tendrils into the world of wisdom.

A note to readers: There are a lot of clever spam-bots out there, and it’s hard for a vain mortal like me, susceptible to digital flattery, to distinguish genuine reader comments from generic spam-generated remarks. So if you’d like to comment or complain or point out—with civility, please—what an idiot I am, please try to include some specific reference to the content of the post so I can separate the much-appreciated wheat (however much it might cut) from the spammish chaff.

Illustration by Steve Burnett

There’s a lovely story in Cicero’s essay “On Old Age” that is as modern as yesterday’s family court docket. The adult sons of a wealthy man, claiming their elderly father to be “weak-minded” and easily distracted from family finances, basically sued to get power of attorney and control his property. The case went to court, and in his defense, the old man read to the judges the play he was in the midst of writing. The play was Oedipus at Colonus, and the old man was Sophocles. After reading the play, Cicero writes, Sophocles “asked them if they would describe its author as weak-minded.” The magistrates immediately voted for acquittal.

The anecdote revives an age-old question: Do people grow wiser with age? There’s an interesting new paper from a group of psychologists based at the University of Michigan that reaches the same conclusion as Cicero (but with more data!): yes. I don’t think the research settles a long-standing scientific debate on this issue, but it adds some welcome experimental findings.

The basic take-home message of the paper, which appeared last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is simple: compared to young and middle-aged people, older people show advanced skill in social reasoning. In particular, they display traits that accord nicely with some of the behaviors I discuss in Wisdom, namely an ability to consider multiple perspectives (which fits under my rubric of compassion), an ability to compromise (emotion regulation), and an ability to deal with uncertainty or the limitations of knowledge. (You can hear my discussion of the research on the nationalized syndicated radio show “The Takeaway” here).

I won’t bore readers with a recital of the complicated methodology here, except to say that the survey was large (it started out with nearly 250 subjects) and involved a task in which the subjects were asked to read and assess fictional news accounts of intergroup and interpersonal conflict in an unfamiliar foreign locale. These responses were analyzed by the authors, and then reassessed by a special panel of wisdom researchers. The Michigan psychologists (Igor Grossmann was first author, Richard E. Nisbett senior author) noted, “In line with some earlier experimental research showing that some older adults may give wiser responses than younger adults when the tasks involve social interaction, we believe that these conditions facilitated wisdom-related sociocognitive reasoning among older adults.” In short, older people used “higher-order” cognitive skills to analyze a conflict situation than their younger counterparts.

A few liner notes on this study:

–These results do not come out of the blue. Fredda Blanchard-Fields of Georgia Tech has published papers for more than a decade showing that older adults are better problem-solvers than young people when it comes to social conflict, and she too has located this skill in the cognitive part of the brain.

–The group headed by the late Paul Baltes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin has long argued that wisdom does not—repeat, not—increase with age; they cite data from four separate studies to support that conclusion. In their PNAS paper, the Michigan researchers imply that the Berlin studies may reflect selection bias—that is, the subjects included in the studies did not truly represent a random sample, and therefore may have tilted the results in a particular direction. But Jacqueline Smith, who participated in many of the Berlin studies (and who reviewed this new wisdom paper prior to publication), is not convinced by the argument of her University of Michigan colleagues.

–Finally, a little scientific sociology: I wonder what the Baltes group thinks of their research being characterized as “folk psychology,” as the Michigan researchers do at the beginning of their article?

Bottom line: this new study does not definitively answer the question: Do we become wiser as we get older? But it adds some much-needed empirical ammo to the argument and, it is hoped, will inspire a new round of even more rigorous research. Indeed, the fact that the study was supported by grants from both the National Institute on Aging and the National Science Foundation suggests that wisdom studies are beginning to attract mainstream funding.

Illustration by Steve Burnett

As some of you know, I was a guest on The Leonard Lopate Show yesterday on WNYC here in New York. He’s one of the most astute and shrewdly probing interviewers in radio, and I’ve had the pleasure of being on his show a number of times. You never quite know where the conversation is going to go, but it always has direction and ends up in interesting places (you can replay our discussion of wisdom here).

During one of the brief (non-commercial!) breaks, Leonard mentioned that he’d gotten interested in the idea of wisdom, or at least philosophy in general, when he first began to read Friederich Nietzsche. As it turns out, I’d been thumbing through my Wisdom Notebook on the subway ride into Manhattan to do the show, and had been struck by a passage I’d jotted down by Nietzsche, precisely because it was a philosophical echo of something a neuroscientist had mentioned to me when I was working on the book. There wasn’t time to mention it on the radio, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to elaborate here.

The actual passage is from Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human (and I’m grateful to David Shenk’s excellent book The Genius in All of Us for bringing these remarks to my attention). Nietzsche writes:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration…[shining] down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, and bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers [are] great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering. [Shenk, p. 48]

There is a lot of wisdom in those remarks, beginning with the fact that Nietzsche draws a firm connection between good artists and good thinkers. Both rely on a combination of imagination and rigor to arrive at their final destination (the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Peter Medawar similarly spoke of the balance between imagination and critical thinking as being essential to good science).

The process Nietzsche described reminded me of a conversation I had with Paul Glimcher, who heads the Center for Neuroscience at New York University. Glimcher was making the point (recounted in Wisdom) that in complex decision-making, with multiple appealing choices, you have to “edit” (his word) the choices according to the values you bring to the decision. Glimcher believes that before the brain makes a decision, it has to assign relative value on a common scale for all the options available. And he went on to say—offered more as a speculation, to be fair, but an interesting and perhaps profound one—that attaching value to such a choice requires this process of  editing (which is what Nietzsche, I think, meant by “sifting”): identifying the most important criteria that inform a decision, and then pruning away the possibilities on the basis of that value.

As I tried to convey in Chapter 5 of Wisdom, the way the brain assesses “value” is hugely complicated and is going to be a very hard nut for neuroscientists to crack, which is why a lot of decision-making studies tell an incomplete part of the story. If value is upstream of the decision, so too is wisdom.

Assigning value is also highly subjective, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any rigor to the process. Nietzsche uses three dynamite words, almost tossed off, to describe how a good thinker arrives at a good judgment: Rejects. Selects. Connects.

Rejects: This sounds like the kind of winnowing process that Glimcher describes in the book when he talks about choosing a college. If you know what’s most important to you, it’s easier to edit out or reject options that are not so good. These are value judgments in the commonplace sense, but also value judgments in the neural sense (we just don’t know how value is actually established neurally).

Selects: By eliminating the lesser options, it becomes easier to see the value of the competing options—and easier to select the best one. We know from the classic choice experiments of Iyengar and Lepper that too many choices paralyze us and increase the odds that we’ll be unhappy with our decision. Editing down choices, being parsimonious about possibilities, hones our neural sense of value, which makes decision-making quicker, clearer, and, if you believe the recent research, more satisfying.

Connects: This is in many ways the most interesting word. Good judgment about really important things—wisdom, if you will—is an associative process; it demands creating links between action and consequence, self-interest and group welfare, short-term gains and long-term goals. Indeed, it requires enormous imagination to bind often divergent and contradictory values into a single, coherent, meaningful action.

Connecting self-indulgence or short-sighted gratification to a more impoverished future, or an act of self-sacrifice to a more prosperous future, is not only an act of imagination; it is one of the most unique qualities of the human brain. And Nietzsche is right: it’s very hard work.

Illustration by Steve Burnett

Apologies for the extended absence. I’ve been on the road talking about “Wisdom” and it’s been gratifying to see such large and enthusiastic crowds. We had more than 200 people in Seattle, 150 at Powell’s Bookstore (yeah, Portland!), nearly 100 at Stanford, and 200 people attended a sold-out conversation I had with neuroscientist Andre Fenton at the Rubin Museum of Art on March 24. Thanks to everyone who came out. And for those interested, Rick Kleffel of NPR affiliate KUSP in California has posted a pod-cast of our lovely one-hour conversation about wisdom.

Now, on to Obama.

In his life of Pericles, Plutarch tells the amusing anecdote about how the great Greek leader was verbally assaulted in the marketplace one day by a relentless citizen-critic. Rather than having the man sent off, Pericles endured his insults for the remainder of the day, allowed the man to follow him home, and eventually arranged for one of his servants to accompany the heckler to his own residence after dark by torchlight.

That story of cordiality in the face of insult came to mind when I read an interesting piece in the Washington Post this morning, describing how Barack Obama reads ten letters from the public every day, and how he insists that the people who screen his mail include letters from critics and detractors in the mix. About half the letters, Obama is quoted as saying, “call me an idiot.”

Obama’s leadership style in general, and especially since passage of health care reform, has led me to ponder this question: Is Barack Obama wise? As it turns out, a number of news stories in the past week or so have repeatedly hinted at qualities that echo the eight “neural pillars of wisdom” described in my book Wisdom.

In his New York Times column after health care legislation passed, for example, David Brooks stressed the role that Obama’s “sheer resilience” played in keeping the legislation alive. As readers of Wisdom know, emotion regulation—the ability to stay even-keeled in the face of negative events or adversity—is a hallmark of emotional resilience, which in turn is crucial to decision-making. It is essential for keeping focused on long-term goals, is clearly related to patience, and just as clearly derives, at least in part, from cognitive strategies originating in the prefrontal cortex.

Psychological qualities long associated with wisdom (including resilience) emerge even more strongly in a fascinating story by Ceci Connolly in the Washington Post last week that gave a behind-the-scenes account of how the White House pulled off the health reform coup after it looked all but dead in January.

In the piece, Obama exemplifies several wisdom traits identified by psychologists like Paul Baltes, Vivian Clayton, and Monica Ardelt: dealing with uncertainty (especially after the Scott Brown election in Massachusetts); re-framing the problem in search of an alternative solution (a White House official lauded Obama for “changing the narrative”); humility in the form of patiently listening to critics (Obama convened the bi-partisan health care summit against the advice of staff); and emotion regulation (despite monolithic Republican opposition, Obama by all accounts remained cordial, if feisty, in his conversations with opponents).

And if wisdom, as Clayton suggested three decades ago, involves an ability to reconcile deep cognitive contradictions, consider this take on Obama from Connolly’s story: “In so many ways since taking office, he had seemed to be searching for the right balance between two versions of himself: Obama the idealistic community organizer, and Obama the pragmatic president who could abandon core principles in the drive to pass a bill.”

Pundits have taken to lampooning Obama’s “cool and deliberate” style of decision-making (see Dana Milbank in the Post). But you could argue that George W. Bush’s “Blink”-style, seat-of-the-pants gut decision-making strayed far from wisdom, not least because his cherry-picking approach to knowledge acquisition almost doomed him from the start to bad decisions.

No one, including Obama, is immune to bad decision-making, but his philosophy of information-gathering, including those ten letters he reads every day, suggests he’s open to contradiction, criticism, and the kind of knowledge that, while sometimes unflattering, may still be crucially informative. If good decisions require the humility (yes, humility) of relentless (even courageous) knowledge gathering, then Obama has proven—at least on the basis of recent events—to be wise.

Coming attraction: When I return to the subject of wisdom and leadership, I want to revisit Barbara Tuchman’s fantastic 1979 lecture, “An Inquiry into the Persistence of Unwisdom in Government.”

Other things I’m thinking/reading/maybe writing about: the absence of wisdom in the medical profession, as it pertains to the Henrietta Lacks story; a somewhat different take on rumination and depression from the recent New York Times Magazine story; and some thoughts on the “afterlife” of decisions after reading Sheena Iyengar “The Art of Choosing.”

I’m also pondering the cultural blindspot in which we tend to view men (Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha, etc.) as wise figures, but less commonly confer that same distinction on women. I have my thoughts about why that is, but would welcome suggestions from readers as well, and am soliciting nominations for a Top Ten (or maybe Fifteen) list of the wisest women of all time.

Illustration by Steve Burnett

Following my talk at Seattle’s Town Hall the other night (great crowd, more than 200 people), a gentleman from the audience posed a provocative question. My emphasis on qualities like compassion and humility, he suggested, implied a kind of passivity to wisdom. The qualities he most associated with wisdom, he continued, were vision, imagination, and action.

It’s a good question, and I realize it offers a good opportunity to elaborate a little bit on the action component of wisdom—not as a fuzzy and vague exhortation to “act wisely,” but rather as a consideration of neural properties that motivate action and create visionary strategies.

Both Buddhism (as explained to me by Matthieu Ricard, a French-born Buddhist monk) and neuroscience (as explained to me by Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin) see compassion not simply as a perceptual act of understanding and feeling another person’s distress; they see action arising out of that understanding as an intrinsic part of compassion itself. Indeed, Davidson has been working out a tentative circuitry that links compassion to action.

As I describe in Wisdom, Davidson and his colleagues have been conducting brain experiments on Buddhist monks for nearly a decade, teasing out a circuitry of activity associated with compassion meditation. The emerging circuitry is still somewhat speculative, but involves three specific subcomponents of compassion that produce activity in three distinct areas of the brain.

The first module involves what Davidson calls “perspective taking”—adopting the perspective or point of view of another person. This perceptual skill seems associated with heightened activity in a brain area known as the temporal-parietal junction. The second component is a somatic “feeling” (or, if you will, “embodiment”) of another person’s suffering; this emotional component of the response occurs primarily in the insula, a region deep in the brain that seems especially attuned to monitoring emotional weather. And the third component has to do with motivation, what Davidson calls “propelling into action.” This “translation-into-action” aspect of compassion triggers heightened activity in parts of the brain that are known to integrate motivation and action, especially the basal ganglia.

So at least among expert practitioners of meditation, compassion is not merely a passive act of feeling for another person, but part of a more elaborate circuit that connects this emotional feeling to a motivation to action.

There are other examples of neurological “wisdom in action.” Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University wrote a wonderful essay several years ago called “The Vulcanization of the Human Brain” (I assign it to my Columbia journalism students to read every year, so that they’ll be aware of how forward-thinking public policy, for example, is dependent upon specific brain regions and specific cognitive strategies).

Cohen shrewdly points out that forward-looking, future-attentive plans and programs—everything from inventing Social Security as a financial protection for retirees to the training of doctors to the creation of Antabuse for alcoholics—are essentially the result of activity in the prefrontal cortex. These are cognitive strategies designed to counteract and overcome the short-term impulses of the emotional brain, which can steer us away from saving money or, in the case of doctors, leave us feeling so emotionally repulsed (reasonably!) by injury and pain that we are unable to use our medical expertise to treat another person. As Cohen notes, “Those measures are clearly designed to protect us against ourselves,” and the conception and design of training programs to overcome our natural aversion to blood and gore (in the case of doctors and soldiers) certainly involve the prefrontal cortex.

If that isn’t visionary, I don’t know what is. Indeed, this kind of long-term planning produces what might be thought of as a kind of institutional wisdom.

As I pointed out in Seattle, vision and imagination are crucial components to wisdom in action. But it’s also important to remember that vision and imagination arise, at least in part, out of the knowledge we bring to a given situation, and that qualities like compassion and humility materially enhance our knowledge-gathering capacity. Compassion helps us understand another person’s perspective; humility prevents us from thinking we know everything and thus makes us open to the acquisition of new knowledge.

I can see how my Town Hall interlocutor thought of those as passive qualities, but I don’t. And I concluded my answer to him by mentioning the paradoxical example of Gandhi: clearly a deeply humble person, but just as clearly someone who possessed the heart of a lion in opposing social injustice. Anything but passive.