Are old people really wise?

Scholars tackle murky concept of wisdom

There is more information than ever at our fingertips, yet we’re none the wiser it seems.

And many old people are wise, as most of them will tell you, but sometimes they can’t remember your name, so how smart is that?

It’sparadoxes like these that lie at the heart of a new $2 million researchproject called Defining Wisdom. Based at the University of Chicago, thefour-year initiative, supported by the Templeton Foundation, hasenlisted 23 scholars ranging from historians to economists topsychologists to computer scientists to examine the idea of wisdom, with the aim of cultivating it and better understanding its nature.

Definitionsof wisdom are all over the map, even among the funded scholarsinterviewed for this story. The communications scientist says wisdominvolves intelligence that is sensitive to the needs of others andmakes a good use of judgment. The computer scientist says wisdominvolves being able to quickly access information from compresseddatasets. And the historian refuses to impose a definition and prefersto draw it out of the historical contexts she studies.

Noneof these three researchers seems to be willing to state whether wisdomtoday is greater or less than it used to be, but each is taking a stabat seeing how wisdom can be understood and measured.  

Shaking things up
Earthquakes,of all things, have offered significant opportunities for society tofigure out what constitutes wisdom, says Barnard College’s DeborahCoen, who studies the history of science and is interested in wisdom asthe capacity to navigate the rough waters between technical expertiseand what the rest of us know and experience. As such, wisdom is morethan commanding facts, aka knowledge.

Coen’s new research will focus on how lay people’s observations helped scholars and others make sense of earthquakesduring a period from 1857 to 1914. This era was the "hey-day of humanobservation of earthquakes," Coen said, in a time before mechanicaldetectors of earthquakes were reliable.

Scholars of the timethought it was imperative to observe earthquakes scientifically, andrelied on eyewitnesses to answer questions about an earthquake’sduration. At the same time, though, some thinkers ironically believedthat people who experienced earthquakes repeatedly had theirrationality destroyed, leaving them desensitized to the experience and,in a way, incapable of contributing to higher science or culture.

Soa "science of the lay people" flew in the face of one's fear of thenatural world. A contradiction emerged between common sense andscientific experts who redefined a modern form of wisdom — in this caseabout earthquakes.

Nowadays, lay people are mostly excludedfrom the scientific process, but in the late 19th century, there was a"moment of opportunity for collaboration, negotiation and communicationbetween experts and lay people. Experts needed lay people’s eyes earsand hands," Coen said.

Thereis no more or less wisdom today about earthquakes than before, but wehave missed an opportunity, she said, (although a scientist today wouldsurely claim there is a lot more knowledge about temblors).

"Wehave cut off options for ourselves," Coen said. "The technocratic agehas limited the modes of communication between experts and lay people."

Compression and computers
Historianscannot quantify wisdom, Coen says, but that is exactly what AnkurGupta, a computer scientist at Butler University in Indiana, is tryingto do. His latest project investigates data compression, which is theprocess that takes, for instance, a high-fidelity digital music fileand reduces it to a much smaller mp3-format file that you can play onyour iPod or other music player. The data has been reduced but the file still sounds like the original to most listeners.

"The goal is to try to use data compression as a mathematical measure of wisdom," Gupta said.

Zoumight think that’s fine for music. But what about digitizing the entireuniverse, or one’s perception of it at least, and then trying to seewhat information is contained in that digital representation?

Datacompression, and the organizing and sorting of the data involved inthat process, would be an approach to getting at what the informationcontained in such a digitized world.

"The process of datacompression is the process of categorizing the information that isthere," Gupta said, adding that the wisdom achieved is implicit. "I maynot tell you what that wisdom is in an explicit form, but I’ll give youa compressed representation of that wisdom. Then I’ll allow you tosearch that compressed representation very quickly."

How fast can you find your scissors?
The project also will deal with the speed of wisdom. Sherlock Holmes is a good metaphor for the project goals in that case.

"If you go back and read Sherlock Holmes tales, he does not make every decision in a purely logical way,"Gupta said. "He employs some undefined cognitive process along withlogic ... Moreover, the value of what he does it would be irrelevant ifhe gave you the answer 40 years later."

Holmes' genius was partly his ability to access compressed data quickly, one might argue.

Butto bring the notion of compression to everyday life, a scientificassessment of any one person's wisdom would be "tough," Gupta said,because you’d have to digitize someone’s entire life experience viainterviews and other approaches. Even those approaches would be biasedby the interview questions and other contextual issues, like what theperson ate that day, the lighting and so on.  

"I think thewisdom that I’m talking about isn’t as much about human experience butmore about how to deal with the massive amount of data that we haveavailable," he said. Understanding that data may lead to bettercompression.

"It's a compelling goal to attempt to quantifywisdom in any domain, even if the initial approaches in this projectmay not be immediately applicable to readers," Gupta said.

You know it when you hear it
Here’sanother paradox about wisdom — the elderly are the wisest people onEarth because they’ve been around so long. Or so many people say. But as we age,our mastery of language starts to drop and many of us sound, to befrank, more stupid. Our sentences get shorter. Our grammar tends todecline. And we have trouble recalling ... what is the word? ...vocabulary. And proper nouns.

These troubles are no joke forpeople who lose their ability to convey their thoughts, a conditioncalled aphasia. This often happens to people who suffer strokes. Butfor most people with healthy minds, cognitive decline is as inevitableas taxes and that other thing.

So Jean Gordon of the Universityof Iowa, a communications scientist who has done a lot of work in thepast on aphasia, plans to use the Templeton money to study how ourperception of wisdom varies with how others use language and how thatrelates to age. She will use a variety of language measures to testthis on 48 subjects, varying such things as the age of speakers andwhat they speak about.

Wisdomis in the ear, or really, the mind, of the beholder, she says. Moreknowledge about wisdom is perceived and passed on can help medicalproviders assist people with language use disorders.

"People’sperceptions are very tied up in speakers' competence with language.It's the way that we maintain social connections and maintain ouridentity," Gordon said.