Wisdom - Scientific Research Overview

     "Wisdom is an ancient concept that has gained new interest among clinical researchers as a complex trait relevant to general physical and mental health, well-being, happiness, life satisfaction, personal mastery, and resilience. (Referenced) studies suggest that wisdom is a useful construct with important implications for individuals as well as society. 

     The concept of practical (as opposed to theoretical) wisdom has been discussed since the times of Aristotle, but is used in recent years to refer to knitting together the cognitive, social, and emotional processes involved in everyday decision making i.e., actual decisions and choices one might make rather than the abstraction of a ‘wise’ person. Erikson (1959) proposed the last stage of psychosocial development culminating in wisdom. Beginning in the 1970s, Baltes and others initiated empirical research on wisdom, focusing on cognitive abilities. Subsequently, several investigators drew attention to the importance of emotional regulation, and Vaillant, Cloninger, and Blazer stressed the potential role of wisdom in well-being.

 

Defining wisdom:

     Based on a review of empirically based definitions of wisdom published in peer-reviewed journals, mostly from western countries, we identified six most commonly included components of wisdom: 

(1) general knowledge of life and social decision making - ability to give good advice, life knowledge, and life skills; 

(2) emotional regulation - affect regulation and self-control; 

(3) pro-social behaviors - e.g., empathy, compassion, altruism, and a sense of fairness; 

(4) insight - the ability and desire to understand oneself and one's actions at a deep level; 

(5) value relativism (tolerance for divergent values) - being nonjudgmental and accepting of other value systems; and 

(6) decisiveness - the ability to make quick and effective decisions.

 

     Current thinking in wisdom research considers the entity of wisdom not as a collection of distinct traits, but rather as a higher-order construct that includes various domains such as prosocial behaviors, emotional regulation, and others listed above. Thus, overall wisdom is greater than the sum of its parts in terms of its utility to the self and the society. 

     In a separate survey study using the Delphi method, international researchers in the field agreed that the components mentioned above were key to defining wisdom. Finally, a mixed-methods study of wisdom in the Bhagavad Gita, a scripture written in India several thousand years ago, suggested that most of those components had also characterized the ancient Indian construct of wisdom. The same seems to hold true for the Books of Wisdom in the Bible and documents in most other religions. Whereas the relative emphasis on specific components of wisdom has varied across cultures and times, there have been more similarities than differences among different postulated concepts of wisdom over the centuries and around the world, suggesting that there is an underlying biological substrate of wisdom that influences and is influenced by life experiences.

Putative neurobiological basis:

     By examining the neurobiology of consistently identified components of wisdom, one can begin to hypothesize how such a complex human characteristic may be orchestrated within the human brain. Accordingly, we reviewed studies focusing on neuroimaging / brain localization and neurotransmitters associated with individual components of wisdom. Prefrontal cortex and amygdala seemed to be the main brain regions related to all of these components. The prefrontal cortex figures prominently in emotional regulation, social decision making, and value relativism, primarily via top-down regulation of limbic (amygdala) and striatal regions. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex facilitates calculated, reason-based decision making, whereas the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is implicated in emotional valence and prosocial attitudes / behaviors. Reward neurocircuitry (ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens) also appears important for promoting prosocial attitudes / behaviors. 

     We also approached the putative neurobiology of wisdom by examining behavioral effects of localized brain damage. Severe damage to the above-mentioned areas, especially the prefrontal cortex, either through trauma or disease, results in a loss of personality characteristics associated with wisdom. A number of cases have been described, starting with the well-known case of Phineas Gage, in whom damage to frontostriatal and frontolimbic circuits resulted in loss of behaviors listed as components of wisdom. A noteworthy example is the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia, with brain atrophy restricted to anterior portions of the prefrontal lobes, which is associated with dramatic changes in personality as the patients become impulsive, socially inappropriate, and emotionally inept, with behaviors antithetical to wisdom."

       Thomas, M.L., et al., "A new scale for assessing wisdom based on common domains and a neurobiological model: The San Diego Wisdom Scale (SD-WISE)." Journal of Psychiatric Research (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2017.09.005

 

Katie Hoffman      Boy (Crystal Stare)      www.katiehoffman.com

Attention, Values & Interbeing

     Attention is not just another “function” alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, the very nature of the world in which those “functions” would be carried out and in which those “things” would exist. Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world. If you are my friend, the way in which I attend to you will be different from the way in which I would attend to you if you were my employer, my patient, the suspect in a crime I am investigating, my lover, my aunt, a body waiting to be dissected. In all these circumstances, except the last, you will also have a quite different experience not just of me, but of yourself: you would feel changed if I changed the type of my attention. And yet nothing objectively has changed.

     So it is, not just with the human world, but with everything with which we come into contact. A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no “real” mountain that can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking that reveals the true mountain.

     Science, however, purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value-free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object, onto which our feelings and desires are later painted. Yet this highly objective stance, this “view from nowhere,” to use the American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s phrase, is itself value-laden. It is just one particular way of looking at things, a way that privileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object viewed. For some purposes this can be undeniably useful. But its use in such causes does not make it truer or more real, closer to the nature of things.

     Attention also changes who we are, we who are doing the attending. Our knowledge of neurobiology and neuropsychology shows that by attending to someone else performing an action, and even by thinking about them doing so—even, in fact, by thinking about certain sorts of people at all—we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think, and feel. Through the direction and nature of our attention, we prove ourselves to be partners in creation, both of the world and of ourselves. In keeping with this, attention is inescapably bound up with value—unlike what we conceive of as “cognitive functions,” which are neutral in this respect. Values enter through the way in which those functions are exercised: they can be used in different ways for different purposes to different ends. Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a “howness,” a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a “whatness,” a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values. 

     From: Iain McGilchrist. "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World." Yale University Press, 2009. Reprinted in Tricycle Spring 2017.