4

INTELLIGENCE

The problem-solving brain

The most noticeable effect of aging, apart from wrinkles and hair loss, is the decline in intellectual processing that some people undergo. But not all people. Some of us remain happy, healthy, and mentally fit while others start to lose it.

What’s going on in the brains of those older adults who remain mentally vital into their eighties and nineties? Are they just barely hanging on to what they had, or are they actually improving in some ways? I’ve come to believe that life after seventy-five can launch a period of intellectual growth, and not mere maintenance. At the age of eighty, the great cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he continued to practice so much, and his swift reply was, “Because I want to get better!” Casals believed like Segovia, that self-improvement and expertise are possible at any age, whether it’s intellectual, physical, emotional, or spiritual.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of expertise in older adults happened just last year. Like many musicians, I put a home recording studio in a spare bedroom. If the room acoustics aren’t just right, you can end up making serious errors because what you’re hearing in the room isn’t indicative of what is really happening on the recording. Speaker placement is especially crucial. Once all the equipment was hooked up and plugged in, and I attached sound treatment to the walls and ceiling, I knew that I had to bring in a consulting acoustician to “tune” the room—that is, to make critical adjustments. Michael Brook, a film composer and record producer friend, had recommended George Augspurger. George is a legend in the business and has tuned many of the best studios in the world. But I was worried since he was eighty-seven years old, and it is well-known that high-frequency hearing declines precipitously after age sixty-five. My friend said he had had the same concerns but that George performed brilliantly in tuning his home studio. So I hired him.

George came to the house and brought a James Taylor CD with him, and cued up the song “Line ’Em Up” to play on a loop. He walked around the room, listening intently to the song from different positions. He did this for forty minutes. Then he told me to sit in front of the mixing desk and listen for the conga drum at 0:36 (thirty-six seconds into the song).

“Where does it sound like it’s coming from?” he asked.

“The center,” I told him.

“It’s supposed to be coming from the right. You’ve got some imaging smear in the room. Now,” he asked, “do you hear the organ?” He advanced the CD to 1:22.

“No,” I answered.

“The organ is being masked by the room reflections.” He rubbed his chin, looked around, and then said, “Move the left speaker one inch to the left. Move the right speaker one-half inch to the left and back one-half inch. Then put one of those sound treatment panels on the door behind you.”

I did all of these things. He sat down and listened again, and then had me move my desk three inches to the left. He put the CD on and smiled. “Listen now,” he said, and motioned for me to take the chair.

It was transformational. I could hear the conga coming clearly from the right speaker and not the center, just as it had been recorded. I could hear an organ part I had never heard before. George’s high-frequency hearing may have been diminished, but his experience and exquisite knowledge and memory allowed him to make the adjustments that needed to be made. Only then did he take out a spectrum analyzer, a digital device that measures the sound characteristics of the room. After looking at the readout of the device, he told me to increase the volume of the subwoofer by one-half a decibel. And that was that. Musicians who have come over to the room marvel at how good it sounds, and it is not a specially designed room by any means—it’s just a spare bedroom. But it is properly configured, thanks to George’s expertise. His fee was three hundred dollars; that was for the special kind of intelligence that only sixty-plus years of professional experience can bring.

I’ve seen a similar drive toward remaining meaningfully engaged in my own family and in my university colleagues. My mother published more than forty novels in her career but was unable to keep publishers interested in her work after age seventy-five. So she branched out to another art form and began writing plays, which required her to learn a whole new vocabulary and an entirely new set of skills and techniques. She’s written four in all now, and two have been staged in well-known theaters in Los Angeles, the first when she was seventy-eight. That part required her to learn about writing and properly formatting a script on her computer, finding a venue, hiring a director, auditioning actors, overseeing rehearsals, costume design, set design, lighting, ticket sales—all things that were completely new to her. “It was more work than I had imagined,” she recalled. “I began at seven in the morning and stayed at my desk until evening. During auditions and rehearsals I was often out until midnight. I discovered I had more stamina than I had realized.” It was a grueling schedule for someone half her age. And stressful—she wasn’t sure anyone would show up to see it, or if they’d like it. “There is no feeling as rapturous as sitting there on opening night and seeing your play come alive before your eyes, hearing the laughter of the audience, seeing tears, applause. Applause!” At seventy-eight, my mother learned that she loves applause. And I learned the power of being willing to try something new—at any age.

George Shultz, the former secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, published his eleventh book at age ninety-seven and continues to engage in scholarly research. He has become a leading advocate for reducing climate-damaging emissions, is promoting new ideas for international monetary reform, and publishes his views in peer-reviewed articles and op-eds for The Wall Street Journal. His call to end the war on drugs in the United States, published in The New York Times, was widely shared. The day I met with him in his office at Stanford, he had piles of folders on his desk and he was excited because he had just recruited a new young collaborator to help him work on them. He marveled at this young fellow, Jim Timbie, who had so much energy, and that the two of them were now making such good progress. “Young” Jim Timbie was seventy-four at the time. Or, as the famous jazz drummer Art Blakey, who was constantly renewing his band the Jazz Messengers with younger players, said, “Yes sir, I’m gonna stay with the youngsters. When these get too old, I’m gonna get some younger ones. Keeps the mind active.”

People age at different rates. Within the life span that you will have, the goal is to try to increase your health span and decrease your disease span (recall the illustration in Chapter 1). For most of us, some disease, including loss of mental function, is inevitable, but we can think about and deal with the negatives, putting systems in place to minimize them and the impact they have on our lives. I take a rather broader view of health span than others. To me, health span is about the health not just of your body but of your mind as well. I believe we can all stretch the health span to enjoy many more years of mental fitness and agility so that we can still do the things in life we care most about with intact intelligence.

The Healthy practices of the COACH principle are partly responsible for people with increased health spans: Curiosity, Openness, Associations, Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices. The people I’ve encountered who are still contributing to society, to arts and science, to their communities, and to their families are doing all five of these. Some examples of Healthy practices: My mother has been a vegetarian for thirty-five years. George Shultz has a Pilates instructor and works out regularly. Conscientiousness helps us to follow through on the things we start, to actually get a Pilates trainer and to show up. Openness to experience allowed my mother to immerse herself in the world of theater at age seventy-eight, and George Shultz to go against decades of Republican Party platform about climate change and recreational drug use. How about Associations? My mother and George Shultz both reached out to, and engaged with, others to help them achieve their visions. Their collaborations are sometimes maddening and frustrating, but they are also mentally challenging and, ultimately, fulfilling. Curiosity fueled the intellectual desire to do all these new things.

COACH allows us to maintain the intelligence we had when we were younger and to grow it at any age. Growing intellectually is one of the secrets of successful aging; it is different from intelligence, but we can’t easily say how. Still, we might suspect they have something to do with each other. Let’s investigate.

What Is Intelligence?

There are great disagreements about what intelligence is and how to measure it. I’ve come to believe that intelligence is the ability to apply knowledge in novel ways, making links between things that weren’t seen as linked before. And intelligence predicts how well we are able to adapt to changing environments. For George Augspurger, the rooms he has to tune are always changing, but he applies a wondrous intelligence to each. However we measure it, more intelligence should mean that we are more likely to solve new problems. These problems could be theoretical or academic, physical, practical, aesthetic, interpersonal, or even spiritual.

Related to intelligence is the question of how we acquire information in the first place. What humans excel at, compared to other animals, is making associations: taking information, both old and new, and seeing how it interacts with other information. Whenever we encounter new information, our brains place it in a contextual frame and then seek to associate it with other things we’ve experienced. The brain is a giant pattern detector, applying statistical analysis to make decisions. Our brains add to that the ability to form analogies, something that (as far as we know) is uniquely human. Analogies, or analogical reasoning, have led to some of the biggest discoveries in science, from the Big Bang origins of our universe to immunotherapy for cancer.

The wisdom that we find in older adults—the most experienced members of our population—follows from these four specific things: associations, experience, pattern recognition, and the use of analogies. And this is why we gain more and more wisdom as we age. Wisdom comes from the accumulated set of things we’ve seen and experienced, our ability to detect patterns in those experiences, and our ability to predict future outcomes based on them. (And what is intelligence if not that?) Naturally, the more you’ve experienced, the more wisdom you are able to tap into. In addition, certain changes in the aging brain facilitate these kinds of comparisons. Young upstarts may be faster at playing video games and quicker to adapt to new technologies, but in the realm of wisdom they can’t hold a candle to old-timers who have been witness to so many things that seem to cycle around again and again. Wisdom enables you to handle some problems more quickly and effectively than the raw firepower of youth. A young, strong person might be able carry a heavy load up a hill without breaking a sweat. An older person will think to put it on a handcart or dolly.

Making associations underpins learning. To assimilate new information we need to associate it with what we’ve seen before. Life experience gives us more associations to make, more patterns to recognize.

Understanding and studying intelligence have been hobbled by huge disagreements about what it is. In cognitive developmental neuroscience we can’t identify the brain basis of behaviors until those behaviors are well defined. Intelligence simply isn’t, and even when researchers try to define it, there are huge disagreements about whether the tests that measure it are doing a good job, or whether they’re flawed or biased and miss a great many things that we would hope them to be sensitive to. We need to understand these debates about intelligence before we can see clearly how intelligence and aging interact.

Different Types of Intelligence

Starting in the early 1900s, psychometricians and cognitive psychologists—the folks who measure and study intelligence—thought of intelligence as a single, unitary thing. It varied along a single continuum and you could have more or less of it, whatever it was. Their measurement of it was called the intelligence quotient, or IQ. The idea was intuitively appealing and to some extent tracks to our normal experience. As a kid, you probably had classmates who just seemed to do better in school than others. To those kids, school came easy, but to many others, lessons were a struggle. It’s easy to conclude that the people who found school easy were the more intelligent and the ones who found it more difficult were the less intelligent. That thing in the brain that led to intelligence was seen as a general factor, influencing many domains of endeavor, and so was called g (for general intelligence).

But if you think about your experiences, both as a student and later in life, it’s apparent that this story is too simplistic. The triad of genes, culture, and opportunity plays out in how different children learn. There are surprising differences in things as basic as motor development across cultures and countries, even when you account for economic conditions. For example, infants from African countries hold up their necks and walk earlier, on average, than infants from Europe and America. (This is due to expectations by African parents that their children will acquire these milestones at earlier ages, and to them having adopted child-rearing practices that accelerate this growth, such as stretching of children’s limbs during daily baths, and formalized muscle massage.) Even though humans all share basic genetics and neuroanatomy, developmental stages, and hormonal changes, each of these is shaped by the individual’s particular experiences. For example, iron deficiency (affecting 9 percent of US children ages one to three), blood levels of lead, and other environmental toxins impair learning and memory. Learning doesn’t happen the same way for everyone because the influence of culture, genes, and opportunity impacts everything we do from the womb to the tomb.

Variation plays out in our Western classrooms. Think back: Some of your classmates may have had difficulty in school because of a learning disability, not a lack of intelligence. They might have had dyslexia, or a short attention span, or families who didn’t read, or they might have been sleep-deprived if they came from a disordered household. Some might have grown up in households or cultures that did not value education and so they lacked motivation. Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell didn’t do well in school because they found the lessons arbitrary, boring, and irrelevant to their interests. Quincy Jones got caught up with a bad crowd, occupying his mental energy with petty thefts and other criminal activities in Seattle. Many people we regard as brilliant often did poorly in school for a variety of other reasons, and their IQ scores, as established by standardized tests, might have been in the “normal” rather than “gifted” range. But you couldn’t say they lacked intelligence.

So something is clearly wrong with the idea that intelligence is one thing that can be measured by a single number, IQ. As David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute and an expert in complex systems, says, “There is no topic about which we have been more stupid than intelligence.”

At the other end of the continuum, we now know that students who do well in school often have advantages that other students lack, such as parents or older siblings who value education, who help them with their homework and teach them ahead of time what they’ll encounter in class. That is, school becomes a place where privileged students can show off what they already learned at home. Does that mean they have more intelligence? Or does it mean they’ve been exposed to more knowledge? Those may not be the same thing at all. A special commission of the US National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2018 that “school failure may be partly explained by the mismatch between what students have learned in their home cultures and what is required of them in school.” And the advantage of having learned a certain set of things at home doesn’t just enlighten those particular things but will also give you more time to learn new things.

We need to somehow separate out the learning experiences a person has had—knowledge acquisition—from their innate ability to use whatever information they have. Scientists call the things you’ve already learned crystallized intelligence, and they call your potential to learn fluid intelligence. There’s also a third intelligence I call acquisitional intelligence—that’s the speed and ease with which you can acquire new information (if given the right opportunity). Think of it as coming before both crystallized and fluid intelligence: You can’t amass a store of learned information quickly without acquisitional intelligence.

Crystallized intelligence is the knowledge you have already acquired, regardless of how easy or difficult it was for you to obtain it. It includes things such as your vocabulary, your general knowledge, your skills, and any mathematical rules or formulas you might have learned. It is heavily dependent on culture, because certain kinds of knowledge are valued more than others depending on where you live. Think knowledge of plants for people living in a hunter-gatherer community versus reading for people living in an industrialized community. Crystallized intelligence also depends on educational experience and opportunity. Crossword puzzles are an example of crystallized intelligence because you need to have amassed a big vocabulary; you need to know a lot about the world, geography, proper names, things like that—and the kinds of short words that crossword puzzle makers often have to use. How quickly and effortlessly you can acquire and retain new information, such as learning the capital of Myanmar while doing your crossword puzzle, is acquisitional intelligence.

Fluid intelligence is your ability to apply any information you have (whether it’s extensive or not) to new contexts. It is your innate ability to reason, to think, to identify patterns, and to solve problems. We’ve all known people who have a remarkable retention for what they’ve learned, and can learn quickly, but lack the ability to apply that information—they would be high in crystallized but low in fluid intelligence. Some people with photographic memories are like that.

Fluid intelligence is thinking on your feet, flying by the seat of your pants; it’s the kind of thinking you want to have in a pilot whose engine has just failed after takeoff as you are looking down at New York City just a few thousand feet below (Miracle on the Hudson). You need to combine that with the principles of flight and aerodynamics to right the plane (crystallized intelligence). And ideally, you can learn new information relevant to you without much effort, making you high in acquisitional intelligence. Of course the ideal situation is to have all three of these intelligences. That is, if you think intelligence is a good thing.

The terms crystallized and fluid are misleading but we’re stuck with them. The word crystallized might seem to imply that somehow the knowledge base becomes highly structured, formed, and then doesn’t change (like a crystal), but that’s not what it means. Crystallized intelligence does change. Your concrete knowledge base increases with age as you learn and experience new things. Acquisitional intelligence can also change if you are highly motivated to learn something new, and not suffering from the current epidemic of information overload. The term fluid suggests that this type of intelligence changes over the course of a life span, but it generally doesn’t (although you can learn to increase yours through systematic practice; of course, brain damage or dementia can decrease fluid intelligence).

Multiple Intelligences

The three-part distinction of crystallized, fluid, and acquisitional intelligence captures important ways to distinguish intelligence. But it misses the idea of intelligence domains that are vital to understanding how people differ from one another mentally. I’ve sat at meals with brilliant musicians or writers who did not know how to calculate the 20 percent tip on a restaurant bill. Even when given a simple trick like “ignore the last decimal place, take what’s left, and double it,” they go blank. They can be superior in crystallized, fluid, and acquisitional intelligence when it comes to music and literature, but they just aren’t good at math. Math seems to be a special domain of ability. So does music, for that matter. Wouldn’t it make sense to be able to compute a math IQ and a music IQ separately, and not have them depend on each other, or on having a large vocabulary?

Harvard professor Howard Gardner felt just that when he proposed his theory of multiple intelligences in his influential 1983 book, Frames of Mind. It took the cognitive neuroscience community by storm, and all the professors I knew immediately started teaching this concept in their cognitive psychology classes as a new and innovative approach to intelligence. There are several formal requirements that a skill must meet in order to be considered one of these frames of mind (a separate intelligence type), but there’s no reason for us to get distracted by those requirements here. Gardner’s intelligences are:

  1. musical-rhythmic,

  2. visual-spatial,

  3. verbal-linguistic,

  4. logical-mathematical,

  5. bodily-kinesthetic (athleticism, dancing, acting),

  6. interpersonal (or “social” intelligence),

  7. intrapersonal (or self-knowledge),

  8. spiritual (think Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, for example),

  9. moral (ability to solve problems within a moral and ethical frame, think King Solomon), and

  10. naturalistic (knowledge of nature, plants, animals, and the sorts of things one might need to know to survive in the wilderness).

Regarding naturalistic intelligence, here’s Gardner himself: “The individual who is readily able to recognize flora and fauna, to make other consequential distinctions in the natural world, and to use this ability productively (in hunting, in farming, in biological science) is exercising an important intelligence.” There were clearly very smart, creative people in our preindustrial past, people who first harnessed fire, who invented the wheel, and who discovered agriculture. They might have been geniuses in this naturalistic domain and only average in others.

Intelligence expert Robert Sternberg studied naturalistic intelligence by visiting a rural village in western Kenya that is home to many parasitic infections.

He tested eighty-five villagers between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Of these, 94 percent were infected with Schistosoma mansoni, 54 percent with hookworm, 31 percent with whipworm, and 19 percent with roundworm. Sternberg tested their naturalistic intelligence by asking questions about their knowledge of plant-based treatments for parasites—clearly this knowledge domain has very practical significance for them. As Sternberg writes, “Children in this community use natural herbal medicines to treat themselves and others, sometimes with and sometimes without the involvement of parents or other adults.” The children performed very well on these multiple-choice tests (there’s an example of one of the questions in the notes on this page), and their performance on these real-world skills was significantly better than their performance on tests of concepts they had learned in their village school, or other standard measures of intelligence, such as vocabulary. “Their knowledge of such medicines,” Sternberg writes, “appears to be fairly extensive” and includes “what medicines to use for what illnesses and in what doses.” What might account for this testing discrepancy? In some developing countries, the link between school success and life success is nonexistent. As Sternberg notes,

In a village where most boys will become farmers or fishermen and most girls will become wives and mothers, success in school holds no immediate benefits. Indeed, even the time spent in school may be viewed as largely wasted in terms of the skills and resources that will lead to success in later life. . . . Someone could intelligently be spending his or her time learning the things that are most important to him or her—whether it is herbal medicines or music theory or moves on the basketball court—and thereby sacrificing points on a conventional intelligence test.

Taken more broadly, naturalistic intelligence can be seen as a type of practical intelligence, what in an urban setting we would call “street smarts.” Practical intelligence (or any of the others mentioned previously) can constitute a distinct faculty from that which is measured by conventional intelligence tests.

Any of these multiple intelligences can be crystallized (you have amassed a great deal of knowledge in that domain), fluid (you have high potential in that domain), and acquisitional (you can learn things in that domain especially quickly), but what you have in one domain doesn’t necessarily transfer to another.

Many cognitive scientists believe that the more expertise one obtains in a given domain, the larger the gap between that domain and others. (An exception would be polymaths, such as Leonardo da Vinci.) This is in contrast to individuals of average intelligence who tend to have low variability across the various skills subtests that are used to establish IQ. That’s just a fancy way of saying that if they are moderately good in one area, like verbal ability, they tend also to be moderately good in others, like spatial and mathematical ability. This has fueled the belief in that general intelligence factor I mentioned earlier, g—if you’re reasonably good at a whole bunch of things, there must be some common mental substrate for all of them.

But this is not true for exceptionally high-performing individuals. They tend to excel in a single domain, or perhaps two. It’s not that they couldn’t excel in many; it’s that as these high performers start to get really good at something, they become increasingly absorbed in it and continue to develop that single area of expertise by redirecting brain resources toward it, letting other areas that are less relevant to them fall by the wayside. In the course of my work, I’ve met Nobel Prize winners who have such poor visual-spatial intelligence they get lost walking in their own neighborhoods. (The stories of Einstein getting lost on the Princeton campus are legendary.) It’s tempting to chalk this up to absentmindedness or being preoccupied with other thoughts, but often it’s not that the individual isn’t paying attention; it’s that they’ve allowed their spatial skills to atrophy because they’ve reallocated neural resources to the topic that consumes them. I’ve met mathematicians who utterly lack social intelligence and salespeople who have the uncanny ability to make everyone around them feel good but are deficient in other domains. For exceptional performers, one measure of intelligence, say, verbal, can be significantly different (several standard deviations) from other measures, such as visual-spatial. This led the great cognitive psychologist Buz Hunt to quip that g is not really a general intelligence factor, but a general mediocrity factor: Those who do not truly excel in any one domain are more likely to have similar scores on various subtests of intelligence. High intelligence breaks you free of the constraints of the hypothetical g.

Lately Gardner has been wondering if teaching ability should be an eleventh intelligence. He should know. Many of the most brilliant researchers at elite schools like Harvard and UC Berkeley are dreadful teachers (and maybe it’s not lack of ability but lack of motivation). Many of the scholars who teach material the best—who have a gift for explaining things coupled with a real empathy for students—have not made important discoveries of their own and will never go down in the annals of great researchers. Often, poor school performance is the fault not of the student but of the teacher. Dandelions can grow just about anywhere and do not need much maintenance in order to thrive. Orchids, on the other hand, need very specific care in order to survive. Dandelions are like the children with genetic and socioeconomic factors predisposing them to do well at school and on IQ tests—for them the environment is not as important, as they will likely do well regardless. Orchids are like the children without these genetic and socioeconomic predispositions. For them, it is critical that they receive careful attention to their education in order to succeed at school.

Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is taught widely in universities, but the intelligence testing community has been slower to adopt it and clings to the hundred-year-old concept of a general intelligence factor, g. Part of the reason is that the tests they use, the WISC, Woodcock-Johnson, Ravens Matrices, and so on, have been used for decades, providing them with responses from tens of thousands of people, revealing normative data: the typical profile of responses of people on average. They have so much data that they often can predict very well how 88 percent of the population will perform. The problem is they don’t know which 88 percent.

One thing that has limited the acceptance of Gardner’s theory is that we don’t have well-defined tests for each of these intelligences, and the tests we do have tend to correlate highly with that pesky g. Gardner is not a test maker, and the test makers have not jumped in to fill this gap. We can look at people like Serena Williams and Paul McCartney and agree that they exhibit exceptional, unique, and world-class abilities in their respective domains, but that’s not the same as quantifying their abilities with specialized measurement tools. In psychometrics, we want a number, so that we can, for instance, say that Paul McCartney is at 212 on some scale of musical intelligence, and someone with a tin ear is down around 90. You might find it astonishing—as did I—that there aren’t any good tests of musical ability. There are tests, but they don’t measure anything relevant to real music in the real world. They’re useless.

The Problem with Standardized Tests of Intelligence

There are a number of problems with the standardized tests of intelligence in use. Psychometricians look for two properties in a test, reliability and validity. Reliability means that if you take the same test on multiple occasions, you’ll receive roughly the same score. Slight variability is to be expected—sometimes you’re having a bad day, or you’re hungry, you’re taking the test late in the day and you’re a morning person, and so on. But a reliable test is one for which your score is similar each time you take the test. Most of the standard IQ tests are like this. Validity is different—it means that the score on a test is relevant to some real-world scenario or attribute. Few of us would take seriously a general test of athletic ability if LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Serena Williams did poorly on it, while Homer Simpson (or Harry Styles) obtained high scores. The test might have high reliability, meaning that people scored more or less the same on it each time they took it, but what does it really mean if it doesn’t conform to the way we perceive athletic excellence?

And that’s the first problem with many psychometric intelligence tests: We aren’t always sure what they are measuring. About 25 percent of the difference in school performance across students is due to IQ test scores; that leaves a whopping 75 percent unexplained. What could contribute to good school performance? Diet, exercise, socioeconomic class, family culture—and that factor that Gardner proposed, the teacher’s intelligence. And even though IQ correlates moderately with school grades, there is more to life than academics. The tests are biased toward a decidedly middle-class Western conception of intelligence, learning, and values. Even a casual look at any media outlet will show that measurable intelligence has very little to do with economic success. Motivation, resilience, opportunity, and getting along with others are often even more important, contributing to that unexplained 75 percent.

Standardized IQ tests are also culturally biased. They were mostly written by white people who looked at the world a certain way, resulting in tests that are notoriously biased against African Americans. Dr. Robert Lee Williams II created a one-hundred-question black IQ test, with information relevant to blacks. Black Americans who took the test achieved higher IQ scores than on standard IQ tests, and higher scores than whites who took the test.

One component of IQ tests asks general knowledge questions, such as who was president during the US Civil War. Obviously, if you are not from the United States you are at a disadvantage. (People from the North are likely to answer Abraham Lincoln, and some people from the South might answer Jefferson Davis.)

Another problem with standardized IQ tests is that they penalize creative thinking: There is no room for creative answers or for solutions to the problem that the test writer didn’t think of. For a creative person, taking a standardized IQ test requires not just solving a problem, but trying to figure out the way the white, middle-class test creator solved the problem, and that is not the same thing.

Consider this example:

Which one does not belong: golf, tennis, squash, football, baseball?

What would you answer? Only one was considered correct, football, because it’s the only sport that doesn’t require an implement to hit the ball with. But you could make an equally compelling argument for golf, since it is the only game you can play alone and still get a meaningful score, or for tennis, which is the only one played with a net. I was discussing this with a friend of mine, and we were going back and forth, when his seven-year-old daughter, Jocelyn, who had overheard us, ran into the room and said, “You’re both wrong! Squash doesn’t belong because it’s a vegetable!” She had us. Then she also pointed out that squash was the only one that is always played indoors. (By the way, that seven-year-old ended up going to MIT and is now an innovative high school math teacher. I am a very proud godfather.)

Bursts of great creativity come from somewhere, and one can’t help but marvel at, and admire, the brains that produce them. When facing such moments, it seems untenable to insist that creativity isn’t part of intellect.

My favorite example of this comes from the book Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas, by James L. Adams, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford. At eighty-five he says, “I have been retired from paychecks for twelve years. But it isn’t easy, because there are so many good things to do, and I was given neither infinite money nor infinite time at my retirement party.”

Ever heard the phrase thinking outside the box? Jim popularized it from the solution to a problem known as the nine dot puzzle, which traces its origins at least back to 1914. You’re shown three rows of three dots, and your job is to connect them all by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the nine dots only once and never lifting the pen from the paper.

As with any puzzle, I suggest you try it yourself. There’s a brain-based reason for this. It is easy to forget things that you are simply told. If you engage actively in exploring an issue—whether it’s a puzzle, a thought problem, or even a question about history (“Who was president during the Challenger explosion?”) or the arts (“In what century did Monet work?”), you’re more likely to retain the answer after you’ve exerted some of your own effort toward finding it, using your own reasoning and problem-solving skills.

The standard solution to the nine dot puzzle is in the endnotes, on this page. The first solution that many people attempt is to start with their pen on one of the dots (the problem doesn’t say you must), and to never let their lines extend beyond those dots (the problem doesn’t say that you can’t extend beyond the dots either). In effect, they are imposing a frame, or box, around the dots, and they don’t let their pen or their imagination go beyond the confines of this box (see below).

Solving the problem requires thinking beyond these confines. Jim’s book made a big splash in the corporate world. Thinking outside the box became a shorthand for not imposing constraints on a problem that didn’t need to be there, whether it was designing a more fuel-efficient engine (such as Mazda did with their rotary engine) or, more recently, room sharing and ride sharing via companies such as Airbnb and Uber. (Who says that customers will only ride in a car that is painted a particular color and has a trip meter?)

After Jim’s book was published, he received a flurry of letters about the nine dot puzzle from people who had managed to solve it with three lines or two, by folding, ripping, taping the paper—all kinds of things. Nothing in the problem says you can’t. One particularly elegant solution, using only one line, involved rolling the paper into a cone shape and connecting the dots with a continuous line that goes around the cone shape in three dimensional space. My favorite comes from a ten-year-old, who wrote this letter:

I find solutions like this tremendously exciting. The kind of open-mindedness that leads to such bursts of creativity is, I believe, a hallmark of intelligence, and I think it’s something that all of us have innately. Four-year-olds incessantly ask why questions: Why do I have to go to bed? Why do I have to go to school? Why does it rain? We have this natural inquisitiveness trained out of us by weary teachers and parents. It’s a shame. The good news is that you can rediscover and rekindle this at any age. By the way, ten-year-old Becky Buechel, who wrote this adorable letter to Jim Adams, was admitted to Stanford eight years later.

Among other things, Jim’s book shows that you can prime the pump of creativity by looking underneath the hood at how some creative problem solving is done. Problem solving is a mind-set, an approach, and it can be built and improved upon just by doing it. Every sudoku or crossword puzzle you do requires some problem solving, and they get easier as you practice them. Now, if you’ve heard that doing these puzzles is the key to good cognitive health as we age, that’s an oversimplification. The evidence is that while you will undoubtedly get better at doing sudoku and crossword puzzles, you will not necessarily get better at other things. No, the best strategy for cognitive health is to keep doing new things—things that require new ways of thinking. If you never did crosswords before and you start at seventy, that’s great. If you’ve been doing crosswords since you were sixteen, there’s no reason to stop now, but don’t expect them to be a magic elixir that fends of dementia. Instead, find some other kind of puzzle you’ve never done—a Rubik’s cube, logic problems, jigsaw puzzles, 3-D wooden jigsaw puzzles, brain teasers. They can be frustrating at first, so it’s best to start easy. And stick with it. Maybe find a fourteen-year-old to help, which checks off another box of the COACH principle: associating with new people.

Processing Speed

Standardized tests in general, and IQ tests in particular, are typically administered using predetermined time limits; thus, processing speed is part of the conception of intelligence used by psychometricians. Someone who can solve a problem at lightning speed has more of some mental quality that certainly seems like intelligence. But what about the slow, plodding, methodical thinker who solves a huge problem but requires time to do it? It took Einstein ten years to come up with general relativity. It took Tolstoy six years to write War and Peace and J. R. R. Tolkien twelve years to write The Lord of the Rings. Are they less intelligent than Mozart, who reportedly wrote pieces as fast as he could think of them? The question, when posed like that, seems absurd. Yet the testing community has been slow to recognize that speed, while impressive, isn’t everything. Neuroscientist Jeffrey Mogil at McGill University, a keen observer of the field, says, “I’ve always thought that processing speed, while obviously a thing, has essentially nothing to do with intelligence. It’s just a party trick.” The Mona Lisa, one of the most famous paintings in Western art, took fourteen years to paint. Nevertheless, being able to solve certain problems quickly is a skill we can lose as we age, and that can be both frustrating and worrying.

Art Shimamura has studied the aging brain and reaction times:

The number to remember is 1⁄25th of a second, which is the annual decrement in reaction time that we found in participants between the ages of 30 and 71 years. This value doesn’t seem very much, but after 30–40 years, such slowing can be the cause of broken hips and mental slips.

Processing speed and prefrontal cortex function are significantly correlated. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for a number of aspects of cognition that often decline as we age:

Unfortunately the prefrontal cortex is susceptible to age-related decreases in blood flow, changes in the structure of cells, and reduction of volume (shrinkage). A biological explanation is that there is no evolutionary pressure for the prefrontal cortex to stay sharp in old age, just as there is no evolutionary pressure for anything to stay sharp in old age. (Once we are past the age of reproducing and passing our genes to the next generation, evolution doesn’t care about how we spend the rest of our lives.) And so processing speed, led by prefrontal cortex decline, slows down.

Fluid intelligence declines with age, or at least scores on tests of it do. In the Lothian Birth Cohort Study (named after the region in Scotland where the participants lived), intelligence and depressive symptoms both declined during a nine-year period between ages seventy and seventy-nine years old. But low fluid intelligence in childhood predicted greater depressive symptoms in old age. High fluid intelligence is protective against the declines of aging, not just intellectual declines but emotional ones as well.

Practical intelligence increases with age, peaking after age fifty or sixty. An example of a practical question is, “If you were traveling by car and got stranded on an interstate highway during a blizzard, what would you do?” Or it might involve social tasks such as dealing with a landlord who would not make repairs, getting a friend to visit more often, or what to do when one has been passed over for promotion. People over fifty do far better on these questions than people under fifty, and many get better after sixty or even seventy. Practical intelligence seems to grow alongside crystallized intelligence as we get older.

Analytical intelligence is preserved in old age if you can practice using it. Rather than passively taking in information, question it, relate it to other things you know, and ponder it. At the universities where I’ve worked, a ninety-year-old professor coming into the office every day, participating in seminars, and interacting with much younger colleagues is the norm. I haven’t seen this nearly as much in boardrooms, but this vitality is not uncommon among doctors, lawyers, and judges. Take Jack Weinstein, a ninety-eight-year-old federal judge in Brooklyn who still handles a full caseload. His colleagues even hand him some of the most difficult cases they have. He and I had a delightful meeting, surrounded by piles of open cases, research briefs from his clerks, and manuscripts he was writing. That wasn’t a typo—he is ninety-eight. His philosophy appears to be in accord with what I’ve encountered with other people in their nineties: Try not to slow down. A great deal of what goes into Judge Weinstein’s work requires analysis, thoughtful probing of facts, hypotheticals, and scaffolding on a lifetime of learning and experience.

From the arts side, musician Judy Collins (age eighty, and still touring and writing) advises, “Never stop. That’s the key. Never stop. Never stop growing. Never stop being curious. Never stop thinking that there’s something you want to do that you haven’t done. And do it!”

Jane Goodall (age eighty-five, and still holding down a rigorous program of field research in Tanzania and worldwide public lectures) adds:

People who retire fade rather fast unless they have something really important they want to do. It’s feeling that you have purpose, and that you have less and less time to make your mark. Instead of slowing down you have to speed up.

Abstract Thinking Gets Better with Age

After your brain receives inputs from the senses, the first, or lower stages of processing preserve a relatively faithful copy of sensory inputs. Abstract thinking occurs in higher brain centers; it isn’t unique to humans but is most fully developed in our species, and it underlies mathematical ability, language, problem solving, and industrialization. Intelligent, adaptive behavior requires abstracting behaviorally relevant concepts and categories, an ability that gets better with age.

Neuroscientist Earl Miller from MIT found that abstraction involves a wide range of brain regions, gradually increasing as one moves up the hierarchy of the brain, reaching its peak in the prefrontal cortex. Recall that the prefrontal cortex is the last region of the brain to become fully formed as we develop, and it normally doesn’t reach an adult-like state until the twenties. When we form abstract representations of objects, we go beyond their appearance and think about them in terms of categories, such as how they might be used, where one is likely to find them, how rare or common they are, or what kinds of motion they might make. These can be the kinds of abstractions that Posner and Keele studied in their random dot patterns, the abstract representations musicians have for fingerings, or that you have for using everyday objects like forks and pens.

The tendency to form abstract representations is innate, and it begins at birth, if not sooner, but takes many years to develop. This is the reason that algebra and calculus are not typically taught before ages thirteen and sixteen, respectively: because the abstract reasoning required to learn them is not present in most schoolchildren before that age. In fact, studies show that this is an overly ambitious schedule: It isn’t until around sixteen or seventeen that kids begin to show an accurate ability to solve equations with letters (symbols) rather than numbers, the fundamental basis of algebra. Algebra is usually the first domain in school mathematics that encourages students’ abstract reasoning. This developmental trajectory is the same reason that adult literature usually doesn’t make sense to young children—it’s not simply the more difficult vocabulary or adult themes; it’s the abstract relations among characters and ideas. (The study of abstract thinking in other species is a cottage industry within neuroscience and biology, and an exciting new paper shows that even bees can engage in abstract thinking and can represent the number zero, something that was thought to be uniquely human.)

By age sixty, you begin to realize you can’t always trust your senses and that there are more important things than appearances when considering similarities. For example, here’s the kind of abstract reasoning that is handled by the prefrontal cortex: Suppose you have to prop open a door. Which of the following objects could help you do that?

The objects have nothing in common at the level of visual appearance—it is their function that defines whether they fit in a category or not. Relying on your visual cortex and occipital lobe won’t help you here—you need that prefrontal cortex to analyze the abstract functional relation.

Much of the information that is most useful to us in the world requires abstraction and categorization. Consider foods: few of them look alike in terms of color and shape, and yet we know—learn, actually—that such disparate-looking objects as potatoes, pineapples, salmon, turmeric, and almonds are all edible. We can further subdivide into those that need to be cooked before being eaten.

Writer Diane Ackerman invented a game called Dingbats that she played with her late husband, the writer Paul West. They would start with a single object and try to generate alternative uses for it:

What can you do with a pencil—other than write?

I’d begun. “Play the drums. Conduct an orchestra. Cast spells. Ball yarn. Use as a compass hand. Play pick up sticks. Rest one eyebrow on it. Fasten a shawl. Secure hair atop the head. Use as the mast for a Lilliputian’s sailboat. Play darts. Make a sundial. Spin vertically on flint to spark a fire. Combine with a thong to create a slingshot. Ignite and use as a taper. Test the depth of oil. Clean a pipe. Stir paint. Work a Ouija board. Gouge an aqueduct in the sand. Roll out dough for a pie crust. Herd balls of loose mercury. Use as the fulcrum for a spinning top. Squeegee a window. Provide a perch for your parrot. . . . Pass the pencil-baton to you . . .”

“Use as a spar in a model airplane,” Paul had continued. “Measure distances. Puncture a balloon. Use as a flagpole. Roll a necktie around. Tamp the gunpowder into a pint-size musket. Test bon-bons for contents. . . . Crumble, and use the lead as a poison.”

Neuropsychologists use this kind of test to evaluate intelligence. And results from the tests correlate with increased cortical thickness and gray-matter volume in brain structures of the daydreaming mode. Participants might be given two minutes to generate and list as many ideas as they can, answering a question like “What can you do with a brick?” Typical answers might include build a house, break a window, use it as a penholder, prop open a door, and so on. (Weirdly, this test of divergent thinking penalizes participants for coming up with a large number of examples of the same general category without informing them ahead of time of this penalty. The sample answers above would be worth four points. But the answers “Build a house, build a factory, build a stone wall, pile them sequentially higher to make a stairway” would receive only one point. Score another blow against standardized testing.)

The developmental trend toward abstract thinking is one of the compensatory mechanisms of aging that mitigates the decline of our sensory systems. Even apart from that decline, the trend toward abstract thinking helps us to solve problems that would not be solvable otherwise. Aging is not accompanied by unavoidable cognitive decline. The aging brain changes, thanks to neuroplasticity. It changes itself, heals itself, and finds other ways to do things, some of them (such as abstract reasoning) actually better than the earlier ways of doing things; it harnesses neuroprotective and neurorestorative capabilities.

The ability to learn new things quickly reaches a peak in adolescence and the college years and declines after age forty. Fluid intelligence, the ability to use what we already know, is lower before the age of forty and picks up in each decade thereafter. Although our raw neural processing speed and reaction times may slow down (precipitously in our eighties), older adults have experienced so much more than twenty-year-olds that they have a competitive edge. This is one reason why so many Fortune 500 companies are keeping their more senior workers on as chairmen emeriti. Clive Davis, at eighty-seven, is chief creative officer of Sony Music, following a distinguished career as a record company executive and innovator. It’s what makes George Augspurger so effective at what he does.

An important point should not get lost: We vary considerably in the ways that we age. Many people in their late nineties are outperforming people in their early sixties, and the opposite is also true. The rate at which our cognitive abilities decline, and the severity with which we might develop dementia, are all highly variable. Many individuals (in some reports up to 25 percent) show the biological, pathological markers for Alzheimer’s disease and yet show zero impairment in thinking capacity. Cognitive reserve can insulate against the damaging effects of aging.

So how do you get cognitive reserve? High levels of education and a balanced diet help. Recall also the conclusion of the Lothian Birth Cohort Study: High fluid intelligence is protective against the declines of aging, perhaps due to cognitive reserve.

The reserve is also dependent on occupational complexity. Complex occupations require continuing education, sustained intellectual engagement, and mental effort. They feature a changing landscape of options and decisions that cannot be done on autopilot or according to simple rules. On the opposite end, epidemiological studies have established that low educational attainment and low occupational complexity increase risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease.

Fluid Intelligence Training

Almost every book or article you read on intelligence says that you can’t increase fluid intelligence, and certainly not over the age of sixty or seventy. While that may be true (I’m skeptical), you can certainly increase your performance scores on tests of it, which I think is just as good—it expands your brain and increases your cognitive reserve to learn new ways of approaching problems.

To a purist, fluid intelligence cannot be altered by learning. But the way we measure it is impure and imperfect, and nearly all the tests that purport to measure it are sensitive to learning effects. The tests are not independent of education, experience, or socioeconomic class. Very little is. Some children are taught or encouraged to embrace their mental and intellectual selves while others are taught to embrace, exclusively, their emotional, physical, or spiritual selves. This orientation early in life can have profound effects. I’ve visited households where the children grew up with logic problems, puzzles, and mental games as part of the day-to-day dinner conversation. I’ve visited others where prayer, supplication, and charity were the focus. And it’s not just children. The style in which older adults live their lives, their focus, and the extent to which they engage in intellectual play affects their ability to answer the kinds of questions one sees on tests of fluid intelligence. The aging couple who share mental games are just going to be more prepared for problem-solving tests than the couple who spend all their time silently hiking and trekking together, or the couple who are immersed in community service to the exclusion of all other activities. But that doesn’t make the hikers and do-gooders any less intelligent—we just don’t administer tests on which they’d excel.

Karl Duncker, a great Gestalt psychologist from the twentieth century, looks at problem solving in the most general way, tieing together these various forms of intelligence:

A problem arises when a living creature has a goal but does not know how this goal is to be reached. Whenever one cannot go from the given situation to the desired situation simply by action, then there has to be recourse to thinking. . . . Such thinking has the task of devising some action which may mediate between the existing and the desired solutions.

Duncker then proposed a problem, one that requires some thinking:

Suppose you are a doctor who has a patient with a malignant tumor in his stomach. The tumor cannot be operated upon, but you can use a particular type of ray to destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once at a sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed. Unfortunately, at this intensity, the healthy tissue that the rays pass through will also be destroyed. At a lower intensity the rays would not damage the healthy tissue but would also not destroy the tumor. What can be done to destroy the tumor and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue?

This is a difficult problem for nonmedical professionals to solve—only about 10 percent come up with the solution. People who are high in fluid intelligence might ultimately attack the problem by considering stories or events that have some structural similarity. In the abstract, the problem is how to destroy a target when direct application of an intense, large force is harmful to the surrounding area. We think, “Have I ever heard of a problem like that in another domain that might be informative?”

Now consider this scenario from tactical military history:

A general wishes to capture a fortress located in the center of a country. There are many roads radiating outward from the fortress. All have been mined so that while small groups of soldiers can pass over the roads safely, any large force will detonate the mines. A full-scale direct attack is therefore impossible. The general divides his army into small groups, sends each group to the head of a different road that leads to the fortress, and times it so that the groups converge simultaneously in the fortress.

The analogous situation in the tumor problem is to use multiple low-intensity beams all at once, aimed at the tumor from different directions. Each low-intensity beam on its own won’t harm the surrounding tissue, but the sum of all the beams will destroy the tumor. The elements of both problems are similar. Where you need to make a logical or creative leap is here: In the fortress problem, there are many roads that lead outward from it; in the tumor problem there are not. But what if you could create many roads? That’s what focused, dispersed beam therapy does. (If you follow medical technology, you know that brachytherapy and other surgical procedures that implant small radioactive seeds are also used these days, but they are not strictly analogous to the military fortress problem.) Resource dispersal is the abstract concept, and it comes up in a variety of different scenarios, such as illegal money laundering: Large sums of money are divided into small sums, each of which is carried into a country or deposited into a financial account in amounts that do not trigger suspicion and thus avoid detection.

In the tumor/fortress problems, an analogy is used to describe a set of particular relations among objects. When told the fortress story is a hint to the tumor problem, up to 90 percent of people solve the tumor problem. The philosopher Karl Popper has suggested that all of life is problem solving. The problem-solving strategy that works here is to think of any analogies that may apply. Analogical thinking has led to great discoveries, such as Rutherford’s attempts to understand the structure of the atom and Schrödinger’s cat.

The way to become good at problem solving, to get in the flow of your best fluid intelligence at any age, is to practice, to expose yourself to different kinds of problems, and to share them with friends. What people who score higher than average on fluid intelligence have going for them is that they’ve learned a system for attacking a particular kind of problem, and they’ve had lots of practice solving problems of different types. Better than doing crossword puzzles or sudoku is engaging in a variety of different kinds of problems.

Wisdom

What is wisdom? As with intelligence, there is no scientific consensus, but nine common themes emerge in the research:

  1. social decision-making ability and a pragmatic knowledge of life

  2. prosocial attitudes and behaviors

  3. ability to maintain emotional homeostasis (with a tendency to favor positive emotions)

  4. a tendency toward reflection and self-understanding

  5. acknowledgment of and coping effectively with uncertainty

  6. valuing of relativism and tolerance

  7. spirituality

  8. openness to new experience

  9. a sense of humor

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list—you may disagree with some and think of others that are missing from this list—but it’s a starting point. Paul Baltes defined wisdom as knowledge useful for dealing with life problems, including an awareness of the varied contexts of life and how they change over time, recognition that values and life goals differ among individuals and among groups, and acknowledgment of the uncertainties of life together with ways to manage those uncertainties.

And isn’t that what we seek wisdom for? We don’t climb to a high mountaintop in the Himalayas to ask a guru what to name our pet. We don’t read philosophical treatises to know whether it’s better to serve rice or potatoes with trout, or to deal with other small or day-to-day problems. When we seek wisdom, we seek answers to the big, unusual questions of life. We consult the people we consider wise, whether it’s grandparents, spiritual leaders, or poets, whether it’s the Dalai Lama, Shakespeare, Guinan (Star Trek: The Next Generation), or Vishnu, to provide a perspective we lack—an insight into happiness, peace, and the harmonious integration of ourselves into the world.

If you’re thinking that what we call wisdom has a lot to do with the kinds of intelligence that standardized testing can miss, I agree. At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that wisdom arises from four things: associations, experience, pattern recognition, and the use of analogies. And this is why we gain more and more wisdom as we age. Older people have more wisdom precisely because of how the brain’s networks have evolved to scaffold on prior knowledge and experience, to abstract out common principles, to be able to see to the core of a matter that might elude younger (and less wise) observers, and to have more experiences on which to base analogies.

Developmental psychologist Judith Glück proposes that life challenges act as catalysts for the development of wisdom, and our internal resources influence how we appraise, deal with, and integrate these challenges. According to her model, the internal resources that predict the development of wisdom include: mastery (managing uncertainty and uncontrollability), openness, reflectivity, and emotion regulation, including empathy (the model is called MORE). External resources are equally important. Other people, such as friends and mentors, play a crucial role in both the short-term expression and the long-term development of wisdom. Situational contexts, including life phases, also influence the extent to which people act on their wisdom-related knowledge.

One of Gardner’s multiple intelligences, interpersonal or social intelligence, is connected to what we usually think of as wisdom: helping others and mediating disagreements. In the Bible, King Solomon was called upon to mediate the dispute between two women who both claimed to be the mother of a single child. His answer has become the very archetype of wise judgment in Western culture. Older adults show higher levels of emotional regulation, experience-based decision making and conflict resolution, prosocial behaviors such as empathy and compassion, subjective emotional well-being, and self-reflection or insight, compared to younger adults. Oldsters also show a tendency toward favoring positive emotions, and greater ability to maintain positive relationships. They’re more likely to say hello to strangers on the street, to wave other drivers in front of them, and to be trusting of others (this is why scammers find old people an easy mark).

The wisdom we attribute to older adults may well be neurobiologically based, born out of changes to the brain that allow the two hemispheres to communicate more freely, to combine the logical with the intuitive, the quantitative with the qualitative, the fact-based thinking with the artistic. Greater wisdom is also marked by freer connections between the frontal lobes and the much older limbic system, and by age-related changes in neurochemistry. For instance, it is known that dopamine decreases with age while norepinephrine and serotonin levels remain stable. The brain’s neurochemistry is a system with complex, dynamic interactions. It is overly simplistic to say things such as “dopamine increases blah blah” or “serotonin decreases blahdedy blah.” Rather, changes in even a single neurotransmitter, like dopamine, can cause the remaining chemical receptors and circuits in the brain to function differently. Some older people describe a “burning off” of previously distressing mental states. Leonard Cohen, for example, was amazed that his chronic depression, which no medication could relieve, simply disappeared in his seventies.

Yet not everyone grows wise with age. Wisdom comes from combining motivational, emotional, and cognitive experiences, having successfully overcome challenges, and having had meaningful interactions with others. Although we may think of wisdom as primarily an intellectual quality, in fact it is heavily reliant on emotional maturity and a shift in those motivations that drive us. Emotion and motivation change with age as a function of a number of different hormonal and neurotransmitter changes in the brain.

We are all flawed. Throughout the course of our lives we will likely do things that are both wise and unwise. Wisdom is perhaps reaching the point where the wise actions outnumber the unwise, and we are in a position to examine problems and decisions from a perspective that allows us to better predict a good outcome, whether it involves us or others. The good news is that wisdom can be cultivated and taught. Precursors of wisdom, such as empathy, emotion regulation, and critical thinking, can be modeled and explicitly taught from an early age. And we can strive for the higher ideal in acquiring intelligence and wisdom—to use them for the betterment of others and of the world we live in. That is what Jane Goodall says is her primary motivation, “to recruit lots of young people who will help make the world a better place.”