7
With Age Comes Wisdom:
why older people are wiser
If someone asks me whom I regard as a wise person, I always think of Kofi Annan, former UN chief and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Though I have never met him in person, in the media he talks sense in a tactful and friendly way. In 2007, chaos followed disputed elections in Kenya. Official counts showed that the sitting president, Mwai Kibaki, had won 47 per cent of the vote while his rival, opposition leader Raila Odinga, had only 44 per cent. But these results were widely questioned. Followers of both leaders, who represent different tribes, were incited to attack each other by politicians on both sides. Hundreds of people died. Long regarded as one of the most stable and prosperous countries in Africa, Kenya attracted thousands of big-game tourists every year. Now it had become the scene of lynch parties and people fleeing in panic from their compatriots. The chairperson of the African Union, Ghanaian president John Kufuor, was quickly called in to try to bring the two sides closer together and work out a solution. He didn’t even manage to get Kibaki and Odinga to the negotiating table. Then Kofi Annan, who was nearly 70, agreed to take over. He engineered a reconciliation between the two sides, and a coalition government with Kibaki as president and Odinga as prime minister was formed. Wisdom is certainly needed to bring people together in such extreme circumstances.
But even the wisest people cannot achieve the impossible. Even Kofi Annan was unable to convince the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that he should co-operate with the UN Security Council. In February 1998, he spoke for three hours with Hussein, doing his utmost to win him over. ‘In the end, the only means I have is reason and persuasion,’ he said later. When negotiating with government leaders, Annan would try to see the situation through their eyes and find issues on which they could agree. This is an important element of wisdom: the ability, by using knowledge of the past and taking different viewpoints into account, to put forward proposals that may lead to something positive in the longer term.
In all cultures, wisdom is associated with experience and handing on knowledge gained in the past. During time spent on a Native American reservation in southern Arizona, the American psychologist Louis Cozolino met a tribal elder who called himself Mister John. ‘His bright eyes were sunken within a patchwork of dark wrinkles,’ wrote Cozolino. ‘I estimated him to be about 80 years old.’ In answer to a question about wisdom, Mister John told him that it consisted of the stories of his forefathers, passed on by ‘the old ones’. These stories were a lifeline to their history. He believed that people needed a connection in order to live together, and on their reservation, that connection was the tribe. Young people need guidance to make the right long-term choices for themselves and for others, choices that mean they will be surrounded by love and friendship. The people around you are your life’s riches.
Mister John’s words are diametrically opposed to the slogan that appeared on posters displayed in physics departments in some American universities in the 1980s. It read: ‘The knowledge of the previous generation is no longer valid.’ Indeed, many scientific insights change over the years and new knowledge is acquired. But are wisdom and knowledge always the same thing? Young people today have often benefited from higher education and are at home with modern media. Before you know it, they’ve found the answer to a question on the internet. But if wisdom is about insight into complex life issues or dealing with difficult situations, the perspective that age brings might well come in useful.
WHAT IS WISDOM?
Throughout the ages, and in every culture, there have been people regarded by their contemporaries as repositories of wisdom. They were often grey-haired old men valued for their religious and philosophical knowledge and experience, which gave them insight into the major issues in life.
But how can a person be wise if their grey cells are shrinking and their memory and concentration going downhill? To answer that question, we should first define wisdom and see whether it does indeed increase as we age. If it does, we then have to reconcile that with the changes we have noted in the brain.
Scientific research always requires a definition. But because it is not easy to pinpoint what wisdom is, researchers tend to use different definitions. The following is perhaps a good place to start: wisdom is the ability to understand complex situations and thereby promote optimal behaviour, so that the outcome satisfies as many people as possible and takes everyone’s wellbeing into account.[1] But this is not an entirely satisfactory definition. To try to establish what people generally believe wisdom to be, an Austrian and an American researcher developed a questionnaire that was completed by over 2,000 readers of GEO magazine. Many answers referred to the ability to understand complex issues and relationships, knowledge and life experience, self-reflection and self-criticism, acceptance of others’ perspectives and values, empathy and love for humanity, and an orientation towards goodness. These perceived elements of wisdom are not unique to GEO’s readership; they are subscribed to worldwide. The American psychiatrists Thomas Meeks and Dilip Jeste added two qualities to the list: emotional stability, and the ability to make decisions in ambiguous situations. And, finally, there is humour. Though it isn’t generally regarded as an essential component of wisdom, a sense of humour must surely be part of the self-knowledge required for true wisdom. Jeanne Louise Calment, a French woman who lived to the age of 122, was known for her wit. On her 120th birthday, a journalist expressed, somewhat hesitantly, the hope that he would be able to congratulate her the following year too. ‘Why of course,’ she replied, ‘you look very young.’
Though people have recognised the importance of wisdom for thousands of years, it was, until recently, almost entirely absent from medical research into ageing. This may be because Western culture puts greater emphasis on the intellect. Cognitive skills, such as memory, concentration, and logical thinking, have of course been extensively studied. But knowledge, skills, and expertise are not the same as wisdom, which has to do with a broader insight into life and making choices in ambiguous situations. It is also about achieving a balance between polar opposites: between weakness and strength, doubt and certainty, dependence and autonomy, transience and infinity. We consider people wise if they can give good advice in difficult circumstances and their judgements are balanced.
But research into wisdom doesn’t have to be confined to living individuals. We can also look at what has been written on this subject over the centuries and in different cultures. In many cases, these are religious texts. The most well known example in the West is the Bible. In the book of Proverbs, wisdom is presented as more valuable than precious metals or jewels: ‘Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? … Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.’[2] The Bible also links wisdom to age: ‘With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding.’[3] Christians believe that true wisdom is acquired in a personal relationship with God, who is the source of all wisdom. St Augustine distinguished between two kinds of knowledge: sapientia, or knowledge concerned with eternal reality (wisdom) and scientia, or knowledge of the natural or material world (what we call science).
Long before Augustine, the Greek and Roman philosophers who shaped much of our Western culture attached great importance to wisdom. Sophocles (5th century BCE), for example, wrote in his play Antigone: ‘Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.’
Eastern culture, too, has for centuries placed enormous value on wisdom. Its understanding of the concept has much in common with Western ideas. The Bhagavad Gita, written in India around the 5th century BCE, is a major work on this subject. It sees wisdom as the sum of life experiences, the ability to deal with emotions, self-control, love of God, compassion, humility, and self-sacrifice, all of which are also part of the Western concept of wisdom. The American psychologist Douglas Powell, who interviewed over 300 older people in the course of his research, calls humility ‘a gift of experience’. During the course of their lives, older people have had moments of disappointment, failure, missed opportunities, and plain bad luck. These setbacks have been described by researchers and psychologists as ‘wisdom-prone circumstances’.
Another influential work is the Tao Te Ching, a Chinese manuscript dating from around the 6th century BCE and one of the most important Taoist texts. It regards intuition and compassion — more so than reason — as the way to wisdom. Later on, the influential philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) called on his followers to improve the world, but warned them they had to start with themselves. ‘To know what you know and to know what you don’t know is true wisdom.’ This concept of the limited nature of one’s knowledge recurs in our current take on wisdom. And it is something you often see in older people as a result of their ability to see things in perspective. For instance, 73-year-old Joanne does not believe that her mental abilities have declined in the past few years. She points out that intelligence is not the same as wisdom, and that she has grown wiser in the course of her life. She now has more insight into the choices that she makes because she has a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages that each entails. ‘Nowadays I’m less certain that I always make the right decision,’ she says, ‘but that’s not such a bad thing.’[4]
HOW OLDER PEOPLE REASON
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) made an important contribution to our understanding of cognitive development in children. He described four stages, the last of which is ‘formal thinking’. This begins around the age of 11 and continues into adulthood. A person who has reached this stage is capable of logical reasoning and can solve abstract problems; in other words, they can imagine various logical solutions to a problem and can test them through trial and error. The wrong solutions can then be eliminated, and what is left is the right one. Imagine, for example, that you’re 12 years old and your mobile phone doesn’t work. Your first reaction is that maybe the battery is dead; your second, that perhaps it’s because you dropped it in some water yesterday. You test your first idea by recharging the battery, and if that hasn’t worked after several hours, you conclude that the problem is likely to be water damage. Now, older people are no better than young adults at this kind of logical thinking, except perhaps in highly complex situations where past experience is helpful, such as applying for a mortgage. Yet in the case of new, artificial problems such as those created for psychological experiments, older people are actually at a disadvantage because they make heavy demands on concentration and working memory, precisely the things that deteriorate with age.
There is, nevertheless, a form of thinking that improves with age. Based on Piaget’s terminology, behavioural scientists have come up with the concept of ‘post-formal thought’, which is used in confronting complex everyday problems that can be solved in different ways. It involves more uncertainty and more flexibility. To arrive at a solution, you often have to put yourself in others’ shoes. In one experiment, subjects in varying age groups were presented with the problem of a student who had plagiarised large chunks of Wikipedia for a paper.[5] The student admitted she had taken whole passages from Wikipedia, but argued that she had never been told she had to list her sources or how to do so. The subjects were asked what steps they would take as a member of the examinations committee reviewing her case. The guide given to students clearly states that plagiarism is a serious offence that may be penalised by suspension or expulsion from the university. What was the result? Many young people thought that the student should be expelled. This is the outcome of formal thinking as described by Piaget. Their conclusion was logical: a rule had been broken, and the corresponding penalty should be imposed. Many of the older subjects, however, were less certain about their answer and applied post-formal thinking. Before they made a decision, they wanted more information. Was the student really unaware of the procedures? How far had she got with her degree? Had the concept of plagiarism been properly explained? Depending on the answers to these questions, older people might well have come to the same conclusion as their younger counterparts, but they were more likely to see things from the student’s perspective and to consider the consequences of the penalty.
Another example of a problem where post-formal thinking works best is the dilemma confronting Harold and Hanneke.[6] Both recently turned 68, and will soon be celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. They realise that they must think about the future and whether they should continue to live in the spacious home where their children grew up. Harold wants to sell the house and move into a luxury apartment in a complex for seniors that has lots of facilities, including a gym. The complex is also well served by public transport, which will be essential once they cannot drive anymore. Hanneke is not enthusiastic about the idea. She wants to stay in their home and undertake modifications when they become less physically able. For example, safety bars could be installed in the bathroom, and a large room downstairs could be converted into a bedroom. Harold and Hanneke think they need to talk through all the possible advantages and disadvantages of both courses of action with each other and their adult children. The fact that they intend to take their time over this decision, to consider all the pros and cons, and to weigh up each option shows they realise that a quick, logical answer is not available. They are thinking post-formally.
THE OLDER, THE WISER?
Does growing older automatically mean we will grow wiser? Not for all of us, unfortunately. In all age groups, there are people whose thoughts and actions cannot be described as wise, though this doesn’t mean that they won’t acquire more of the characteristics of wisdom as they age. Generally speaking, the experience of life and its ups and downs builds wisdom. But this is very difficult to measure. If you present people with complex situations and ask them for the best solution, many older people do no better than middle-aged people, according to a German study. What was interesting was that older people, like young adults, were better at solving problems that were typical of their age group. The subjects had to respond to a number of difficult situations — some of which involved a younger person, some an older. An example of the first was the story of Michael, a 28-year-old mechanic with two young children who hears that the factory where he works will close down within three months. There is currently no suitable work for him in the area where he lives. His wife is a nurse and has just started work again locally in a well-paid job. Michael doesn’t know whether they should move to another town where he can find a job, or if they should stay where they are, with him taking on the role of stay-at-home dad. What would be the best solution for the next three to five years? What additional information is needed to come up with a solution? An example in the older category was Sarah, a widow of 60. Having recently completed management training, she has set up her own business, a challenge she has long wanted to take on. However, her son has just lost his wife and has two young children to care for. She could either give up the business and move in with her son to help out, or she could help him financially with costs of paid care for the children. What is the best plan for her for the next three to five years? What additional information is needed to solve her problem? Older subjects (aged 60–81) were better at devising a solution for Sarah, and the younger group (25–35) came up with better answers for Michael. In order to qualify as ‘wise’, the participants had to name various aspects of the problem, come up with a number of solutions, list the pros and cons of each, recognise uncertainty, assess risks, and finally devise plans for critical follow-up and possibly reconsideration of the chosen solution.
A small proportion of seniors will not perform as well as middle-aged people on this type of task, where solutions to complex problems are required. This is because it draws heavily on cognitive abilities such as working memory and executive functions (the ability to plan and empathise, for example). Older people whose skills have eroded more than the average will find it more difficult to think up a range of solutions and to compare them with one another. Though intact cognitive functions don’t necessarily lead to wisdom, they do make a contribution. You can still be wise if your mental faculties have declined, especially in situations that are familiar to you from experience. But when faced with new problems that require weighing up a lot of information, a decline in working memory and cognitive flexibility tends to work against you.
THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE
In 2004, neuropsychologists at the University of California described a patient they called ‘a modern-day Phineas Gage’. The reference was to a 19th-century railway worker of that name, one of the most well-known patients in the history of neuropsychology. The brain damage he suffered taught us much about the function of the hitherto mysterious frontal region of the brain (the prefrontal cortex). In 1848, Gage was involved in a dramatic accident: following an explosion, an iron bar penetrated his face with tremendous force and exited through the top of his head. To the amazement of his colleagues, he survived the accident and was even discharged from hospital two months later. But he was a changed man: as a close friend put it, ‘Gage was no longer Gage.’ Though his powers of reasoning, observation, and memory were intact, his personality was radically changed. A man known to be hardworking, energetic, and possessed of managerial abilities had, it is said, become impatient, foul-mouthed, and lacking in empathy. He was no longer able to assess the emotional significance of situations and could not control his own emotional reactions. He was subject to regular outbursts of rage, and was unable to plan his activities. Reconstructions of his brain based on his preserved skull show that it was primarily the underside of the prefrontal cortex that suffered severe damage.
The modern-day Phineas Gage in the case reported in 2004 had suffered damage to his head in 1962 when his Jeep hit a landmine on a military mission abroad. As a result of the explosion, the metal frame of the windshield penetrated his forehead. Like Gage, he appeared at first to have suffered no damage to his mental faculties when he left the hospital. He performed well on neuropsychological tests, and his intelligence was intact. Socially, however, he was not functioning well. He displayed disinhibited behaviour and an inability to control himself, both of which led to problems in his interactions with others. He lost his job, broke up with his wife, and became estranged from his children. According to geriatric psychiatrist Dilip Jeste, damage to the prefrontal cortex seems to lead to the opposite of wisdom: impulsiveness, socially inappropriate behaviour, and emotional awkwardness. Together with colleagues, Jeste mapped out for the first time a network of brain regions that are essential to wisdom. They attributed a special role to the prefrontal cortex.
Neurologist Elkhonon Goldberg proposes the same thing in his book The Wisdom Paradox. He sees the prefrontal cortex as the conductor, and the other regions of the brain as the orchestra. The prefrontal cortex doesn’t make the music, but co-ordinates, integrates, and directs. This is why people who have suffered damage to the prefrontal cortex are still perfectly capable of performing many tasks, but encounter problems (or have delayed reactions) when things become complex, as is the case in social situations. Goldberg pointed to two other functions of the prefrontal cortex. First, our ability to empathise; and second, to activate certain sequences of actions, especially those involved in complex situations. For example, if you have years of leadership experience, you automatically know what steps to take in many situations. Goldberg gives the example of Winston Churchill, who suffered occasional mental lapses, but remained a brilliant leader despite his age.
There are four areas of the brain essential to wisdom (see figure 20). First, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which plays a role in emotional responses and decision-making. Second, the outside of the prefrontal cortex (technically speaking, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), which is involved in rational thought and determining a strategy to solve problems. Third, the anterior part of the cingulate cortex, which detects conflicts between competing interests and between rational processes and emotions. And finally, lying deep in the brain, the striatum, which is the brain structure activated by stimuli associated with reward.
FIGURE 20. Areas of the brain that are essential to wisdom: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (in the frontal lobe at the bottom), the dorsolateral (or the outside of the) prefrontal cortex, the cingulate cortex, and the anterior (front) part of the striatum.
Research has provided indications that older people are more focused on the rewards that follow good solutions than on the negative consequences of mistakes, which means that they place an emphasis on achieving constructive answers rather than preventing errors. If you want to teach a 75-year-old to use a computer, it’s better to concentrate on what they do well, rather than constantly pointing out their mistakes or reminding them to do things differently. While it’s fine to occasionally say, ‘Hang on, that’s not the right way!’ when teaching a younger person a new task, it’s the wrong strategy where an older person is concerned. This could be the result of changes in the way that certain areas of the brain function as we age: the anterior cingulate cortex, involved in error detection, is less rapidly activated (in many people, the number of grey cells in this area declines as they age) while the structures forming the ‘reward system’ remain unaffected.
Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure electrical activity along the scalp, a team of German researchers found that a spike in brain activity occurred in young and middle-aged people when they were informed that they had made a mistake. This spike represents activity in the cingulate cortex. The more elevated the spike was (and therefore the stronger the activity in the brain), the faster the person learned from the mistake. But in older subjects, the spike was much weaker. Older people use other regions of the brain in learning, primarily the prefrontal cortex, which is essential to working memory. Though the function of this area of the brain also declines slightly, many older people manage to get the best out of it. They do this partly by mobilising extra brain activity, as we saw in chapter 2.
In general, older people have more difficulty with completely new tasks than with ones in which they can fall back on existing knowledge gained through experience. The well-stocked ‘database’ that they have built up over the years helps them resolve many routine issues with ease.
Dr Oury Monchi of the University of Montreal in Canada likes to refer to one of Aesop’s fables when explaining the results of his research into the brains of elderly people. In the race between the tortoise and the hare, it is the tortoise that wins, even though he is much slower. He knows how to make the best use of his abilities, while the arrogant hare takes a nap during the race. Monchi and his colleagues asked a group of older and a group of younger adults to classify words into categories while in an MRI scanner. Words could be categorised according to rhyme, meaning, and their initial letter, but the researcher constantly changed the rules without informing the subjects. While classification according to rhyme (‘door’ would belong with ‘floor’) was initially correct, it suddenly became wrong and the subjects had to decide whether they should now categorise by meaning (‘door’ would belong with ‘house’). The older subjects, unlike their younger counterparts, did not show increased brain activity in response to negative feedback (‘Wrong!’). Rather, they exhibited increased brain activity primarily when they had to make new choices about the words. In other words, they appeared to invest more in thinking up new strategies to perform the task, which is a more active response than simply reacting to error warnings.
THE EXPERIENCED DECISION-MAKER
Many psychological experiments are artificial: the tasks they set have nothing to do with daily life. In this type of artificial test, people who are around 20 perform better than those around 70. An example of this is where the subject repeatedly has to choose one of four cards shown on a computer screen. Because a different (bigger or smaller) reward is attached to each card, subjects can discover which strategy offers the most benefit. Younger people are often better at this than their older counterparts.
In this test, each decision is isolated: earlier decisions have no effect on later decisions. But in daily life, one decision often has an impact on another, and choosing short-term benefits may not always lead to long-term gains. Imagine you’d really like to take a holiday in France, but it’s too expensive. So every year you go to New Zealand. But you could do without a holiday one year and save the money to go to France the next. The first part of the decision (no holiday one year) is less rewarding, but the next part (achieving your dream of visiting France) more than compensates. Or you decide to buy a more expensive washing machine, which produces no immediate benefit in comparison with a cheaper model, but may in the long term save money in terms of energy consumption, repairs, and the machine’s longer lifespan.
With this idea in mind, psychologists at the University of Texas performed an experiment based on realistic scenarios in which one decision affected subsequent decisions. The best possible strategy could only be adopted if the subject had a long-term vision. Here, older subjects performed better than younger people. It is not that young people cannot do this, but it is remarkable that older people can do it better, given that their executive functions (working memory, ability to compare, cognitive flexibility) deteriorate as they age. Again, experience may be an important factor.
Research has also demonstrated that older people take fewer risks in financial decision-making and are less impulsive. This is to do with their greater use of both hemispheres. In ambiguous situations where the risk of losing is greater than that of winning, this decision-making style is more sensible than a risk-taking approach. Nevertheless, it is sometimes necessary to take risks in order to progress. To get the best of both worlds, it might be wise for financial organisations and investment banks to employ people over 65 alongside their younger staff.
MAKE HASTE SLOWLY
As we have seen, not all our mental faculties go downhill as we age. Many of them (including language skills, logical reasoning, general knowledge, and spatial insight) hardly decline at all. And older people are even better than their younger counterparts in solving certain kinds of problems. They can call on a larger database of knowledge and experience, and can make complex decisions relying on intuition.
Paradoxically, this may — at least partly — be the result of the fact that older people’s brains work more slowly, so they react less impulsively. And because it takes longer for them to arrive at a decision, they have more information on which to base it. According to Louis Cozolino, you might expect three phenomena in wise people, neuropsychologically speaking: more diverse activation of different areas of the brain, slower processing of information, and integration of cognitive and emotional functions. And that is precisely what the ageing brain is like. There is more diversity in the use of brain structures, because older people can draw on a greater store of knowledge amassed over the years and have learned more ways to tackle a problem. We have seen that they are more likely to use both sides of the brain, which then work together to achieve good results. Cozolino’s second point, on slower information processing, is inevitable given the fact that the brain’s highways (the white-matter pathways) break down as it ages. The advantage of this, on the other hand, is that fewer hasty conclusions are reached. And better integration of cognitive and emotional functioning is the result of older people learning to assess the value of both reason and emotion, and to give each its own place.
IMPORTANT INSIGHTS