The Wisdom Paradox

Elkhonon Goldberg has written an interesting book (The Wisdom Paradox) about how our minds change as we get older. Most of us think that things get worse, but Goldberg argues that some things may get better. Interesting?

Goldberg spends some time in the book reviewing what we know about how mental abilities change as we get older. This is usually called cognitive aging. People often think that our mental abilities get worse as we get older, but many people don’t know that some things may actually get better. Things that ask us to work quickly (psychomotor speed) or keep several things in mind at once (working memory) are performed more poorly as we get older, it’s true. But things like knowing words, general knowledge, and judgment may actually get better.

That’s where Dr. Goldberg’s book comes in. He argues that life experience can help us to recognize patterns around us, and that these patterns are what make up wisdom. For those of us over 50, it means that we can often figure out things faster than our younger counterparts. They may be able to do some things faster, true, but it may take them longer to figure things out. Older people can take longer if they have to figure out something new, but can work more efficiently when it’s something they’ve seen before.

Now that might sound good and bad. You can cope with old situations pretty well, but new ones can be challenging. What does it mean overall?

First, think about how many really new situations you have to cope with. Buying a car? Did that one a couple of times. Buying a house, investing money, coping with difficult family members? Been doing that one for decades. And research shows that older adults often do just as well or better than younger people in areas such as this.

Second, you need to know that even though some mental abilities are worse as you get older, it doesn’t mean that you lost them completely. You may not learn how to surf the Web on a computer as quickly as a 10 year old, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t. In fact, there’s more and more research that shows that older people can perform new tasks just as well if their unique needs are taken into account. My colleagues and I did a symposium on this topic last year (2005) at the meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, and it was pretty well attended.

So if you think about, it’s a good thing that younger people are quicker — they have a lot more to learn! It’s only fair to them. Otherwise, older persons’ abilities might put them at an unfair advantage.

The book is called The Wisdom Paradox. You can find it in our Amazon bookstore here.

If you’re interested in our symposium, contact me or leave a comment.