As we established earlier, wisdom and competence come with age. Does this mean that as we age, we acquire these precious traits as a matter of course, the way we acquire gray hair and wrinkled skin? (That would be nice, wouldn’t it?) But it does not happen in an assured, preordained way. In a book of interviews published by the renowned Australian radio journalist Peter Thompson, the subtitle is as important as the title: Wisdom: The Hard-Won Gift. The gift of wisdom is a reward, not an entitlement. It has to be earned. And likewise you have to work for your competence.To revert to the language of the brain, both wisdom and competence are attained through the accumulation of attractors allowing pattern recognition in important situations. Well, then, it stands to reason that some people spend a lifetime accumulating such patterns, and others… less so. Every human being accumulates a certain pattern-recognition capability in the course of his or her lifetime. But not every human being accumulates the patterns necessary for the solution of problems of genuine importance to a significant number of other people. Generally speaking, people who have spent their lifetime dealing with strenuous mental challenges and who have been good at it, in other words people who are both bright and have been mentally active most of their lives, are rewarded with extra mental resistance to the effects of aging.This became quite apparent when the relationship between reasoning ability and general knowledge (including language vocabulary) was examined. In people with low reasoning ability, general knowledge and vocabulary were either constant as they aged or showed actual decline. But in people with high reasoning ability both knowledge and vocabulary actually continued to increase with age—all the way to the age of eighty years old!So it appears that the gift of effortless and powerful pattern recognition as a way of solving problems that faze other people is the culmination of and the reward for a lifetime of facing up to such mental challenges. In those who earned this reward, the gift of wisdom, to use Peter Thompson’s turn of phrase, has an amazing staying power in the face of aging and of all manner of neurological assaults on the brain. The great American psychologist William James was right when he said: “Could the youth but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in their plastic state.”Those in whom “the bundles of [acquired] habits” include genuine competence continue to reap its benefits well into old age. Today, an increasing number of aged individuals elect to remain active in the workplace. This is a very welcome and demographically realistic development. But it has also triggered the concerns that their performance on the job would be compromised because of age. But the concerns proved to be basically unfounded: Studies have shown that there is no relationship between aging and job performance. It simply does not decline with age.Job-related competencies are reflected in so-called “tacit knowledge,” the kind of procedural knowledge helpful in solving everyday problems arising in the workplace that is not taught explicitly as part of formal training. Research has shown that tacit knowledge does not suffer any appreciable decline with age, which may explain the lack of a negative relationship between aging and job performance. In fact, tacit knowledge declines far less than the isolated mental faculties (memory, attention, and so forth) usually assessed through formal neuropsychological tests. This means that an aging professional is likely to continue to be sound on the job, despite the decline in memory and attention.*30\302\2*
MEMORIES, PATTERNS, AND THE MACHINERY OF WISDOM: “BUNDLES OF HABITS”
Posted: under Anti-Psychotics.
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