Getting Smarter

An article in Forbes suggests that older minds make better decisions. I agree with this idea just as completely as I would have disagreed with it 30 years ago, and just as completely as people 30 years younger than me disagree with it now.

The article is by a researcher who's a part of a new study center at Stanford University that's going to be examining longevity and its impact on how we live. It's going to pay attention to some of the physical neurological changes in our brains as we age that may offer clues to understanding the kinds of things we may take for granted. That neurological knowledge may be interesting, but I am not certain there will be a lot of new discoveries about larger issues rising out of this research. And that's because it is indeed studying things that we take for granted, and we take them for granted because they are often true.

For example, the idea that older minds make better decisions is obvious to anyone who's turned over enough calendar pages to understand the idea of gaining wisdom through experience. Even 18-year-old me, who would scoff at the idea that the decrepit wreck he would one day become could be smarter than he was then, understood that the gap in knowledge between himself and the person he was at eight came largely through experience. He knew more than that third grader because he had done more things than the third grader had. His inability to then flip that equation over to realize that others -- such as his father, for example -- might also have more wisdom because they had done more than he had was something he had yet to lose.

Although the institute will probably open up some interesting areas of learning how the brain works, there is already quite a body of research that supports the idea that older brains make better decisions. Middle-aged brains, for example, did not make Justin Bieber famous. They made Aldo Nova and Milli Vanilli famous, but they did that back before they were middle-aged.

(H/T Big Think)