Wisdom: We Still Don't Get It

Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor,

LiveScience.com

There is more information than ever at our fingertips, yet

we're none the wiser it seems.

And many old people are wise, as most of them will tell

you, but sometimes they can't remember your name, so

how smart is that?

It's paradoxes like these that lie at the heart of a new

$2 million research project called Defining Wisdom.

Based at the University of Chicago, the four-year

initiative, supported by the Templeton Foundation, has

enlisted 23 scholars ranging from historians to

economists to psychologists to computer scientists to

examine the idea of wisdom, with the aim of cultivating it

and better understanding its nature.

Definitions of wisdom are all over the map, even among

the funded scholars interviewed for this story. The

communications scientist says wisdom involves

intelligence that is sensitive to the needs of others and

makes a good use of judgment. The computer scientist

says wisdom involves being able to quickly access

information from compressed datasets. And the historian

refuses to impose a definition and prefers to draw it out

of the historical contexts she studies.

None of these three researchers seems to be willing to

state whether wisdom today is greater or less than it

used to be, but each is taking a stab at seeing how

wisdom can be understood and measured.

Shaking things up

Earthquakes, of all things, have offered significant

opportunities for society to figure out what constitutes

wisdom, says Barnard College's Deborah Coen, who

studies the history of science and is interested in wisdom

as the capacity to navigate the rough waters between

technical expertise and what the rest of us know and

experience. As such, wisdom is more than commanding

facts, aka knowledge.

Coen's new research will focus on how lay people's

observations helped scholars and others make sense of

earthquakes during a period from 1857 to 1914. This era

was the "hey-day of human observation of earthquakes,"

Coen said, in a time before mechanical detectors of

earthquakes were reliable.

Scholars of the time thought it was imperative to observe

earthquakes scientifically, and relied on eyewitnesses to

answer questions about an earthquake's duration. At the

same time, though, some thinkers ironically believed that

people who experienced earthquakes repeatedly had

their rationality destroyed, leaving them desensitized to

the experience and, in a way, incapable of contributing to

higher science or culture.

So a "science of the lay people" flew in the face of one's

fear of the natural world. A contradiction emerged

between common sense and scientific experts who

redefined a modern form of wisdom - in this case about

earthquakes.

Nowadays, lay people are mostly excluded from the

scientific process, but in the late 19th century, there was

a "moment of opportunity for collaboration, negotiation

and communication between experts and lay people.

Experts needed lay people's eyes ears and hands," Coen

said.

There is no more or less wisdom today about

earthquakes than before, but we have missed an

opportunity, she said, (although a scientist today would

surely claim there is a lot more knowledge about

temblors).

"We have cut off options for ourselves," Coen said. "The

technocratic age has limited the modes of communication

between experts and lay people."

Compression and computers

Historians cannot quantify wisdom, Coen says, but that is

exactly what Ankur Gupta, a computer scientist at Butler

University in Indiana, is trying to do. His latest project

investigates data compression, which is the process that

takes, for instance, a high-fidelity digital music file and

reduces it to a much smaller mp3-format file that you can

play on your iPod or other music player. The data has

been reduced but the file still sounds like the original to

most listeners.

"The goal is to try to use data compression as a

mathematical measure of wisdom," Gupta said.

You might think that's fine for music. But what about

digitizing the entire universe, or one's perception of it at

least, and then trying to see what information is

contained in that digital representation?

Data compression, and the organizing and sorting of the

data involved in that process, would be an approach to

getting at what the information contained in such a

digitized world.

"The process of data compression is the process of

categorizing the information that is there," Gupta said,

adding that the wisdom achieved is implicit. "I may not tell

you what that wisdom is in an explicit form, but I'll give

you a compressed representation of that wisdom. Then I'll

allow you to search that compressed representation very

quickly."

How fast can you find your scissors?

The project also will deal with the speed of wisdom.

Sherlock Holmes is a good metaphor for the project goals

in that case.

"If you go back and read Sherlock Holmes tales, he does

not make every decision in a purely logical way," Gupta

said. "He employs some undefined cognitive process

along with logic ... Moreover, the value of what he does it

would be irrelevant if he gave you the answer 40 years

later."

Holmes' genius was partly his ability to access

compressed data quickly, one might argue.

But to bring the notion of compression to everyday life, a

scientific assessment of any one person's wisdom would

be "tough," Gupta said, because you'd have to digitize

someone's entire life experience via interviews and other

approaches. Even those approaches would be biased by

the interview questions and other contextual issues, like

what the person ate that day, the lighting and so on.

"I think the wisdom that I'm talking about isn't as much

about human experience but more about how to deal with

the massive amount of data that we have available," he

said. Understanding that data may lead to better

compression.

"It's a compelling goal to attempt to quantify wisdom in

any domain, even if the initial approaches in this project

may not be immediately applicable to readers," Gupta

said.

You know it when you hear it

Here's another paradox about wisdom - the elderly are

the wisest people on Earth because they've been around

so long. Or so many people say. But as we age, our

mastery of language starts to drop and many of us sound,

to be frank, more stupid. Our sentences get shorter. Our

grammar tends to decline. And we have trouble

recalling ... what is the word? ... vocabulary. And proper

nouns.

These troubles are no joke for people who lose their

ability to convey their thoughts, a condition called

aphasia. This often happens to people who suffer

strokes. But for most people with healthy minds, cognitive

decline is as inevitable as taxes and that other thing.

So Jean Gordon of the University of Iowa, a

communications scientist who has done a lot of work in

the past on aphasia, plans to use the Templeton money

to study how our perception of wisdom varies with how

others use language and how that relates to age. She will

use a variety of language measures to test this on 48

subjects, varying such things as the age of speakers and

what they speak about.

Wisdom is in the ear, or really, the mind, of the beholder,

she says. More knowledge about wisdom is perceived

and passed on can help medical providers assist people

with language use disorders.

"People's perceptions are very tied up in speakers'

competence with language. It's the way that we maintain

social connections and maintain our identity," Gordon

said.

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