A seat of wisdom in the brain?

Two re­search­ers have com­piled what they say is the first schol­arly re­view of the ba­sis in the brain of wis­dom—once the sole prov­ince of re­li­gion and phi­los­o­phy.

The study by Dilip V. Jeste and Thom­as W. Meeks of the Uni­ver­s­ity of Ca­li­for­nia, San Die­go, was pub­lished in the re­search jour­nal Ar­chives of Gen­er­al Psy­chi­a­try on April 6.

“Defin­ing wis­dom is rath­er sub­jec­tive, though there are many si­m­i­lar­i­ties in def­i­ni­tion across time and cul­tures,” said Jeste, a psy­chi­a­trist and neu­ro­sci­ent­ist. But “our re­search sug­gests that there may be a ba­sis in neuro­bi­ol­o­gy for wis­dom’s most un­iver­sal traits.”

Wis­dom has been de­fined over cen­turies and civ­il­iz­a­tions to en­com­pass nu­mer­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal traits. Com­po­nents of wis­dom are com­monly agreed to in­clude such at­tributes as em­pa­thy, com­pas­sion or al­tru­ism, emo­tion­al sta­bil­ity, self-un­der­stand­ing, and pro-social at­ti­tudes, in­clud­ing a tol­er­ance for oth­ers’ val­ues.

“But ques­tions re­main: is wis­dom un­iver­sal, or cul­tur­ally based?” said Jeste. “Is it un­iquely hu­man, re­lat­ed to age? Is it de­pend­ent on ex­pe­ri­ence or can wis­dom be taugh­t?”


Source: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090424_wisdom