By Andrew Moseman | Discover Magazine "It would be an advertiser’s dream: knowing the exact location in your brain that indicates whether an ad has worked, and whether you intend to buy that cat food or wear that suntan lotion. Now, some researchers claim they’ve found a region which might predict...

By Charles Q. Choi "The dozen students and scientists spread over an area called Furnace Creek looked like cyborgs in floppy hats scrabbling over the boulders. Before hammering chips off rocks, they inspected them with magnifying lenses held up next to eyeglasses sporting miniature cameras and infrared...

By Dr. Judith Rich from The Huffington Post. "I just returned from the Wisdom 2.0 conference, held last weekend in Mountain View, CA at the Computer History Museum. Hoping to discover more about wisdom, I came away with a new understanding and appreciation for the amazing role technology is playing...

By Lama Surya Das from The Huffington Post . "Wisdom is an endangered natural resource today in our Over-Information Age, where knowledge is rising and genuine sagacity increasingly rare. If we wish to become wiser and more sane, we'd do well exploit and develop our own innate natural resources...

By Soren Gordhamer from The Huffington Post. "It is by most estimates an odd group to bring together ... the Vice President of Engineering at Twitter, the Vice President of Products at Google, along with a Zen teacher, and editors from the Huffington Post and the popular social media blog, Mashable...

From TED "Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics...

by David Munger from Seed Magazine "Medical writer Tom Rees devotes his blog Epiphenom to the scientific study of religion. Last week he examined a study on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly , this study by Satoshi Kanazawa replicated...

by Melinda Wenner from Scientific American " Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social...

by Philip Ball from Nature News "Medieval monarchies might not have had many things to recommend them compared with liberal democracies, but here's one: our rulers have no Fools. How often now will a national leader employ someone to laugh at their folly and remind them of bitter truths? More...

by Natalie Angier in The New York Times "The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage...

We all know the story in which science supposedly demonstrates a Bumblebee only flies because it doesn’t know it can’t. I know the real story but like that one better because the bumblebee still goes about its daily tasks, unencumbered by knowing about all the impossible parameters which are being erroneously...

By Eerik Lagerspetz There is a permanent tension between the requirements of substantive goodness or wisdom and those of formal legitimacy in public decision-making. This article charts the various attempts to reconcile the two requirements within decision rules. First, the history of decision rules...

By Lewis Asimeng-Boahene Preparing children to function effectively as global citizens in today's complex and ethnically polarized nations and the world, will require students who think critically about the knowledge of the histories, experiences, and the cultural practices of other parts of the...

By Christopher Cannon In an essay in which he explored the nature of the proverb, Kenneth Burke wondered why it would not be possible to 'extend such analysis … to encompass the whole field of literature'. For Burke, the possibility for such extension stemmed from a similarity in 'strategy'...

By Kurt C. Strange The information age presents great opportunity to move from data to information to knowledge and potentially to go further to generate understanding and wisdom. As information is generated in ever smaller segments, however, and as we use information for increasingly narrow purposes...

By Dilip V. Jeste, Monika Ardelt, Dan Blazer, Helena C. Kraemer, George Vaillant and Thomas W. Meeks Purpose: Wisdom has received increasing attention in empirical research in recent years, especially in gerontology and psychology, but consistent definitions of wisdom remain elusive. We sought to better...

By Christopher McMahon The paper distinguishes two ways of understanding a wise society. A society can be wise by virtue of possessing mostly true evaluative beliefs. Or it can be wise by virtue of employing rational procedures of collective belief formation. If the first possibility involves the society's...

Stephen S. Hall "A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue. We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science...

by Igor Grossmann, Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Denise C. Park, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Speci fi cally, older...

Leslie E. Anderson Parties can be a crucial to democratic function but not all parties or party systems are democratic. Some parties are fully competitive within a pluralist system while others, notably hegemonic parties, are antithetical to democracy. Between competitive, pluralist party systems and...

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee Wise Counsel Research— www.wisecounselresearch.org To continue our discussion of wisdom and wise counsel in the context of comedy, on June 1 our reading group discussed Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim . We began with the question, “What is Jim’s luck?” and with the...

by Keith Whitaker, Defining Wisdom Grantee Wise Counsel Research— www.wisecounselresearch.org After our recent conversation about the Fool in King Lear , our reading group decided to pursue wisdom in a comic context, with the character of Jeeves—the seemingly omniscient “gentleman’s gentleman”—in the...

“Defining Wisdom” is an interdisciplinary research program within the Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago. Twenty groups of researchers from a wide range of disciplines have been awarded two-year grants under the program to investigate the nature and benefits of wisdom. As a group, we have...

As a philosophical concept and cultural ideal, wisdom has enjoyed a long history. It has also acquired a prestige such that one cannot speak of “bad wisdom” or “undesirable wisdom.” Wisdom is good – and where it is lacking, the lack is always regretted. Part of what makes wisdom prestigious is its elusive...

At the Defining Wisdom Network Meeting in June 2009, participants were asked to come up with a series of questions about wisdom that might shed light on the broad issues of our project. One participant asked the following question: “Has the world become more or less wise in the last 50 years? Or is the...

I just came back from our first conference of “wisdom scholars” in Chicago, and was fascinated by the topics that the wisdom grant winners are investigating. I thought I would try to blog about a topic that allowed me to mention several of them. Wisdom commonly is thought of as something that one accumulates...