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 Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich , npr.org "If you've ever kept a journal, you've probably worried about someone coming across it and getting an uninvited peek into your personal life. But the daily traces we leave behind in our writings – more and more in today's world of emails,...

by Caroline Bassett, The Wisdom Institute "Recently, on a trip East from my home in Minnesota, my sister and I visited a 101-year-old friend of the family, an exemplar of elder wisdom, who lives in rural Massachusetts. Aunt Jane, as we called her (not her real name and some details have been changed...

The fall, 2009 issue of Itineraries is titled "The Harvest of Wisdom" and focuses on elder wisdom. Table of Contents Caroline Bassett Elder Wisdom Drew Leder The Tao of Longevity Margaret Owen Thorpe Bird Wisdom Robert C. Atchley Serving from Spirit Jane F. Gilgun The Yellow Brick Road of Not...

By Val Farmer | INFORUM "There is one quality that improves with age. That quality happens to be a wonderful virtue. It is wisdom. Wisdom encompasses other virtues. Wisdom incorporates other virtues that are essential to happiness. A wise person will have embraced principles of love, service and...

The Los Angeles Times recently printed an article about How to Live , by Henry Alford, a comedian who set out to write a book about wisdom. "Nothing distresses one of my friends more than hearing that someone has died short of their 70th birthday and Psalm 90's promise of three score and 10...

by Andrew Zuckerman "Inspired by the idea that wisdom is the greatest gift one generation can give to another, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman interviewed, photographed and filmed 50 of the world's great writers, actors, artists, designers, politicians, musicians and...

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain The New York Times By SARA REISTAD-LONG Published: May 20, 2008 When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong...

The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis The New York Times By STEPHEN S. HALL Published: May 6, 2007 In 1950, the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, in a famous treatise on the phases of life development, identified wisdom as a likely, but not inevitable, byproduct of growing older. Wisdom arose, he suggested, during...

By Dani Dumitriu, Jiandong Hao, Yuko Hara, Jeffrey Kaufmann, William G. M. Janssen, Wendy Lou, Peter R. Rapp, and John H. Morrison Age-associated memory impairment (AAMI) occurs in many mammalian species, including humans. In contrast to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), in which circuit disruption occurs through...

Nicholas W. Simon , Candi L. LaSarge , Karienn S. Montgomery , Matthew T. Williams , Ian A. Mendez , Barry Setlow , Jennifer L. Bizon The ability to make advantageous choices among outcomes that differ in magnitude, probability, and delay until their arrival is critical for optimal survival and well...

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...

by Ute Kunzmann and David Richter Previously, we found that during films about age-typical losses, older adults experienced greater sadness than young adults, whereas their physiological responses were just as large. In the present study, our goal was to replicate this finding and extend past work by...

By P. J. Henry and David O Sears 'The conventional wisdom is that racial prejudice remains largely stable through adulthood. However, very little is known about the development of contemporary racial attitudes like symbolic racism. The growing crystallization of symbolic racism through the lifespan...

This study examined the psychosocial correlates and psychometric properties of the Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale (SAWS) (Webster, 2003 a). Seventy-three men and 98 women ranging in age from 17-92 years (Mean age = 42.77) completed an expanded, 40-item version of the SAWS, the Loyola Generativity Scale,...

This research uses an autobiographical approach to examine the relation of age to several aspects of wisdom. In Study 1, adolescents', young adults', and older adults' wisdom narratives were content-coded for the types of life situations mentioned and the forms that wisdom took. Types of...

Narrative approaches in the field of aging are receiving increasing attention by theorists and practitioners alike. This article draws on recent thinking in narrative gerontology to look at three aspects of aging on which a narrative perspective can shed further light. In relation to the temporal aspects...

Although wisdom is thought to be a strong predictor for many attributes of aging well, the concept of wisdom still lacks a comprehensive, directly testable scale. Quantitative and qualitative interviews with a.sample of 180 older adults (age 52-plus) were conducted to develop a three-dimensional wisdom...

This study examines cross-cultural age-related patterns of two modes of wisdom : the analytical (i.e., Knowledge Database, Abstract Reasoning), and the synthetic (i.e., Reflective Understanding, Emotional Empathy, and Emotional Regulation). A total of 68 American and 68 Japanese community-dwelling adults...