The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older by Elkhonon Goldberg

The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older Reviews

• 
  Rossdavidh

  Subtitle: How your mind can grow stronger as your brain grows older.
  
  So, what is the equivalent of a midlife crisis for a clinical professor of neurology, with a private practice in neuropsychology? Getting an MRI scan of your brain. And then writing a book about what it means for your brain to get older.
  
  This is one of several books I have read to compare the scientific study of the mind/brain today, to the study of the planets and stars in Galileo's time, just after the invention of the telescope. It's not that no one studied astronomy before Galileo's time, or that no one studied the brain before now. But once you have a way to look directly at what you're talking about, it can clarify your theories considerably (or completely discredit them).
  
  What Goldberg found, when he had his brain scanned (Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, was the scan used), was that by and large he was in good shape. But, his brain had changed a bit, in the normal way for a man in his fifties (i.e. it shrunk), and this got him thinking about the phenomenon of wisdom.
  
  Crudely speaking, why do we tend to think of old people as being wiser? We now know that the brains of older people, even when they are not suffering from Alzheimer's or any similar condition, is somewhat smaller than that of young adults. At the same time, we tend to think of an intelligent old person as being wiser than that same person when they were twenty years younger.
  
  One possibility, of course, is that this is just society being nice. Maybe older people are actually dumber, and we just feel it's rude to say, so we use the term 'wisdom' to hide the fact that they are less 'clever'. But if that were the case, we would never think of a young person being 'wise beyond their years' in a positive way, and anyway words which begin as euphemisms quickly become negative (e.g. 'recession' in economics), and the term 'wisdom' has been regarded positively in all English-speaking societies we know of, and most other languages have a similar term.
  
  Goldberg's thesis, which he develops methodically and in an unhurried style and which I will give a spoiler for here, is that the difference rests in how our brain hemispheres divide up the task of thinking. It should be said that there have been a lot of different theories on this, and most have been discredited eventually, but Goldberg's is that our right brain is in charge of processing novel information or learning new things, and our left brain is in charge of storing skills and knowledge that is no longer novel. When learning a new skill, our right brain (and to a lesser degree front left) do most of the work, and over time the work load for this skill shifts to our left brain (and to a lesser degree back right).
  
  Unless, of course, your right brain has partially atrophied, or you are one of those left-handed people who divide up work differently between hemispheres than most of us do. But however the work is divided, Goldberg's contention is that different parts of the brain are dominant in early childhood (when most of what we encounter is novel) and later in life (when most of what we encounter is not novel). As we age, most of us begin to avoid topics which require us to use our right brain, and rely on the skills we have already built up. 'Wisdom' is our word for these already developed skills of recognizing a pattern which we already know how to deal with. If you're wise, you've memorized a lot of patterns, and at a high level of abstraction.
  
  Goldberg's exposition, of course, is not nearly as simplistic as this, and he delivers a great deal of evidence from many different fields of study in support of his view. Then, we come to the part of the book where we may ask ourselves, "so what?"
  
  The answer depends on whether you are a fatalist about this atrophy of the right hemisphere. If you are not, then the prescription is to intentionally put yourself into novel situations which you do not know well how to handle (e.g. learning a new language, or hobby, or career). The way to prevent any part of the brain (or for that matter, the entire body) from atrophying from disuse, is to use it. Take the stairs, not the elevator. Walk, don't drive. Read it in the original language, not the translation. Learn a new programming language every year. Travel in foreign countries. Join a book club where you read things you wouldn't normally choose on your own.
  
  Such as, for example, this book!
• 
  Olatomiwa Bifarin

  Yet, some more evidences from a top neuropsychologist that we can change our brain: 'biology' is not fixed, it is a range; but more importantly - the message about attractors and aging give me some sort of relief, joy. Thank you Dr. Goldberg.
• 
  amberle

  leggendolo ho scoperto perchè diavolo perdo un sacco di tempo a somministrare il test degli occhi, quindi assolutamente promosso!
• 
  Datschneids

  *Larry David voice* "pretty, pretttttty, prettttty, prettttty good."
• 
  Amy

  Meh. Parts of this were really dry. Could be much more succinct.
• 
  John

  I was glad when I realized that this was not just a book on aging and the wisdom that sometimes accompanies it. This book was neither just another boring book about the neuroscience of the brain. Rather, I would characterize it as an entertaining and insightful journey into the aging mind, how it functions with memory, how that is connected to what we think about wisdom and then how to comprehend the science of the brain in the light of this. Elkhonon Goldberg has indeed written a great book, but not without a few weaknesses. He does let his scientific mind get ahead sometimes and goes into details a mere mortal could easily skip because it is impossible to retain. There is a lot of talk about the right and left hemisphere, but I think in the whole it is defendable as Goldberg does circle it back to the topic at hand. I could also do without some of the mentions about diseases, but it does have its place in order to explain cognitive decay and brain functions. I think this may be the most accessible neuroscience book I've read so far and it was even better the second time reading it.
• 
  Mckochan

  "How" becomes the title word to parse. If you are looking for a scientific look at brain function, a physiology lesson, and an evaluation if the scientific community, to a degree, this is the book for you. In 2005 it may have been a breakthrough, but in 2014 it seems obvious the brain can be strengthened. Still, the various roles and interactions in the areas of both hemispheres us interesting.
  
  If you are looking for any practical advice in "how" to strengthen a brain, well, the only solution is to move to NYC, unless you are already smart enough to live there, and attend the author's cognition exercise sessions. Exercise your mind. That's the generic advice, and you better have starter as a child.
  
  There's a lot if ego to get through here, likely related to being top if one's field and superior in many ways, as we learn, so perhaps a more recent book would be a better choice as science has advanced.
• 
  Sarah Milne

  My gosh, I love this book! I need to take the time to do a good review, but I just spent too much time blasting Franzen's new book, so perhaps later. Goldberg is awesome. This is not exactly a pop-neuro book, but it is (I think) very, very accessible. Goldberg's work on the gradiential model (proposed opposite to a strictly modular model) is present in what he writes here, as well as other principles he expounds in less accessible forms in The New Executive Brain, and he is able to bring that down to a pretty dang readable level in this book. He makes, to my mind, an entirely convincing case for cognitive fitness and exercise. I get so excited about this idea. How liberating! How empowering! And this isn't some wishy-washy, feel-good, soft science idea. This is science - researched, elaborated, defended, explored, and packaged beautifully. Ya, I love this stuff.
• 
  Tim Gannon

  A very enjoyable read in the field of neuropsychology. The author was a student of Luria. Luria was a very famous neuropsychologist from Russia. After training under Luria, the author left Russia and eventually came to the U.S. where he works as a neuropsychologist.
  
  In this text, he examined the attributes of wisdom and genius. Much time was spent on on the underlying neural architecture, connections and processes that have an impact on how we learn, remember and problem solve. Hemispheric, cortical vs subcortical, emotion, disease and trauma, neuroplasticity, language, types of memory, cognitive training, resiliency, and age-related changes are a few of the areas that are covered.
  
  Very fascinating and informative. It could be quite useful information if you do any work with patients experiencing cognitive problems.
• 
  Ouroboros

  paradigmatic shift: mind opener to viewing fn of hemispheric lateralization [pulled me out of the viscous swamp of pop-psych fallacies:]
  
  lorenz attractors: buffering for aging
  
  pattern recognition: reinforcement thru repetition
• 
  Yael

  A bit harder to read than I expected - it might have been easier in a paper version, in which you can browse to retrieve things read previously.
  I wonder if there are new findings supporting his theory...
  
• 
  Daniel

  a hard read unless you're a brain expert.
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  Tim

  I really decent read for the intermediate neurohack.
• 
  Johann Fourie

  Good read - even if you don't have any medical background
• 
  Kathy Cramer

  Things we need to know as we grow older.