Are old people really wise?

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.

Zou 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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