The Getting of Wisdom

The Getting of Wisdom

Professor Elkhonon Goldberg who is Clinical Professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine and director of the East West Science and Education Foundation is back in town and was recently interviewed on Radio National. I have included a link to the full radio interview.

It‘s interesting to realise the human brain requires regular workouts, so start sweating your brain, particularly into old age, thats if you want to enjoy your mental life to its fullest.

Other encouraging news is as we get older the left brain becomes more predominant in our everyday life and providing we have challenged our ourselves to some degree during our life it makes us wiser. The left brain is the repository of past experiences and understandings enabling it to identify new pattens because of the similarities to past experiences. The right brain is utilised for novel concepts and as the sum total of our past experience grows the need for right brain thinking diminishes. That's because having experienced many past similar patterns stored in our left brain it’s easier for us as we get older to relate to new patterns without having to start from scratch so we become wiser.

I think this is not understood in society and particularly in business. I see many young people struggling to come to grips with novel situations, or taking much longer to complete multi faceted tasks than mature workers. Its not that one person is brighter than another, just the sum result of experiences add up too a considerable advantage. Interestingly our society up until fairly recently did not appreciate this fact and a real stigma was attached to older workers.

It reminds me of the of the Dot com boom when seasoned campaigners queried the validity of the boom and correctly predicted it would burst with an almighty collapse.

It’s a fascinating interview, just click on the link.