He identifies eight neural pillars of wisdom (each is a separate chapter in the book):
-- emotional regulation: the art of coping
-- knowing what's important: the neural mechanisms of establishing a value and making a judgment
-- moral reasoning: the biology of judging right from wrong
-- compassion: the biology of loving-kindness and empathy
-- humility: the gift of perspective
-- altruism: social justice, fairness, and the wisdom of punishment
-- patience: temptation, delayed gratification, and the biology of learning to wait for larger rewards
-- dealing with uncertainty: change, "meta-wisdom", and the vulcanization of the human brain
Basically, though, it comes down to one thing:
So much of wisdom hinges on decisions that involve our relationships with others that almost everything we've been talking about in terms of wisdom, neurologically and psychologically, eventually curls back to a discussion of social intelligence.
I liked this definition:
Most of all, wisdom is a balancing act, a kind of spiritual gyroscope that seeks and requires equilibrium in the face of constantly changing forces and interests.
Specifically, by the definition of Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg, wisdom is the application of intelligence, creativity, and knowledge toward the achievement of a common good through a balance among the following:
-- intrapersonal vs. interpersonal vs. extrapersonal interests
-- short-term vs. long-term
-- adaptation to existing environment vs. shaping of existing environment vs. selection of a new environment
Why we hunger for wisdom:
Humans have that second relentless cognitive clock ticking inside their heads, counting down in a covert yet unassailably certain way the hours and minutes of our remaining time on Earth. Just as we literally hunger for food and water to forestall physiological death, we figuratively hunger for wisdom to forestall spiritual and existential death. The path of the well-lived, virtuous life has meaning precisely because that path arrives, for every living soul, by whatever circuitous route, at exactly the same destination.
More on death's role:
Death jostles the viewfinder through which we look at life most of the time. If we're lucky, it slows down the clock of our quotidian frenzies long enough for us to glimpse a more distant future, see a more worthy goal, imagine a better self.
How technology interferes:
This pause, this form of framing, is harder than ever to achieve nowadays, because so many of our modern technologies produce "personal" devices that collapse time and manufacture urgency -- faster computers, phones that make us perpetually reachable, twitters of constant thoughts, webs of interaction that vastly increase common knowledge, yet somehow deprive us of that apprenticed learning that leads to wisdom; this digital haze obscures our view of the future and keeps our focus ever more relentlessly on the present, with ever more insistence on speed as a virtue in and of itself.
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The book took me about 10 hours to read, and I rated it a 5 on enjoyment, 7.5 on insightfulness, and 6 on well-written. You can view my ratings for all books here.
