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——劼怡&小钊
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乘风破浪的智慧
作者：Anil Ananthaswamy
插图：Matthieu Bourel
译者：劼怡
校对：小钊
策划：小钊 & 晓雪
Tantalizing evidence suggests that brain activity shifts to increase wisdom as we age.
有力证据表明，随着年岁增长，人们的大脑活动出现变化，从而更具智慧。
At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival premiere of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, director Woody Allen was asked about aging. He replied with his characteristic, straight-faced pessimism. “I find it a lousy deal. There is no advantage in getting older. I’m 74 now. You don’t get smarter, you don’t get wiser ... Your back hurts more, you get more indigestion ... It’s a bad business, getting old. I’d advise you not to do it if you can avoid it.”
在2010年戛纳电影节《遭遇陌生人》的首映礼上，导演伍迪·艾伦被问及对衰老的看法。他的回答还是老样子，一本正经，语带悲观，“我觉得衰老糟透了，一点好处也没有。我现在74岁，既不会变得更聪明，也没有更聪慧……不仅如此，还会腰酸背痛，消化不良……变老真是件糟糕的事，如果可以，我劝你还是尽可能保持年轻。”
Creaking bones and bad digestion notwithstanding, is that really the only face of aging? Turns out, it’s not. At least for the fortunate few, old age may not be Woody Allenesque; instead old age is when they become compassionate and wise. Yes, wise.
尽管人老骨脆，消化不良，但这就是衰老的全貌吗？事实并非如此。至少对于少数幸运的人来说，变老不会是伍迪艾伦式自怨自艾，反而是岁月沉淀带来的智慧和悲悯之心。没错，越老越智慧。
While aging diminishes activity in certain brain regions, there’s tantalizing evidence this may be compensated by changes in brain regions associated with supportive and social behavior. This shift in brain activity may foster wisdom in some people, a way of being that moves one away from self-centeredness toward emotional equanimity and wider social consciousness. We may even be able to work toward wisdom in old age.
虽然衰老会导致部分大脑区域的活跃度降低，但充分的证据表明，大脑中与支持性活动和社会行为相关联的区域可能也会出现相应变化，从而代偿其他部分的衰退。而这种大脑活动的变化会促进一些人智慧的增长，变得不再那么关注自我，更注重情绪稳定，拥有更广泛的社会意识。我们还可以通过努力获得这种年老的智慧。
For millennia, philosophers and theologians have been preoccupied with the notion of wisdom (the Greek word philosophia means “love of wisdom”). Centuries before the Greeks got into the act, the religious traditions of India and China, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, were thinking about wisdom, emphasizing the regulation of emotion—or emotional balance—as key to it.
数千年以来，哲学家和神学家们致力于诠释智慧的意涵（希腊语philosophia（哲学）指的便是“爱智慧”）。而早在古希腊人付诸研究之前的好几个世纪，印度和中国的传统宗教，如印度教、佛教和道教，就已经开始了对智慧的思考，并强调智慧的核心在于情绪的调节，或者说情绪的平衡。
Aristotle delineated wisdom into two types. One was the general, god-like, all-knowing wisdom, and the second (more pertinent to us mere mortals) was something called phronesis, or practical wisdom, which is the ability to be discerning about one’s actions, knowing when and why to act in a pragmatic manner. Ideally, such wise actions—whether involving emotion regulation or reasoning—would balance self-interest against the interests of others and those of society in general.
亚里士多德将智慧分成两种类型。一种是广泛认知中的上帝式、全知型智慧，而第二种（这种更贴近普罗大众）是实践智慧，希腊语称phronesis（一种与实际行动相关的智慧），这种智慧能帮助我们识别他人的行为，从而懂得审时度势、因地制宜采取务实行动。在理想情况下，这种智慧驱动的行为，无论是否涉及情绪调节或理性分析，通常都能平衡个人利益和他人及社会利益的冲突。
Despite humanity’s fascination with wisdom, it wasn’t until about four decades ago that it became a topic of empirical study. Vivian Clayton, who practices geriatric neuropsychology in Orinda, California, was a graduate student in the 1970s when she began to seriously think about operationalizing, or defining and measuring, wisdom. Her study of both ancient and modern literature led her to define wisdom as judicious behavior, often involving social situations—behavior born of knowledge, imbued with thoughtfulness, reflection, and compassion.
尽管人类一直以来都十分痴迷智慧这一概念，但实证研究的历史不过四十多年。薇薇安·克莱顿在加利福尼亚州奥林达市从事老年神经心理学的研究，她在上世纪70年代读研究生的时候就开始着手研究如何运用智慧，或者说界定和测量智慧。在研究过从古至今的文献后，她认为智慧通常是一种社会情境下明智审慎的行为，植根于知识，处处体现着思虑、省察和同理心。
Wisdom comes from a balance of activity in brain regions.
智慧源于大脑各区域活动的平衡。
By the 1980s, other psychologists got into the act. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, in the 1930s, had put forth an influential model of cognitive development, the final stage of which endowed us with the ability for abstract thought. Piaget saw this stage as the height of cognitive development, the highest form of reasoning one can achieve. But Woody Allen’s bemoaning aside, is this the pinnacle of human ability? Psychologists speculated that there was more: the “more” being wisdom that came with life experience, and was potentially associated with getting older.
在上世纪80年代以前，也有其他心理学家着手进行这项研究。瑞士心理学家让·皮亚杰在30年代就提出了一个很重要的认知发展模型，在该模型的最终阶段，人类拥有了抽象思考的能力。皮亚杰认为这一阶段是认知发展的顶峰，是人类理性所能达到的最终形态。但抛开伍迪艾伦的哀怨不谈，这难道就是人类能力发展的极限了吗？而心理学家推测，认知发展还有更广大的空间：这部分“多出来”的空间来自于生活经验累积带来的智慧，并可能与年纪增长息息相关。
Such questions led German psychologist Paul Baltes, along with psychologist Ursula Staudinger, to start the Berlin Wisdom Project in the 1980s—a pioneering effort to pin down wisdom. “It was an interest in this notion of wisdom [as] an ideal endpoint of human development,” says Staudinger, who today is the director of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, at Columbia University.
带着这些猜想，德国心理学家保罗·巴尔特斯与厄休拉·施陶丁格在80年代发起了“柏林智慧项目”，这是一次界定智慧的创举。施陶丁格表示“对智慧的概念深感兴趣，认为拥有智慧是人类发展的理想终点。”她现在是哥伦比亚大学罗伯特·巴特勒哥伦比亚老龄化中心的主任。
Baltes and Staudinger defined wisdom as “expertise involving deep insight and sound judgment about the essence of the human condition and the ways and means of planning, managing, and understanding a good life.”
巴尔特斯和施陶丁格将智慧定义为“一种专家知识系统，即能够对人类境况的本质以及规划、管理和理解何谓美好生活的方式方法有深刻见解和合理判断。”
译注：“Paul Baltes及同事是智慧研究领域的世界级领军人物，他认为智慧既有人格成分也有认知成分（联系了智力和品德的），是有关生活实际的专家知识系统，智慧用于理解、计划并管理美好的人生：
（1）就人类发展、人类境况的背景因素储存丰富的陈述性记忆；
（2）就如何运用技能或规则（人际问题或冲突解决进行复杂决策）储存丰富的程序性知识；
（3）情景主义，即考虑人生的很多主题和背景（如自我、家庭、同伴、学校、社区等）以及这些东西在人生全程中的变化和相互关系；
（4）认识价值观的相对性并能容忍不同于己的价值观，只要不会威胁公共利益；
（5）认可并容忍模糊性，认识到人获得信息是不完整的，未来是难预测的，人的信息加工能力是有限的。”
Intuitively, the ability to be wise seems as if it should grow with age, but their research showed that it’s not enough to get older to get wiser. Other processes that come with aging could hamper the emergence of wisdom. Aging diminishes what Baltes and Staudinger called the “mechanics” of the mind—which depend on the biology of the brain, such as the number of neurons, the connectivity, metabolism, and the speed at which the brain can process new information. The mechanics of the mind reach their peak around the age of 25 to 30, and then decline steadily.
人们直觉上会认为，随着年龄渐长，也应该变得更具智慧，但心理学家的研究表明年龄增长并不必然意味着智慧增长。伴随年老的一些生理过程也会妨碍智慧的成型。年龄增加会削弱巴尔特思和施陶丁格研究所称的“机械智能”—这一智能取决于大脑的生理结构，如神经元的数量，连接性，新陈代谢和大脑处理新信息的速度。“机械智能”大概在25-30岁之间达到巅峰，随后逐步减弱。
译注：“mechanics” of the mind：在巴尔特思之前，另一位心理学家Cattell提出智力分为晶态智力和液态智力，“ Cattell的理论经John Horn发展，并由德国心理学家Paul Baltes等整合，形成了毕生发展观，并分别用智能（pragmatics，又叫晶体智力，即基于文化、经验等内容丰富的知识）和机械智能（mechanics，又叫液体智力，即一般意义上生物学的、遗传决定的、内容单一的基本信息加工）标识前述两部分。”
“毕生发展观认为：（1）发展是毕生过程，发展不是建立在生理成熟概念基础上的线性、单维度和单方向成长,而是一个多维度、多功能的动态系统；任何一种行为发展都既有生长也有衰退，不是功能增长的单向运动，而是获得与丧失同时进行的动态过程。（2）发展高度可塑，所有年龄的人都能发展某些技能以补偿他正在降低的某种能力；由于个体生活条件和经验的变化, 发展可采取多种形式；发展由多重影响系统共同决定, 个体发展的任何一个过程都受年龄阶段、历史阶段和个人生活经历的影响。（3）必须联合有关人类发展的其他学科( 如人类学、生物学、社会学、医学) 才能更深入地探索和理解人的心理发展。”
Many studies have shown that the aging brain gets slower. For instance, the ability to carry out mental operations definitely declines. As does our capacity for episodic memory and executive function (which is necessary for planning, multitasking, and verbal fluency, among other tasks), due to dysfunctions in the medial temporal lobe memory system and the frontostriatal networks, important for executive function.
大量研究表明，大脑会随着增龄而变得迟缓，如执行脑力活动的能力将必然下降。由于内侧颞叶记忆系统和影响执行功能的额叶-纹状体连接通路功能失调，我们的情景记忆能力和执行能力也会下降。（此外，这对规划、多任务处理及言语表达流畅度有重要影响。）
SEEKING WISDOM: Through analysis of The Bhagavad Gita, researchers found that wisdom is described in a similar way across cultures. Godong/UIG
追寻智慧：通过分析《薄伽梵歌》，研究者发现不同文化之间不约而同对智慧有着相似的描述。
But all’s not lost. “What doesn’t go down is reasoning and cognition that is based on knowledge and experience,” says Staudinger. This ability, which reaches its peak between the ages of 40 and 50, and then stays stable and declines only during the final years of one’s life, could contribute to wisdom, as long as we stay mentally active and engaged. Evidence from studies of rhesus monkeys supports this observation. This involves structures called dendritic spines, which protrude from one neuron’s dendrite toward another neuron’s axon. These spines have a neck and a head. Those with long necks and small heads decline with age, but the shorter, stubbier “mushroom spines,” hypothesized to be “locus of long-term memories,” don’t decline. That potentially explains why our ability to learn new things suffers as we age, yet abilities that depend on lifelong learning (such as playing a musical instrument) don’t.
但衰老并非意味着所有能力都在下滑。施陶丁格表示：“建立在知识和经验之上的理性和认知不会滑坡的。”这项能力会在40-50岁之间达到顶峰，随后稳定保持，到行将就木之时才会下降。只要我们保持思维活跃度和投入度，这种能力就会有助于智慧成型。对恒河猴的研究也证明了这一点。这涉及到名为树突棘的神经结构，它是一种突起结构，连接一个神经元的树突与另一个神经元的轴突的末端。这些突起由一个棘头和一个棘颈组成。那些棘颈细长、棘头较小的树突棘会随着年龄增长而减少，而更为短粗的“蘑菇型突棘”（这类突棘被假设为“长期记忆的位点”）则不会。这可能就解释了为何我们学习新事物的能力会随着年龄的增长而下降，而依赖终身学习的技能（如演奏乐器）却不会受到影响。
Following Baltes’ death in 2006, Staudinger has come to differentiate between so-called general and personal wisdom. She has found that while general wisdom—the ability to make wise decisions about others—stays more or less stable over one’s lifespan, it’s much harder to be wise about one’s own life. Personal wisdom is not easy.
2006年巴尔特斯去世后，施陶丁格进一步区分了所谓的“普适智慧”和“个体智慧”。她发现，虽然一般智慧（在对待他人的事物上做出明智决定的能力）在人的一生中基本保持在同一水平，但要对自己的生活保持明智却难得多。拥有个体智慧并不容易。
基督徒和犹太人都将以色列国王所罗门视为智慧的典范，他的故事尤其体现这一论断。有两个女人带着一个婴儿来找他，两个人都声称自己是婴孩的母亲，所罗门建议她们把婴孩一分为二，各取一半。随后其中一个女人喊着饶了这个孩子，说要让给另一个女人，所罗门便确认了谁是孩子的母亲。这里体现了所罗门的一般智慧。”但与此同时，所罗门的个人生活却是一地鸡毛“。施陶丁格补充道。
And that often makes a person vulnerable. “What you find is that if you put people in a situation where their self is threatened, then people are not very good in engaging in any form of wise reasoning. They want to quickly defend their self,” says Grossmann.
格罗斯曼的跨文化研究表明，在像日本那样，个体之间依存度更高，更倚赖与他人关系的文化中，人们较少有自我受到威胁的感受，从而更能进行理智判断。
But studies show that even for those of us who take offense easily, it’s possible to boost the ability to reason wisely by creating some distance between you and, well, your self. Clinical psychologists call this process decentering: You take an observer’s view of something that’s happening rather than being a participant.
但研究表明，即使是那些更容易恼怒的人，也能够通过区分外在自我和内在自我，从而提高理性判断的能力。临床心理学家将这个过程称为去中心化：即采取旁观者而非参与者的视角来看待眼前的事物。
Grossmann says that loosening the hold of the self can help with wise reasoning, even as we age. One way to decenter as you age is to live in an interdependent manner, surrounded by people, so that you don’t feel alone and threatened.
格罗斯曼称，即便随着年纪增长，我们也能通过放松对自我的控制进行明智判断。掌握去中心化的一个方法就是生活在相互依赖的环境里，生活在人群中，这样就不会感到孤独或是威胁。
“Old age is not necessarily a time when everything declines,” says Grossmann. “Many of these types of processes are flexible, and you can train them.” Via meditation, for example. “Many of the meditative practices include this type of third-person perspective, where you detach from the immediate self, you become an observer,” says Grossman.
“衰老并不必然意味着一切都在走下坡，”格罗斯曼说，“很多这类过程的发展都是可控的，你可以通过训练改善。”比如冥想。“很多冥想练习都包括第三者视角的训练，这个过程中，你将自己从直接自我中抽离出来，成为一个观察者。”
There’s plenty of evidence that meditation induces neurobiological changes. Sara Lazar’s lab at the Harvard Medical School in Boston has shown that even eight weeks of meditation can increase gray matter density in brain regions associated with executive function, working memory, and—importantly, from the perspective of wisdom—empathy, compassion, and self-distancing. In another study, her team showed that certain regions of the prefrontal cortex were as thick in 40- to 50-year-old meditators as they were in 20- to 30-year-old meditators and control subjects.
而且，大量证据表明冥想确实会引起神经生物基础上的改变。萨拉·拉扎尔在波士顿哈佛医学院的实验室的研究已经表明，仅八周的冥想训练就能提高大脑区域的灰质密度，灰质密度会影响大脑的执行功能、工作记忆以及对增长智慧至关重要的同理心、同情心和自我间距离。其团队的另一项研究还显示，在40-50岁冥想者的大脑中，前额叶皮质某些区域的厚度与20-30岁的冥想者和对照组的厚度相同。
The brain’s prefrontal cortex especially interests Dilip Jeste, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association and director of the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging at the University of California, San Diego. He speculates that it may be part of a network of brain regions responsible for wisdom.
迪利普·杰斯特对大脑的前额叶皮质的相关研究十分感兴趣，他是美国精神病学协会的前主席和加州大学圣地亚哥分校的山姆及罗丝·斯坦恩老龄化研究所的所长。他推测前额叶皮质可能是大脑区域中负责智慧的神经网络的一部分。
To understand wisdom and its possible neurobiological underpinnings, Jeste and his colleagues took a multipronged approach. The first was an extensive literature survey, to identify what researchers mean by wisdom. Second, they put together a panel of experts, and canvassed their opinions on a list of traits. (Jeste considers wisdom a personality trait; not everyone does.) The experts responded anonymously, tagging each trait as necessary for wisdom, intelligence, or spirituality—a trait could belong to one, two, all three, or none of them. Each expert was then sent the panel’s average response, and the process was repeated. “It was clear that the experts viewed these three as slightly overlapping, but largely independent concepts,” says Jeste. For example, “wise people are intelligent, but intelligent people are not necessarily wise.”
为了理解智慧及其可能存在的神经生物学基础，杰斯特和他的同事进行了多方面研究。他们首先进行了广泛的文献调查，以确认研究者对智慧的定义，然后召集了一组专家，就一份性格特征清单征询他们的意见。（杰斯特认为智慧是一种个人特质，并非人人有之。）专家们匿名作答，标记他们认为对智慧、智力或灵性有影响的特征，每一种特征可同时匹配多种特质，或者不匹配任一种特质。然后每个专家会收到小组成员的平均回答，接着再重复进行特征匹配。“显然专家们都认为这三种概念尽管略有重合，但大体上各自独立，”杰斯特说。还打了比方，“（像）智慧的人智商高，但智商高的人不一定有智慧。”
The researchers went further. They interviewed hospice care patients, who were nearing the end of their lives, about what they thought about wisdom. Finally, they addressed an issue that confounds wisdom research: cultural specificity. With help from a medical anthropologist and some special software, Jeste analyzed The Bhagavad Gita, a spiritual treatise that is considered the philosophical cornerstone of Hinduism, dating back to the last few centuries B.C. “We looked at wisdom and its synonyms, like sagacity, and antonyms, like foolishness, folly,” says Jeste. “We wanted to find out how many times those words were used and more importantly in what context in the Gita.”
研究人员还进一步采访了临终关怀病人（他们都已风烛残年），询问他们对于智慧的看法。最后，他们解决了一个困扰智慧研究的问题：文化特异性。在医疗人类学家和一些特殊软件的帮助下，杰斯特分析了神学专著《薄伽梵歌》，该书可追溯至公元前几百年，堪称印度教的哲学根基。杰斯特表示：“我们搜索书中的“智慧”一词及其同义词和反义词，如睿智和愚昧、愚蠢，希望找出这些词在书中出现的次数，以及更重要的是使用语境。”
Their analysis was revealing. “What was really striking and surprising was that the components of wisdom looked at in these different ways are surprisingly similar,” Jeste says.
最后的分析极富启发性。“真正令人称奇的是，即使在不同视角的审视下，智慧的内涵仍然出奇的一致。”杰斯特补充道。
The team identified six components of wisdom: having pragmatic knowledge of life; emotion regulation; pro-social behavior, which would entail compassion, altruism, and empathy; knowing one’s strengths and limitations; decisiveness; and finally, acceptance of uncertainty.
他的团队总结了智慧的六大要点：掌握实用的生活知识；情绪管控；亲社会行为，具体包括同情心，利他主义和同理心；了解自身的优势和不足；决断果敢；以及，拥抱未知。
More striking was the consistency over time. “Why should the concept of wisdom not have changed from thousands of years B.C. to today?” says Jeste. “To me it suggested that it should be biologically based. If it is biologically based, then where would it be based? Obviously in the brain, but where in the brain?”
更令人震惊的是，人类对智慧的认识的一脉相承。“为什么从公元前到如今这几千年之内，智慧的概念都没有改变？”杰斯特的理解是，“在我看来这就说明智慧是有生理基础的。如果真的如此，那生理根基在哪里？很明显在大脑里，但具体在大脑的哪个位置呢？”
Jeste’s team went back to the literature. They looked at studies on brain imaging, genetics, neurochemistry, and neuropathology that targeted these individual components of wisdom, and their opposites; for example, the opposite of emotion regulation is impulsivity, and the opposite of pro-social behavior can be found in the actions of anti-social personalities.
杰斯特团队重新开始研究文献。他们查找了关于脑成像、遗传学、神经化学和神经病理学的研究，这些研究主要分析了智慧的各个组成部分及其对立面；如，情绪管控的反面是冲动性，亲社会行为则可对应反社会人格的行为。
Case reports of patients with brain damage, either due to injury or strokes, were enlightening. Jeste recalls reading the published case of an intelligent young soldier in his 20s, competent, well-adjusted, and happily married. One day the Jeep he was riding in went over a landmine. The resulting brain injury transformed his personality. He would divorce and remarry—three times. He barely managed to hold down a job as a newspaper delivery man. The damage to his brain was localized to the prefrontal cortex.
由于受伤或中风导致脑损伤的病例研究也颇有启发。杰斯特回忆起曾读过的一则案例，一位二十多岁的年轻士兵，能干，理智，婚姻幸福。一天他乘坐的吉普车碾过一颗地雷，这次意外导致他大脑受到损伤，自此性情大变。他离婚又再婚，足足三次；只能勉强维持着一份送报员的工作。他大脑损伤的地方位于前额叶皮质。
Further clues emerged from a form of neurodegenerative disease called behavioral frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), in which the damage is again restricted more or less to the prefrontal cortex. People suffering from bvFTD often start making bad decisions, show lack of insight, become impulsive, passionate, and sometimes anti-social. “If you look at the symptoms, they are the exact antithesis of wisdom,” says Jeste.
一种名为行为变异型额颞叶痴呆（简称bvFTD）的神经退行性疾病给杰斯特团队提供了更多信息。这种病受伤的部位同样大致位于前额叶皮质。那些得了bvFTD的人大多变得莽撞误事，缺乏思考，冲动，偏激甚至反社会。杰斯特说：“这些症状恰是智慧的对立面。”
In a recent retrospective study of 2,397 patients seen at the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, researchers found that those diagnosed with bvFTD were far more likely to engage in criminal behavior compared with those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD). “Common manifestations of criminal behavior in the bvFTD group included theft, traffic violations, sexual advances, trespassing, and public urination in contrast with those in the AD group, who commonly committed traffic violations, often related to cognitive impairment,” the researchers wrote.
加州大学圣地亚哥分校的记忆和老龄化中心最近针对2397名病人进行了回溯性调查。研究人员发现，相比于患阿兹海默症的病人， bvFTD病人更容易出现违法行为。研究人员写道：“bvFTD群体中常见的违法行为有盗窃、违反交规、性骚扰、非法入侵和随地大小便，而阿兹海默症群体通常只是违反交规，而这还是由于他们认知存在缺陷。”
For Jeste and colleagues, the evidence was enticing. “Based on all of those, we suggested there is a neuro-circuitry of wisdom,” says Jeste. This circuit involved the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (responsible for rationality, discipline, and self-preservation), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (associated with “kind, supportive, social, and emotional behavior needed for survival of species”), the anterior cingulate (which mediates conflicts between parts of the prefrontal cortex), and the striatum with amygdala (part of the reward circuitry).
杰斯特和他的同事都很认可这个证据。“基于这些研究，我们认为智慧的确存在神经回路，”杰斯特说。“这个回路涉及背外侧前额叶（负责理性、自律和自我克制）、腹内侧前额叶皮层（与”对物种生存所需的善良、支持性、社会和情感行为息息相关）、前扣带皮质（调节前额叶皮质各部分的冲突），和杏仁核纹状体（是报偿回路的一部分）。
When we are young we like our jokes to be bizarre.
年轻的时候都喜欢与众不同的笑话。
According to Jeste, wisdom comes from a balance of activity in these brain regions. “In some way, wisdom is balance. If you are very pro-social, you give everything to other people, you won’t survive. But of course, if you don’t give anything to others, the species won’t survive. You have to have balance.”
杰斯特认为，智慧来源于大脑各区域的平衡。“某种程度上，智慧就是平衡。如果你过于亲社会，你会把一切奉献给他人，自己就无法生存。当然，如果你一毛不拔，群体就无法延续。因此，你需要学会平衡。”
Despite such evidence, Jeste is cautious. “It’d be unwise of us to say that this is the neuro-circuitry of wisdom,” he says. “We don’t know that. It is a hypothesis. Empirical research may show that it is totally wrong and something else is right. That’s fine.”
尽管有了这些证据，杰斯特依然保持谨慎。“声称这就是智慧的神经回路还是过于轻率，”他表示。“我们仍未彻底了解它。这只是一个假设。实证研究可能会彻底颠覆这些猜想，而正确的另有其说。但这也没关系。”
And what does this have to do with aging? Jeste points out that aging is associated with a shift in brain activity. For instance, there’s something called Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults (HAROLD)—a phenomenon in which the half of the prefrontal cortex that is less active in youth (which half depends on the individual) shows increased activation during old age, increasing overall activity in the prefrontal cortex. There’s also a shift in activity during old age from the occipital lobes, which is associated with sensory processing, to the prefrontal cortex (the so-called posterior-anterior shift with aging).
而这些和衰老又有什么关系呢？杰斯特指出衰老与大脑活动的转变有关。比如，有一种名为老年人大脑半球非对称性减弱（简称HAROLD）的现象，表现为年轻时较为不活跃一侧的前额叶皮质（具体哪一侧视个人情况而定）随着年老而越来越活跃，并增强了前额叶皮质的总体活动。同时，在老年时期，与感觉处理相关的枕叶和前额叶皮质也有活动转换（即所谓老化中由后向前转移模型）。
None of this is to suggest that older people are wiser by default. “Wisdom and aging are not synonymous,” says Jeste. “You see young people who are very wise for their age and you see old people who are very unwise. Having said that, it’s more likely that with aging you can become wiser.”
这些都表明并不是年纪大了就一定会更有智慧。“智慧和年老并非完全对等，”杰斯特说，“有人年纪轻轻就睿智聪慧，也有人垂暮之年仍愚昧不化。话虽如此，随着年龄的增长，人确实更有可能变得更加明智。”
But why? Jeste has often asked himself the same question. As we get older, we develop infirmities, diseases, and disabilities. “If we are supposed to live long with disabilities without contributing to the species, it doesn’t make sense, unless something improves with aging to compensate,” says Jeste. “The idea is that this is wisdom.”
但是因由何在？杰斯特也常常扪心自问。年岁越长，我们会越发体弱多病，甚至残疾。“如果说我们年老体弱，毫无价值，却期待寿命绵长，还是蛮说不通的，除非有些东西可以随着年岁增长而增加，从而补偿缺失的部分，”杰斯特说，“我想到的就是智慧。”
Another association of old age with wisdom comes from studies of humor. Turns out that when we are young we like our jokes to be bizarre, incongruous. As we get older, we find jokes funnier if they don’t merely have incongruous punchlines but also have an overall coherence. “You could make a loose connection between that and perhaps wisdom, where if you think of wisdom as being more interested in how things fit together, and less interested in what is bizarre or different,” says neuropsychologist Hiram Brownell of Boston College.
衰老与智慧的另一项关系来源于对幽默的研究。我们年轻的时候更喜欢那些怪诞的笑话。而随着年岁的增长，我们会更偏好那些既能把包袱抖得出其不意又逻辑通顺的笑话。波士顿大学神经心理学家海拉姆·布朗内尔表示：“你可以把这一点与智慧大致联系起来，如果你认为智慧就是更关注事物之间的相互适应，而不是事物本身有多惊世骇俗或与众不同。”
Staudinger worries that we risk diluting the essence of wisdom by taking too broad a view. Sure, there are things we do better as we age, but she thinks that’s more to do with leading an adjusted, well-balanced life. It’s well known that older adults are better able to focus on positive emotions and avoid negative emotions—something that can be seen as wise. But according to Staudinger, that tells us that we are becoming more socially competent and well-adjusted as we age—but not necessarily wise.
但施陶丁格担心对智慧的理解过于宽泛时，我们会简单化智慧的本质。随着年岁增长，我们的确会更擅长某些事，但她认为要过一种有序、平衡的生活，我们还需要做到更多。众所周知老年人更能专注于积极情绪，避免消极情绪，这也可以视作智慧的一种。但据施陶丁格的观点，随着年老，我们在社会里会愈发游鱼得水，适应自如，但不一定就拥有了智慧。
Wisdom, says Staudinger, includes being able to handle negative emotions and “actually stick to the negative emotionality just long enough to learn from it, and not do away with it or avoid it altogether.” Often, she adds, “we really have to be exposing ourselves to very unpleasant states,” if we are to grow rather than adjust.
她表示，智慧包括处理负面情绪的能力，即“陷在负面情绪的时间刚好足够我们从中吸取教训，而不是完全摒弃或者逃避它。”而通常来说，如果想要成长而不仅是适应，她补充道：“我们必须主动面对非常消极的状态。”
Staudinger and her colleagues have carried out over 1,200 “wisdom interviews” since the 1980s, of people ranging in age from 12 to 95. She thinks less than 1 percent of those interviewed displayed levels of insight and judgment necessary for wisdom according to her team’s definition—a capacity to tolerate negative emotions and learn from them, a penchant for thinking about the next generation and the common good over one’s immediate needs. “Very few people develop the ability to transcend their body, transcend their own self,” says Staudinger.
自上世纪八十年代以来，施陶丁格和她的同事已经针对12-95岁的人群进行了1200多场“智慧访谈”。根据其团队对智慧的定义，智慧包括忍受负面情绪并从中汲取经验的能力以及超越眼前利益并为后代和公共利益考虑的倾向；她认为只有不到1%的人表现出了智慧所需的洞察力和判断力。她表示：“只有极少数的人可以跳出个体的困囿，放眼众生。”
While it’s clear that our definition of wisdom makes it more or less likely that we’ll achieve that exalted state as we age, it’s also clear that those who do live wise lives benefit not just themselves but humanity itself.
很显然，我们对智慧的定义表明，我们或多或少会随着年岁的增长达到一定的生命高度，而选择过一种良好生活的人不仅会造福自己，更会造福于整个人类社会。
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本文原载于 NAUTILUS
原文链接：http://aging.nautil.us/feature/174/the-wisdom-of-the-aging-brain
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