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The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older Kindle Edition

by Elkhonon Goldberg (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 89 ratings
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The Wisdom Paradox explores the aging of the mind from a unique, positive perspective. In an era of increasing fears about mental deterioration, world-renowned neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg provides startling new evidence that though the brain diminishes in some tasks as it ages, it gains in many ways. Most notably, it increases in what he terms “wisdom”: the ability to draw upon knowledge and experience gained over a lifetime to make quick and effective decisions. Goldberg delves into the machinery of the mind, separating memory into two distinct types: singular (knowledge of a particular incident or fact) and generic (recognition of broader patterns). As the brain ages, the ability to use singular memory declines, but generic memory is unaffected—and its importance grows. As an individual accumulates generic memory, the brain can increasingly rely upon these stored patterns to solve problems effortlessly and instantaneously. Goldberg investigates the neurobiology of wisdom, and draws on historical examples of artists and leaders whose greatest achievements were realized late in life.
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  1. Print length
    337 pages
  2. Language
    English
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    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Avery
  5. Publication date
    February 16, 2006
  6. File size
    1324 KB
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Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

The possibilities of cognitive decline and dementia are among the most frightening aspects of aging. But according to New York University neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg, brains get better in key respects as they get older. Moreover, he argues in The Wisdom Paradox, people can do much to ward off the debilities associated with aging. The brain’s capacity for pattern recognition is central to Goldberg’s premise. Moving through middle age and beyond, the brain develops a vast store of "generic memories"—knowledge of the shared patterns in events or things. This reservoir gives older people an improved ability to size up situations and solve problems without going through the step-bystep assessments a younger person might need. Such pattern recognition underlies competence and expertise and can compensate for age-related declines in attention or memory. Pattern recognition can even amount to "wisdom"—basically, knowing what to do. The author cites various elderly achievers to demonstrate that mental vigor can persist late in life. He notes that sculptor Eduardo Chillida retained formidable abilities even as his Alzheimer’s disease progressed. Delving into the relevant neurobiology, Goldberg points to a growing body of evidence that the brain’s left hemisphere is oriented toward familiar patterns, whereas the right hemisphere focuses on novelty. He argues that this dichotomy is more important than nuts-and-bolts partitions, such as the left hemisphere handling language while the right handles spatial reasoning. This maturation of mind means that the left hemisphere becomes increasingly important over a person’s lifetime. Moreover, the brain is shaped by how it is used. For instance, musicians who practice consistently develop a larger Heschl’s gyrus, an area involved in processing sound. And contrary to onetime scientific belief, the brain forms new neurons throughout adulthood. Through such observations, Goldberg emphasizes the importance of maintaining an active mind as a defense against mental decline. Though not a new idea, Goldberg impressively fits it into a wide- ranging picture of the aging brain. He speculates, for example, that art serves a central societal function in boosting mental acumen. He also outlines a "cognitive exercise program" he runs in which participants engage in computer-based exercises. The discussion here would have benefited from home-based exercises readers might try. Altogether, The Wisdom Paradox makes a compelling case for the possibility of maintaining a sharp mind far into old age. The book merits attention from the old and not so old alike.

Kenneth Silber

Review

Brilliant . . . Highly engaging . . . no less than a grand piece of scientific reporting and popular science. -- Oliver Sacks on The Executive Brain

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001N89KSG
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Avery (February 16, 2006)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 16, 2006
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1324 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 337 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 89 ratings

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  1. Elkhonon Goldberg

    Elkhonon Goldberg

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    Elkhonon Goldberg, Ph.D., ABPP is a cognitive neuroscientist, a practicing neuropsychologist, and an educator who lectures worldwide. He is Director of Luria Neuroscience Institute, Clinical Professor of Neurology at NYU School of Medicine, and Diplomate of The American Board of Professional Psychology in Clinical Neuropsychology. Goldberg authored research papers on cortical organization, hemispheric specialization, frontal lobes, memory, traumatic brain injury, dementias, schizophrenia, and other topics. Goldberg’s books The Executive Brain (2001), The Wisdom Paradox (2005), and The New Executive Brain (2009) have been published in 19 languages. His recent books are Executive Functions in Health and Disease (2017) and Creativity: The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation (2018). He coauthored The SharpBrains Guide to Cognitive Fitness (2013) and is the Chief Scientific Adviser of www.sharpbrains.com. Goldberg is a recipient of The Copernicus Prize for “contributions to interdisciplinary dialogue between neurosciences and neuropsychology,” and The Tempos Hominis medal “for international medical sciences education.” He is a foreign member of The Venetian Institute of Science, Literature and Arts. Goldberg’s practice of neuropsychology involves a broad range of clinical and forensic cases.

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
89 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Abi
5.0 out of 5 stars Great!
Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2024
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Great!
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
5.0 out of 5 stars Opinionated , original, and independent
Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2005
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If you like the thinker's prose, the so-called "romantic science",a style attributed to the Russian neuroscientist A. R. Luria,which consists in publishing original research in literary form, you would love this book. Clearly intellectual scientists are vanishing under the weight of the commoditization of the discipline. But once in a while someone emerges to reverse such setbacks.

Goldberg, who was the great Luria's student and collaborator, is even more colorful and fun to read than the master. He is egocentric, abrasive, opinionated, and colorful. He is also disdainful of the conventional beliefs in neurosciences --for instance he is suspicious of the assignment of specific functions, such as language, to anatomical regions. He is also skeptical of the journalistic "triune" brain. His theory is that the hemispheric specialization is principally along pattern matching and information processing lines:the left side stores patterns, while the right one processes novel tasks. It is convincing to see that children suffer more from a right brain injury, while adults have the opposite effect.

There is a little bit of open plugging of Goldberg's for-profit institute;he would have gotten better results by being subtle. A fre minor points. I did not understand why Goldberg discusses "modularity", of which he is critical, as if it were the same thing in both neurobiology and in cognitive science. In neurobiology, modularity implies regional localization, while cognitive scientists (Marr, Fodor, etc.) make no such assumption: for them it is entirely functional and they would be in great agreement with Goldberg. Also I did not understand why he attributes the language instinct to Pinker, not Chomsky, and why he makes snide remarks about behavioral scientists like Kahneman and Tversky. But these are very minor details that do not weaken the message (I still gave the book 5 stars). I am now spoiled; I need more essays by opinionated, original,and intellectual, contemporary scientists.
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Jackie
5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing and encouraging read
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2014
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As an aging baby boomer and semi-retired healthcare professional, I appreciated the explanation of how memory is formed, and why I remember some things but not others. This was validating and left me with a sense of hope.
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Muktha N
4.0 out of 5 stars Strong novel with a weak finish
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2010
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Dr. Goldberg's book The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As You Grow Older is ostensibly a novel about the acquisition of wisdom through aging and life experiences. After reading through it, however, I feel that this book is as much an autobiography and a lesson in introductory neuroscience as it is about its stated topic. This is by no means a critique of Dr. Goldberg's writing style; on the contrary, I found his anecdotes made the book more engaging and his asides helped clarify many of his points by providing a scientific backdrop by which to judge them.

Dr. Goldberg's stated purpose, and a sizable portion of the book, is to elucidate what enables the elderly to quickly and effectively carry out tasks in spite of the neurodegeneration that should be robbing them of the analytical reasoning skills necessary to function at the level necessary to carry out complex assignments in difficult jobs. Goldberg explains that he believes neural development occurs in three distinct phases which he compares to the seasons of Spring, Summer, and Fall. These seasons correspond to development, maturity, and aging. Development is "when the main cognitive abilities and skills are formed." This "season" begins at gestation when neurons begin to form and continues through adulthood until the brain's neural structure begins to stabilize. This marks the beginning of "the season of maturity." This is the stage of neural development that the most research has been done on and the stage with which most people are familiar. The season of maturity is when people begin to shift their focus from acquiring knowledge towards applying what they have learned for practical purposes. The final stage of neural development is what Goldberg refers to as "the season of aging." In this stage the brain begins to atrophy, losing about 2% of its size per decade. Goldberg questions, and encourages us to question, both what enables elderly adults to continue to function and tackle difficult undertakings that could have disastrous consequences if mishandled. He points out many interesting examples of people, including many historical figures such as Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, who were clearly no longer able to carry out their stately duties towards the ends of their terms. He clarifies this passage by noting that mental decline is a slow, arduous process. The condition that many of these leaders were in at the time they left office indicates that their mental faculties must have been declining for quite some time while they were still functioning as heads of state; in spite of this, these leaders were still able to make appropriate enough decisions to remain in power. He also provide cases of many people, such as Golda Meir and Alan Greenspan, who, while not outstanding in any way in their youth, ended up accomplishing many extraordinary feats in old age. The explanation he gives for these cases is the existence of a phenomena that people have described throughout history: wisdom. The idea of wisdom does in fact have an actual biological basis. Wisdom is actually simply an acquired response to a recognized pattern. Goldberg delves into this issue further and explains what happens in our brain to allow us to have a quality such as wisdom. A typical generic pattern contains all of the shared components of its members. The power of a generic pattern is that it allows individuals to respond to novel experiences using knowledge from different experiences. If, for example, you encounter a dog of a breed you have never seen before, you know what it is and in general how to behave around it because you have encountered other dogs before. Goldberg also devotes a section to what he calls "attractors." Attractors are basically neural nets which will respond to multiple stimuli. In a similar fashion to generic patterns, this allows individuals to deal with newly encountered situations. Additionally, pattern recognition allows the brain to use up less resources to accomplish tasks. By using PET scans, doctors have found that patients who were well trained in a task actually could complete the tasks with less glucose, essentially lowering their brain's metabolic requirements. As we age, such a skill becomes increasingly useful. The reason for this is that as we age our blood vessels become more narrow. This means that it becomes harder for oxygen to reach the brain. People whose brains have smaller metabolic needs will be less affected by this decreased blood flow. In this way, pattern recognition actually allows people who have acquired and strengthened certain generic patterns to continue to function at a normal level by diminishing the impact that reduced blood flow has on their cognitive capabilities. I felt that this section of Goldberg's book was his strongest. He explained what interested him in this field and in doing so managed to also catch my attention. He also used multiple analogies to and provided illustrations for his points. I felt that this made the material, some of which seemed like it could be entered into an actual neuroscience textbook, accessible to a layperson who was interested in learning about the advantages of aging without actually having to learn arcane facts to develop the background in neuroscience that would be necessary to understand some of the concepts that Goldberg covered.

After covering what he believes comprises wisdom, Goldberg begins to go more in-depth into what exactly makes memories and a general overview of how the functioning of the brain results in the processes of the mind. I thoroughly enjoyed this section; I felt that it gave me a much stronger sense of how the parts of the brain work together to accomplish mental processes. Goldberg used many analogies to clarify his descriptions. He used a computer to explain a misunderstanding that occurred in the neuroscience community and to establish how difficult it is to specify what the responsibilities of one specific portion of the brain are. In his example, Goldberg describes a computer which has a defective power supply. This computer would be unable to store data. This does not mean that the power supply is responsible for storing the data; that is the job of the hard drive. A person who was presented with this case without any knowledge of computers, however, may be mislead by what he perceives as cause and effect. A situation very similar to this arose in neuroscience with the hippocampus. Previously, the hippocampus was thought to be the site of memory storage. Recent research indicates that memory is actually stored in the neocortex, and the hippocampus simply plays a role in memory formation. Another interesting comparison Goldberg presents is between brain functioning and a symphony orchestra. He describes the frontal lobes as the conductor of the orchestra and various brain parts as the sections of the orchestra. The role of the frontal lobe also confused scientists for quite a while. For a long time, it was thought to not have a function at all, leading to procedures such as lobotomies. It is now understood that, in a similar fashion to a conductor, the frontal lobe coordinates brain activity. A conductor does not actually contribute musically to the orchestra, but without one the symphony would not be presented in as complete a manner. Similarly, the frontal lobe is required for the brain to function but does not actually perform any clear neural function. These two analogies, among many others, helped me to understand how various parts of the brain worked. Comparing the brain to a computer also gave me a better understanding of how interdependent the parts of the brain are. A hard drive is useless individually but serves a very important role in the proper functioning of a computer just as the hippocampus, for example, serves a very important function in the brain but does nothing meaningful on its own.
The latter portion of the book is devoted to Goldberg's own professional work. This starts out in a promising fashion but ends flatly. Goldberg shows research he is doing on the roles of the left and right hemispheres. The work he is doing seems promising. His findings seems to indicate that the left brain plays a role in learned, acquired patterns while the right brain plays a larger role in acquiring new patterns. As could be expected, the right brain is more affected by aging than the left brain. He also provides interesting information relating emotional responses to brain regions. Unfortunately, the final portion of Goldberg's book turns what I felt to be the book's greatest strength into a glaring weakness: Goldberg's tendency to incorporate his own life into his writing. Towards the end of the book, Goldberg shamelessly plugs a learning center he is developing for the elderly. The the goals of his center seem admirable; he and some of his colleagues are attempting to devise mental exercises to improve and cognitive function in the elderly while also improving their mood and outlook on life. Sadly, the way he presented these aims in the book was not tasteful. I almost felt like I was reading an ad in a magazine for his center, complete with testimonials and examples of happy clients. I was extremely disappointed that he chose to place such a tacky section towards the end of such an interesting and enlightening book. I barely felt like reading the epilogue after getting through it. Nevertheless, I felt that overall this book was enjoyable and, for a book which went so in-depth into very specific neuroscience topics, very straightforward and easy to read. I would highly recommend it to any layperson interested in learning more about how their brain works.
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David J. Keefe
5.0 out of 5 stars How our brains work--the story so far.
Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2018
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I once read a description of someone (I can't recall who) who spent a lot of time "organizing his mind." That's an evocative remark, but not easy to act on. For those peculiar enough of chew on such an idea Goldberg's book offers a genuine road map. I think he succeeds in demonstrating that we really can organize our minds.
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Esklando
3.0 out of 5 stars Algunas partes interesantes
Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2014
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Creo que el autor toca algunos puntos interesantes los cuales subrayé. Pero la proporción de puntos interesantes vs. El resto del libro, me hace sentir que fue poco lo que pude extraer como aprendizaje. Sentí un flujo entre secciones muy interesantes y de fácil comprensión (no soy experto en el tema), pero otros muy técnicos que más allá de términos técnicos no me dejaba un aprendizaje útil para mis conversaciones y trabajo con personas. Creo que es un libro que si supiera al principio de que se trataría y cómo abarcan el tema, no lo compraría.
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J. Arango
5.0 out of 5 stars Great reading
Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2010
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I read this book three years ago, and someone who borrowed it never returned it. I had to buy it again, and read it to make sure I don't miss anything. Deep, but explained in a way that makes it very easy to understand.
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Roy
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating book. It has a lot of information that ...
Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2017
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Fascinating book. It has a lot of information that can be used, not only to understand how the brain works and ages, but also to protect oneself from the ravages of age. Worth every penny.
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Top reviews from other countries

Antonio
4.0 out of 5 stars Paradoxal
Reviewed in Spain on April 4, 2024
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Too many scientific concepts at times, as it would be expected from a scientist, a great read anyway, I miss knowing more details about the training developed by his workgroup, not too bad though.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A Jack of all trades, master of none! It pays to be good at something!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 10, 2017
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I found this book informative and fascinating. The idea of the left hemisphere of the brain being utilised for pattern recognition, and the right side for novelty, and the effects these functions have as we age along with our individual experiences, is rather illuminating. At 27 years of age, I'm yet to find myself in a profession that has kept me 'grounded' (More choice than circumstance), so as to increase my pattern recognition capabilities in some field or another. But I guess at present, the novelty seeking capabilities in my right hemisphere are taking precedence over the former.
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Patrik
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books I've read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 3, 2018
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One of the best books I've read! Despite limited knowledge on the subject of neuroscience the book was very easy to understand and read. Good starting point if you want to read more about our brain and our mind.
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Hector
3.0 out of 5 stars SharpBrains is much better
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 6, 2009
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In my opinion this book has a thin premise; that ageing brains lose various powers, but do get better at seeing patterns (being 'wise'). However his SharpBrains joint authored book is excellent; a great current survey of 'brain training going mainstream' developments and interviews. I hope Goldberg really focuses now on developing his brain training, and produces a book with exercises for each aspect of keeping brains well trained and in tip-top form as they age - veyr best wishes to him.
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