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Some of us look for wisdom in the Bible, Plato or at Grandma's knee. Dilip Jeste and his colleague Thomas Meeks are searching for it in the brain.

Jeste and Meeks, both geriatric psychiatrists at the University of California, San Diego, hypothesize in the Archives of General Psychiatry that wisdom, or at least the execution of its attributes, can be found in the brain's primitive limbic system as well as its more evolutionarily advanced prefrontal cortex.

Wisdom for centuries has been a religious or philosophical concept that varies somewhat by culture. But Jeste tells ScientificAmerican.com that there is reason to believe that it's rooted in neurobiology. He and Meeks pored through medical literature, locating 10 papers that defined wisdom. Based on commonalities in the research, the two proposed that wisdom is made up of the behaviors that reflect the good of the group, pragmatism, emotional balance, self-understanding, tolerance and the ability to deal with ambiguity. Then, based on those studies, they zeroed in on which neurotransmitters (the brain's chemical messengers) were active and which parts of the brain light up on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) when we behave wisely.

"What was striking was that some regions appeared time and again," Jeste  says: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (which is involved in control of emotions and processing ambiguity), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (which is involved in empathy, morality, self-reflection and decision-making), the anterior cingulate (which is important to detecting conflict) and the limbic striatum (part of the brain's reward system).

Jeste describes those regions' roles in wisdom this way: "The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is like a proverbial father: a disciplinarian, cold, calculating, rationale. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is probably like a mother: kind, nice, helpful, sociable, emotional. The anterior cingulate is the proverbial uncle who when you have a fight between father and mother, you go to your uncle. The limbic striatum is a friend, a reward system."

"If you look at it in this fashion, it makes sense to have a balance among these regions to lead to something akin to wisdom," he says. "You need cold, calculating rationality but also emotional sociableness. You need to have rewards for what you do and punishments for what you don’t do and conflict detection and resolution."
 
Jeste and Meeks concede that some might call their conclusions reductionistic because they based their "map" not on the idea that wisdom is a single trait, but a collection of attributes. But Jeste said that similarities between how wisdom was portrayed thousands of years ago in the Bhagavad Gita (a Hindu scripture) and in the West today — as well as the tale of Phineas Gage, a railway worker whose allegedly wise attributes such as amiability and good judgment were said to vanish after a spike penetrated his left frontal lobe — "makes you think it's not a cultural phenomenon but biologically consistent."

Updated at 2:40 P.M. April 7 to correct academic affiliation of scientists to University of California, San Diego from San Diego State

Image by iStockphoto/pavlen

12 Comments

1. 1. way2ec 02:16 AM 4/7/09

   Is wisdom in the brain? Where else would it be? Even "body memory" is in the brain. How it exists there or how it comes into being there is as mysterious as any other thought process, emotion, or belief. Can I ask if stupidity is in the brain? Where else would it be found or be found to be missing?

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2. 2. Shekhar 03:54 AM 4/7/09

   Isn't Wisdom a thought?
   There could be many adjectives taht one could ask and seek ; for thier existence and origin... It is our awareness and thinking that helps us know more about brain- functions of brain- connections that brain makes...
   But, Wisdom or its likes... are in our subconscious...

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3. 3. jaytudu 06:39 AM 4/7/09

   First thing is the word wisdom must have to be defined properly. The defination of wisdom is always atribute based. So it is important to have clear
   idea about the different type of attribute that wisdom can have like emotion(love, compassion), belief based emotion, knowledge based emotion, rationality, mathematical ability and etc. Than only the search for it within any domain will become meaningful. The domain may be brain, mind or conciousness. The search for the origine of wisdom in brain only is not coclusive to say that wisdom arises from neural activity. Because it is not yet known how the initial neuron is getting activated for a particular type of behaviour at physical level. So the idea of "origine of wisdom from neuron" is not acceptable at this point of time.

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4. 4. know_the_categories 02:14 PM 4/7/09

   God I hate commenting. Ironically, wisdom is in the execution of action. The ability to think about what the wisest solution is, is different than doing it.
   
   If none of that made sense, I doubt this will too - the wisest do nothing at all. And with that I take myself out of the category.

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5. 5. pprabhakar 02:22 AM 4/8/09

   I think all our actions are not only controlled by the brain but also a zombielike thing outside of brain. So too all our expereances thro' out our life, which lead to making good decissions (which is wisdom) and wisdom differs from person to person though each having the same type of expereances, are not only stored in the brain areas may be outside of the brain too.

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6. 6. Carlton22 11:36 AM 4/8/09

   Wisdom is an attribute of the Yellow plume of ThreeFold Flame of the Heart which resides in the chakra called Secret Chamber of the Heart. This is the location of The Interior Castle that St Therese of Avila wrote about. There are 7 major chakras along the spinal column and 144 minor chakras distributed throughout the body. Chakras are to the etheric body of man what organs are to the physical body of man. They are like step-down transformers for high frequency spiriual energy to nourish the soul and four lower bodies of man: the etheric (memory), mental (mind), emotional (feeling) and physical. Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone but by every Word that proceedeth from the Father. All of creatiion is composed of the same building blocks of God's Light, Energy, Consciousness and has Innate Intelligence. Quantum physics is beginning to realize this in the discovery that everything is composed of wave lengths, frequencies, vibrations, energy oscillating from a physical to non-physical matrix (spirit to matter and matter to spirit). The mind (mental body) is separate from the brain and uses the brain to help us cognize, it gives us Intellectual Intelligence. The brain is more like a computer with input and output, processing and command and control capabilities. The heart has as many or more neurons than the brain and the ancients thought more highly of Heart Intelligence (Spiritual Intelligence) than of brain intelligence. The ThreeFold Flame of the Heart is our Portal to the Kingdom of God (Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is within you). The 3-fold flame connects us to our Higher Mind known as the Christ Mind (St Paul said to let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus). The heart is not the seat of emotion the solar plexus chakra is. Through the ThreeFold Flame of the Heart comes Divine Wisdom, Love and Power and is the source of creativity and inspiration.

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7. 7. rayace7 01:01 PM 4/9/09

   Isn't it so obvious that wisdom is in the brain when humans invented the concept of religions and stuff. They (humans) wrote the religious wrote the scriptures with loads of wisdom. The first human to do so would have obviously observed and written down inspirational and wisdom text upon his experience. Humans wrote the text. The bible or any other holy text did not arrive from the heaven by fax! Man invented it and wrote it down. It's all in the brain...

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8. 8. Mong H Tan, PhD 03:52 PM 4/9/09

   RE: My answer is unequivocally Yes -- Wisdom is in our "memory-thought" system!
   
   However, this study is more phrenologic than reductionistic, as the lead author Jeste has described those brain regions' roles in wisdom this way: "The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is like a proverbial father: a disciplinarian, cold, calculating, rationale. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is probably like a mother: kind, nice, helpful, sociable, emotional. The anterior cingulate is the proverbial uncle who when you have a fight between father and mother, you go to your uncle. The limbic striatum is a friend, a reward system."
   
   In fact, wisdom is a holistic "memory-thought" system and an expression that involves the learning and experience of our whole brain, including those regions as indicated in the study above.
   
   It is the same "thought-memory" system that has given rise to the concept of God or Theology that I explained before in "Where is God? -- God is in one's thought in our brain!" here: http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=where-is-god-09-03-11 and also in my 2006 seminal book "Gods, Genes, Conscience" (URL links below); in which -- more scientifically and philosophically -- the specific mechanisms of our "thought-memory" system in our brain has been extensively and empirically characterized, localized, and defined as "memophorescenicity" as the brain-mind quantum panorama of our consciousness or wisdom expressed (please see Chapter 5: The Origins of Gods; and Chapter 15: The Universal Theory of Mind, in general; and Chapter 15.4: Memory Modulation and Recall: A New Hypothesis of Psychic Imagery, Perceptivity, Creativity, and Reflectivity, in particular).
   
   Best wishes, Mong 4/9/9usct2:51p; author "Decoding Scientism" and "Consciousness & the Subconscious" (works in progress since July 2007), "Gods, Genes, Conscience" (2006: http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0595379907 ) and "Gods, Genes, Conscience: Global Dialogues Now" (blogging avidly since 2006: http://www2.blogger.com/profile/18303146609950569778 ).

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9. 9. bestofnothing 09:45 PM 4/9/09

   If you read the primary source referenced in this article, you will find that the researchers did a Pubmed literature search to identify previous human imaging studies that addressed emotion, decision making, etc...; and then they somehow infered from these previous studies--that had nothing to do with wisdom--scientific knowledge about wisdom's neurological basis.

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10. 10. fontainecosult 09:53 PM 4/9/09

    I don't understand why this finding is controversial or contentious. If one says that wisdom is found in culture then how does that negate the brains responsibility in being wise? A culture is just a bunch of associated brains...

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11. 11. pgtruspace 08:32 PM 4/10/09

    I think not getting involved in this lame discussion is the wise decision.
    

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12. 12. danielle85 10:29 AM 4/17/09

    Wisdom of the brain, if you have a birth certificate, you are a slave to your goverment, you follow there orders, not gods, become a free man of the land, follow god orders and you will find this balance within your person.

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