Wisdom increases with age?

It probably does but the research excerpted below does not prove it. It simply shows that we learn more words as we go through life -- which is no surprise. The journal article concerned is here

New findings seem to contradict one of the most widely accepted assumptions about ageing: that the human brain is at its most powerful between the ages of 18 and 26. Scientists have discovered that intelligence, instead of peaking in our youth, remains stable and in some respects gets sharper as we grow older. The researchers found that verbal skills continued to increase for at least two decades beyond the age of 20, while arithmetic ability remained constant.

Their work suggests that many assumptions made by employers, policymakers and educational institutions about ageing need to be rethought. "Verbal ability appears to keep increasing over time," said Lars Larsen, a psychologist at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who led the research. In the study, Dr Larsen obtained the records of 4300 US ex-servicemen who had been given a battery of intelligence tests when they joined the military at the age of about 20. The same servicemen were tested again two decades later. Dr Larsen's research involved carrying out a meticulous comparison of the two sets of data. The results, published in Intelligence, a peer-reviewed academic journal, show that the real changes in intelligence are more marked and more complex than had been realised.

Dr Larsen believes that the most likely reason for improvements in verbal skills is simply practice. Older people have had to solve far more social and practical problems than younger ones, so they have been forced to develop complex language skills. This effect overrides the slow but steady loss of brain cells that modern medical scanning techniques have confirmed begins in the late 20s....

Source

Posted by John Ray