abstraction occurs without our conscious awareness, and it accounts for one of the most widespread traits that oldsters have: wisdom. From a neurocognitive standpoint, wisdom is the ability to see patterns where others don’t see them, to extract generalized common points from prior experience and use those to make predictions about what is likely to happen next. Oldsters aren’t as fast, perhaps, at mental calculations and retrieving names, but they are much better and faster at seeing the big picture. And that comes down to decades of generalization and abstraction.
