As we age, our brains become better and better at this kind of pattern matching and abstraction, and although dot patterns seem pretty far removed from anything of real-world importance, the experiment illuminates that 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
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