Aging Seminar: Contributions of Wisdom to Healthy Aging
SPRING 2025 SEMINARS OF THE ROBERT N. BUTLER COLUMBIA AGING CENTER | Assets of Aging: A Series on the Capabilities that Accrue with Longer Lives
Join us for the Columbia Aging Center’s ONLINE seminar–the next in a series that focuses on the assets of aging and the capabilities that accrue with longer lives. Please register to attend via Zoom on February 27, 2025. Details and registration link below.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2025, 12:00PM-1:00PM ET
Contributions of Wisdom to Healthy Aging: Exciting Frontiers of Future Research
Dilip V. Jeste, MD
Director, Global Research Network on Social Determinants of Mental Health and Exposomics
President-Elect, World Federation for Psychotherapy
Editor-in-Chief, International Psychogeriatrics
Virtual Seminar
Location: Zoom
Register to attend via Zoom at: https://columbiacuimc.zoom.us/meeting/register/ihe98VbeTLqKAxMTw3TY6A
Abstract: Discussed in religions and philosophies for millennia, wisdom has been a topic of growing empirical research in recent decades. Wisdom is a complex personality trait comprised of empathy/compassion, emotional regulation, self-reflection, acceptance of diverse perspectives, and spirituality. Putative neurobiological underpinnings of wisdom involve prefrontal cortex and limbic striatum, and they provide a biological basis for enhancement of wisdom components with healthy aging. A number of randomized controlled trials have shown an increase in emotional regulation, empathy/compassion, and spirituality with behavioral interventions with moderate to large effect sizes. Our studies show a strong inverse association between wisdom and loneliness, and suggest that wisdom, especially its compassion component, can potentially be an antidote for the modern behavioral pandemic of loneliness, suicides, and opioid-related deaths of despair. I will discuss some exciting frontiers for future research on wisdom including global psycho-bio-social approaches as well as technological advances to help move artificial intelligence (AI) to artificial wisdom (AW).
