ABSTRACT
Folklores of all nations and races suggest that there is one marvellous bonus of old age: a pinnacle of mental achievement, generically labelled wisdom, that can be earned only by living long enough to gain the necessary experience. In pre-literate societies, human brains were the only archives of all of the useful knowledge about the world that our species gained. The immortalisation of knowledge continued and was refined over the next many thousands of years. Now the World Wide Web holds more instantly available information than any of us can ever hope to scan in a lifetime and our grandchildren are far better at accessing it than we are. For cognitive gerontologists, discussion of wisdom had to begin by framing acceptable definitions for what it is and identifying individuals who have more or less of it.
