Thank for your comment! I am reading back sometimes and would like to know if you are going to explore the cognitive basis for wisdom? It sounds very interesting.

Christer

thanks for sharing these thoughts. I really like your angle on the combination of wisdom and creativity. The psychology folk have been doing some great research on the cognitive basis for wisdom and I might explore this in a future post.

John

thanks for the comment and the link to the NSW Chamber of Commerce site. I’m also thinking about how cognition changes with age so I have a few more questions for later.

John

With ref. to creativity I believe we are more open before our brains getting older and needs to nurture it for keeping and growing our creativity skills. For me has “to be innovative” much less to do with creativity than having competence and experience which I think your examples shows us. Madeleine Albright e.g. had a lot to do at home as a married woman taking care of a household etc.

Knowledge and especially Wisdom and Common sense is very useful for being innovative. Definition of innovation, the latin word “innovare” – “renewal” is something else than creativity, “creare” – “creating”. Good idea/s taken further to innovations needs people with experiences and wisdom since we need to avoid playing God and come up with quick and “dirty” solutions only to please the market and business. Innovation is nowadays as a mantra but very few understand it´s depths and possibilities and it needs to be handled with care.

We invent a lot as substitutes and forget sometimes the most important questions, what do we want to achieve with our inventions? If we could start with a Why? and go to the root cause for coming up with innovations and analyse the threats etc. before there would be much better innovations suitable for the humanity.

-Nancy