Usually, any approximate, ten-words-or-less definition of wisdom causes the listener to take what I've just told them about wisdom, and unwittingly begin to fill in all of the missing details from their own experience. If someone has heard of I.Q. and little else, chances are that he or she will colour their understanding of wisdom in light of that psychometric measure. If someone has a particular religious or philosophical leaning that they abide by, or happens to admire a particular historical figure, their version of wisdom will gravitate towards that particular pre-established ideal, just so that they don't have to rewrite their normative standards of living because of something they were told at a party.
This makes quite a lot of sense, from the perspective of Cognitive Science. What most people don't realize is that, very literally, our experienced life is composed of much more than the information that our senses send to our brain. When I look out of my window and see the tree across the street from me, I do what most people do, and take it for granted that I'm looking at a tree. However, there's far more to this interaction. I don't actually see a tree at all. The individual photoreceptors in my retina receive photons, and these get transduced and interpreted by my brain as a series of colours in a particular sequence (oculomotor coordination and foveation make this story a lot more complicated, though), and based on my past experience, I interpret the input stream as a tree. If I were a botanist or gardener, however, I would probably identify it as a birch or fern, or whatever the case is (clearly, I'm neither a botanist nor a gardener...).
Similarly, if I hear a sequence of utterances from my neighbour's mouth, I might be able to parse that sequence into sentences, if it's English, or some other language I understand, or I might just hear a bunch of sounds, if we're talking about one of my neighbours that has a particularly thick accent, or if they aren't speaking English at all.
The point I'm trying to make here is that whether it be the comprehension of something very low-level, like the object that I call 'the tree across the street', or something more complex, like 'an English sentence with a Jamaican accent', or something even higher-level, like 'what you just told me about what wisdom is', one's past experiences are the driving force behind one's ability to interpret new information. This interpretation is done so seamlessly by our brains, that with enough training, it becomes nearly impossible to see or hear or sense things in any other way. I can't hear someone speaking in English or Urdu and fail to comprehend what they're saying. I can't fall back into a state where it's all just a series of interesting patterns of sounds, and no more. Similarly, any person that has trained themselves to understand certain kinds of ideas in a particular fashion will find it rather difficult to assume the perspective of others, should they have a sufficiently different take on those ideas.
I don't remember how gradually my attitudes to people's resonses changed, but instead of becoming rather upset that others would take what I told them about wisdom and concoct something that suited their own world-view, I now react to others' comments rather differently. I empathize with them, knowing how deeply uprooted one feels without a solid fundamental framing of the world around them. While it's true that everyone is continually making tiny changes to their understanding of the way the world works, and are, as a result, experiencing fairly mild discomfort at worst, the more deeply-seated the replaced set of beliefs or valuations in one's world-view, the stronger and further-reaching the shock-waves of dissonance that person will experience.
To use a rather pop-culture example, if you were shown persuasive and compelling evidence that suggested that you really were hooked up to something like The Matrix, and that all of your past and present experiences were little more than an elaborately crafted hallucination, chances are that your current cognitive framework would not be able to reorganize itself in a way that allowed you to maintian your personal identity, and still accept the new information that you had just received. Some people might simply deny the evidence provided, no matter how compelling, as a kind of 'safety mechanism', shielding them from the mental trauma that dissonance causes. Others would go through a rather literal melt-down, and given sufficient and appropriate supports, would have the chance to rebuild a working model of their universe and themselves, in ways that allow them to live in a present that can be reconciled with their past.
The reason why the melt-down is a literal one is that when a mind is sufficiently bent by the data it receives, the brain has to rewire itself, too. Sadly, however, the biological foundation for a person's cognition is not nearly as malleable or adaptable as the cognition itself. For this reason, people that suffer sufficient mental trauma, often involving experiences that surprise them because they appeared to be impossible events, might not always be able to recover. If a person's brain has grown in a particular fashion, its neurons being woven together by the threads of its sense organs, massively incongruous input can unravel much of its mental tapestry. In the absence of an acceptable pattern to feed them, both the mind and the brain can remain in tatters.
Although learning about wisdom can be personally challenging and mentally taxing, I'm very thankful that it isn't outright traumatic. Nevertheless, it requires not just learning, but also a considerable amount of un-learning. Letting go of old ideas, habits, and thinking styles are required, if one wishes to achieve the gift of wisdom. Despite being aware of the fact that knowing about wisdom alone does not guarantee its achievement, I can say with certitude that I have had to undergo a fair bit of difficult un-learning myself. In the process, I have gained a new sense of reverence for the sages of old, since not only did they undergo a much more profound deconstruction of their own psyches, but they also performed the Herculean feat of mental self-reconstruction.
As I'll undoubtedly get to in a later post, part of what my colleagues and I hope to accomplish through our research is the foundation of a regimen of self-deconstruction and self-reconstruction of thoughts and actions that allows negative, self-destructive aspects of one's own mind and life to be detected more easily, and either eliminated or brought into check. It would also allow people to identify the thought processes that allow for their minds and lives to flourish, and discover new ways to allow these positive aspects of mind to be recombined, to interact, and to support each other. With such guidelines for self-training in hand, perhaps people that are willing to make an effort to improve themselves will be able to do so more safely and comfortably, and maybe more people will feel more open to making the effort, too.
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