FuturePundit reports:

The long-held belief that older people perform slower and worse than younger people has been proven wrong. In a study published today in Neuron, psychologists from McMaster University discovered that the ageing process actually improves certain abilities: Older people appear to be better and faster at grasping the big picture than their younger counterparts.

In this study, wisdom takes the form of high-contrast pattern recognition. The results lead Randall Parker to pose an intriguing question: is this an aspect of aging that we would want to reverse?