In the classroom
We teach courses in and beyond MIT classrooms, and are building them into a curriculum others can teach.
A research lab at MIT studying how wisdom and meaning are cultivated, and how they can be taught.
Becoming wiser in an intelligent world.
The Wisdom Lab is an experimental design studio inside MIT’s Department of Anthropology. For over a century, anthropology has studied how people around the world live, and how they make meaning of their lives. We put that inheritance to new use: helping people understand their own lives, and giving them the tools to keep studying them, so that meaning-making becomes a practice, and wisdom something anyone can cultivate.
We bring an anthropologist’s discipline to deeply human questions.
What we do
In the field
We study how people across cultures make meaning, and look for the practices worth carrying into our own lives.
In the world
What we learn becomes open, teachable resources: a forthcoming book, public writing, and tools for classrooms and communities.
Who we are
The Wisdom Lab grew from the collaboration between Graham M. Jones, Professor of Anthropology and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, and Deepak Ramola, wisdom historian and founder of Project FUEL, whose work has reached more than forty countries. Their collaboration brings together anthropology’s study of meaning-making and Deepak’s decade of work collecting and sharing life lessons across cultures.
Together, they have developed an approach inspired by ethnography, anthropology’s practice of learning from people by entering their worlds and taking their experiences seriously. The Lab works at the intersection of theory and practice, translating anthropological insight into tools and resources for making meaning and cultivating wisdom.
Learn moreIt started in a classroom
In 2017, Professor Graham Jones launched The Meaning of Life, now one of MIT’s most highly-rated courses. It is deeply experiential work: students do fieldwork on their own lives, interviewing parents, grandparents, friends, and strangers about love, work, faith, and belonging, and come away having learned things they never knew about the people closest to them.
Explore the class
The question at the center of the Lab’s listening practice.
What if you became a stranger to your own life?
Wisdom is not a static inheritance but a living, evolving resource, shaped by culture, negotiated between generations, and adapted to meet the challenges of a changing world.
Making wisdom accessible
We work at the intersection of practical and participatory learning through play.
The Lab is built to be a bridge, carrying research findings out into community, and carrying what people already know back into the research. So our outputs are not only papers. We make things people can hold, play, read, and argue with, like books, films, games, and tools people can use without us in the room.
Read more
Get involved
This work only happens with other people. We collaborate with artists, technologists, educators, community leaders, and donors who bring their own insight, imagination, and heart to the questions we are asking. Wisdom becomes a great deal more interesting when it is a shared pursuit.
From the field notebook
Essays, conversations, and field notes.
What people are saying
I think I’ve learned lessons that will help me beyond my MIT career in this class.
Graham’s classes transform the students, setting them on paths of lifelong learning and self-reflection.
Deepak is a master designing activities that allow students to access their own internal wisdom.
We study wisdom, seriously and playfully.
Interested in what the Lab is up to? Sign up for the Wisdom Lab mailing list. Reach us at wisdomlab@mit.edu.
