Hypothesis: White Matter Matters to Polymathic Ability

White Matter Matters to Polymathic Ability

Why is a polymath a polymath? What turned them into one of those unicorns that can learn lots, and connect the dots? It’s great and life-altering that the ability is there. But what’s the foundational enabler of these characteristics?

A Hypothesis: White Matter Matters

The hypothesis is that the structural integrity (the shape and density) of white matter in our brains matters and is one of the foundational biological enablers of polymathic abilities. White Matter matters.

What the heck is white matter? “White matter in the brain consists primarily of myelinated axons, long projections of nerve cells that transmit electrical signals between different brain regions and the spinal cord.”

More simply: “White Matter is the physical structure that connects regions of the brain and enables communication between them”

Just like the bandwidth available in computer network connections matters for data transfer, and it matters if there is a “break” in that computer network, the same could go for white matter in our brains. “There are indications that complex brain processes depend on networks and white matter interconnections” (1)

Wait what? It’s a NETWORK?

So… the structural integrity of white matter probably matters as a foundation. There’s most likely more to it (the quantum part of consciousness), but that’s a hypothesis for a different day.

(1) Lyons, D. M., Yang, C., Eliez, S., Reiss, A. L., & Schatzberg, A. F. (2004). Cognitive correlates of white matter growth and stress hormones in female squirrel monkey adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 24(14), 3655–3662. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/24/14/3655

More reading - especially if you read the links

(2) Medical News Today. (n.d.).White Matter: The brain’s flexible but underrated superhighway. Retrieved January 19, 2025, from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318966#Viewing-white-matter

Life Patterns for Polymaths and Prolific People | DataPsy Inc

Dabbling by Design

Life patterns for prolific, polymathic people vary from those for deep specialists. Learn about the four basic patterns that can help you achieve your multiple dreams.

Prevailing business and life culture says that you must have one and only one focus in order to succeed in life and business. This thought gets ingrained in us from the time we start school. Our education system then pushes us into specialized majors. We learn and are tested on subject-areas. Later on, we are expected to become certified in those deep specialty areas and hired to work only in specialized areas. Within that cultural context, memes and quotes such as these are interpreted to mean a single focus.

“One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular ” — Tony Robbins

OUCH!!! For a Polymath, this sort of insprirational meme provokes interesting responses. Some people start thinking they are “wrong” or “don’t fit in” . They think - “That does not apply to me!.” Or they get angry - “How insulting to think I can only do one thing!” Why can’t I both dabble AND achieve? - the good news is that you CAN both dabble and achieve.

Start by re-framing the meaning of the word focus slightly however, put focus in the context of your “purpose” and how you choose to use focus in a pattern throughout your life can yield success in a way that you and you alone define! Focus is a tool that can limite you, or you can leverage it to empower you. Let’s dabble by design and choose how to focus it using some over-arching patterns.

Dabbling by Design

Are you a Polymath? Dabbling or learning about different things is a required activity for you. Your core mastery lies in being a specialist at "integration of disciplines". So to do this it’s required to master multiple disciplines and see the pattern similarities.

To the layperson - this can look like lack of focus, however it's not a lack of focus. It's a focus on integration of specialties - which makes polymaths particularly good at facilitating production of cross-disciplinary teams.

Life Patterns for Polymaths

Let’s look at some life patterns for the dabblers and make some sense out of them. There are many possibilities on how to combine career with interests, and the possibilities can flow and evolve over your lifetime. Four patterns for life design.

1. Singular Career with Multiple “Outside” interests

2. Sequential Reinvention

3. Two (Or Three) Sequentially

4. The Umbrella - Purpose aligned focus

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Singular Career with Multiple “Outside” Interests

This pattern means that the person with multiple interests has one primary strength that can serve as a money generator that funds the development of multiple outside interests - which could be hobbies or side-gigs. Eventually as the outside interests develop and mature, their income producing ability can increase and the need for the singular career can decrease.

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Polymaths can pursue multiple careers simultaneously

Manage Two (or Three) Interests Sequentially

This pattern means that the life-liver is choosing to pursue more than one path at the same time. A person might simultaneously be a Food & Beverage Manager, as well as a Single Mother, as well as a teacher and an event planner

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Sequential Reinvention

This pattern is very familiar to those of us in technology who have been here more than ten years. This pattern means that the life liver periodically completely changes what they are doing. Someone might start out life as a poetry maker, then turn into a printmaker, then become a technologist. Multiple masteries spread out in a row.

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The Umbrella Pattern

Umbrella Focus is a Life Pattern for Polymathic People

The Umbrella Paern — An umbrella pattern can take several forms within its organizing principle. For example, this author’s de?ning of “umbrella” is a mission statement of “connecting people, processes, and technology in order to create new products.” This “umbrella” is broad enough to encompass both a day-job as an Information Technology Manager at the same time as a role in life as a serial entrepreneur. All of these activities ? within the one “umbrella” so this reduces potential for being overwhelmed — all that they do is part of the overall whole.

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Pulling the Patterns Together Over Time

Life patterns for Prolific People

Finally - there’s no rule that says that you have to follow a single pattern over time. This illustration shows a life progression where someone started out their career in one direction, kept doing that while they took a parallel path to reinvent themself, gained an over-arching purpose, and pulled all the paths together into an umbrella pattern.

Productive Triage Team: The Structure

Team Triage - Happily Ever After!

Music from Uppbeat (Free for Creators!): Https://uppbeat.io/t/mood-maze/trendsetter license code: AJWA42ZUIYVQVVMN

Once upon a time there was a company that had two teams.

Team #1 is responsible for creating and maintaining a product.

Team #2 is responsible for creating and maintaining a product that Team #1 needed. Team #1 is dependent on the quality from Team #2.

Initial Problem

Team #1 received a report from their customer that their product was not working correctly. Based on the symptoms, it appeared that the root cause was actually due to Team 2’s product failure.

Team #1 reported this situation to Team #2. Team #2 produced a response that was not favorable to Team #1.

First Response

Team #2’s specialists talked to each other determined that the only way that the product would have broken is if Team #1 broke it themselves. Neither the coordinator or the specialists considered that the break could be in between the specialties. Neither could “see” the connection.

The two specialists insisted that nothing was wrong with the product. So of course, the problem had to be due to Team #1’s actions. They pushed back to Team #1, who in turn, became frustrated.

Team 1 Insists There Is a Problem

Having received no relief, Team 1 now insists that there is a problem and asks Team 2 again for help in finding the root cause.

Team #1’s leader realized that the solution was probably located somewhere between the perspectives of the two specialists. So Team #1 lent their ‘generalizing specialist’ to Team #2 to see if they could bridge the gap between the perspectives.

A “generalizing specialist” is an individual who has one core specialty but also has experience in a large number of other disciplines that may not be directly related to their core discipline. They are able to connect perspectives.

Problem Solving Structure Change

So in order to solve this problem and get over the finger-pointing frustrations, the alignment of the people involved in the problem reporting structure and the problem solving structure needed to be different. Team #1 lent their generalizing specialist, who had knowledge of both Specialist A and B’s perspective to the problem solving process. Between the three perspectives, the root cause and solution was found!

And the team lived happily ever after!

Successful People and Drug Addicts Have One Big Thing in Common

Learn to use Habits to Light Your Own Fire

Habits. We all use habits to perform routine things in our lives, such as simply putting our shoes on. And successful people and drug addicts both leverage more substantial habits to run aspects of their life. There are some big differences in how they leverage the habits to produce different results.

Successful people use habits as life building blocks to empower themselves to achieve more. Unsuccessful people have not yet learned the process of creating these life building block habits. Drug addicts are controlled by triggers and substance consumption.

It’s not surprising this happens - our schools don’t teach this to us so the only way we learn it is by being born surrounded by people that know how to use habits as building blocks for their life design, or seeking out a mentor who can help you learn how to do this. If you are born into an environment where everyone around you and who created you is controlled by negative habitual routines, it’s going to be an uphill battle to learn this. But you CAN learn this. Take a look at Barbie the Welder for a little inspiration of someone born into a challenging environment, who now leads an intentionally designed life.

Once you realize what habits are and how to recognize yours and their triggers, then you can learn a process to create your own and use habits as a super-power. Using habits for personal strength is much more fun than letting a habit be a super-destroyer of your self or your family.

By nature, we are creatures of habit. We think in images, feel our way through our lives, and rely on feeling comfortable as the final decider of truth

So how can you make a habit your super-power? Let’s learn what a habit is, and then learn how to and intentionally create useful habits as part of a life design toolkit that helps you achieve your dreams.

When a trigger like a smell or a sound or a question occurs, the habit produces an immediate response

What is a Habit ?

The simplest way to think of a habit is a set of instructions that run automatically when the trigger that unlocks them is felt by our minds. Triggers can be many things. Triggers that activate a habit can be a smell, or a sound, or a question, taste, time of day, location, or looking at a symbol or photo. All of these things cause your brain to retrieve a “habit routine” and either say, or do what that “habit routine” says for you to do. Some examples:

• Someone disagrees with you and your hand immediately flies up to your mouth and you bite your nails. The trigger was an emotion, and the habit is to self-destruct your nails.

• Your cat licks your face. You wake up, go to the computer and start working on your novel. The trigger was the cat licking your face. The habit is to work on something you love to do.

• Your boss at work criticizes something that you produced. When you get home, you drink yourself into a state where you no longer feel the impact of those words. The trigger was the feeling after you received criticism, and the habit was to drink.

While not “easy”, it is possible to become aware of triggers and the routines built into you. Once you do this, you can also learn to "name your own trigger” and implant your own routines in your mind as habits. You’re one step closer to “lighting your own fire” and achieving your dreams when you do this.

Creating a Habit

There is a mechanism in your brain called a habit loop. It consists of a trigger, a set of instructions, and a reward. When a habit is first created in your mind, the cue, the routine and the reward are associated together. This could happen over time as a matter of practice, such as learning to tie your shoes and get dressed when you are very young, or it could happen accidentally by looking at an image with words on it, liking it, sharing it, then experienced chemicals called endorphins that give you a reward when your friends like your post. In these examples, the associations between cue, routine and reward is automatically being created. That’s ok, but it’s not the only way. YOU can create your own habits.

Intention changes the Habit Loop into a Life Design Loop

Building on Your Habits for Life Success

Let’s build you up. Here are Five steps and five key triggers

Five Steps to Life Design

Here are five steps to active your life design loop and “light your fire”

1. You will decide to do something - set your intention or goal

2. You will decide what you need to do to make it happen

3. You will define when it will happen

4. You will design repetitive routines to get you there and associate them with your trigger of choice

5. You will trigger yourself daily until you achieve your goal.

It’s liberating. No “system” will be able to limit your chances anymore. Want some proof? Take a look at Chris Nikic’s 1% Better challenge. Through his habit of being 1% better every day, Chris achieved his Ironman goal.

Five triggers that make new habits stick

Here are five particularly powerful triggers that make your new habit “stick” - you can use others such as imagery, smell, or music as habitual anchors as well.

1. Time of day, week or year

2. Location

3. Preceding Event.- the cat waking you up

4. Emotional State

5. Other People

A Life Design Loop

So through the practice of setting an intention, and adding discipline and persistence, you can harness your internal habit loop. You can learn how to design and run your own habitual routines, and then use them to power your life with less energy spent overall. You will own your own system of being who you were meant to be. It’s fun.

Read More about Habit Formation

• http://www.psychologydiscussion.net/habits/habit-formation-basis-types-and-measures-for-effective-habit-formation/638

• https://www.motivationalliance.org/how-to-transform-your-habits-with-cues-and-rewards/

• https://gdt.stanford.edu/the-habit-loop/

Why Words Hurt You - Mind's Blind Spot

Let’s challenge an assumption today. Surely you have heard this nursery rhyme before.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me

And - If words didn’t hurt, then why do child abuse victims say things like “the harsh sarcastic words that my mom said in my childhood still echo in my head - and I am 84”? It’s because we have associated the concept of “hurt” with physical pain. Things like a black eye, or a broken arm Let’s shift thinking about the meaning of “hurt” . This will make it easier to see how words can hurt. Words can cause changes in a part of your physical structure - but you’re never going to “feel” it as if you stepped on a sticker. We have a blind spot in our self-protection mechanisms.

Words Like “You Made Me” Do Hurt You Physically

Your Mind’s Blind Spot

Physical pain results when your nervous system detects an intrusion or compression of a body part and the nervous system sends an electrical signal to your brain. The nervous system itself is made up of two parts: the brain and the spinal cord (central nervous system) and the peripheral nervous system (sensory and motor nerves) These two systems tell us what is happening in our limbs and skin and other body parts.

We also have are special receptors in many of our body parts that serve as sensors. The nervous system then transmits those signals up the spinal cord “wire” to the brain that interprets it, and packs that response away with other memories and response. Read how we feel pain.

So when words hurt us, our brain does not get a signal to tell our body to protect itself. It does not tell us to pull away - like how we instantly pull back from a hot burner when our hand comes too close. . So we stay. And we stay. Think how long it takes a victim of verbal abuse to leave their abuser. Some never do.

So where is pain’s blind spot? The nervous system itself does not detect pain inside the brain because there are no receptors in either the white or the gray matter. So if white matter gets ‘hurt’ you won’t be able to feel that. And when it gets hurt, it will operate like an electrical wire that gets melted in a fire - you will get sparks everywhere.

White Matter is a Structure

We take for granted that we can plug our electrical devices into the outlet on the wall and they will work.   Behind that wall is a long series of interconnected wires that bring the electricity to the plug.  What do you think would happen if a rat chewed through one of your electrical cords inside the wall?   Would that wire work anymore to feed the plug?  Probably not.   It is more likely that you would either have a malfunctioning plug, or you would have a bad fire in your house.

White matter is a lot like the wires inside our walls.  Only white matter is provides wires inside our head. Wires made up of cells that can change based on the conditions around it.  Like a rat chewing through an electrical cord, physical reactions to neurochemicals in our brains can literally “chew through” our white matter or make it less “dense” - these things can then and make some transmission paths more prominent than others.   And like in a house, the result can be a fire. In the case of a person - those sparks can yield someone who becomes dependent on a substance, or someone who always reacts with fear or anger.

So what causes neurochemicals to generate in your mind?  Words. Images.  Touches.  Anything we detect with any of our senses.  So the repetitive words uttered by a spouse against their partner can cause neurochemicals to generate and these further cause damage to white matter circuits. If there is a smell in the air, that will also get associated along with your experience into your mind and unfortunately it can stored as a “trigger” that will produce an immediate habitual response when you encounter that trigger again.

Let Your Own Light Shine - Work On Responding More Productively to Your Triggers

What To Do About It?

When you experience verbal abuse, your mind’s response patterns can become trapped inside a ritual of responding to the echoes of your former abuse or your former situation. This ritual has been most likely been empowered by white matter damage. One trigger - a sight, sound, smell or place can cause the bad experience to pour back out.

That ritual response is what you need to change to feel better - and there will be nothing “easy” about changing it. While it does not appear that your white matter can “change back” - your mind is built to be adaptable, and it can create another way to work around its situation.

In our next article, we’ll write about what brain structures and processes store those rituals - and how to work on responding differently to those triggers.

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For Curious Minds

• UC Davis neurology researchers focus on brain's superhighway of connectors

• White Matter and Child-witnessed Domestic Violence

• Why White Matter Matters

Rapid VUCA Business Redesign Using Polymath Power

Long Established Large Corporate Structures Under Siege by External Factors

What happens when a Pandemic happens, and humans respond?

VUCA!

The new business normal includes only a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous environment (VUCA).    Business decisions that have traditionally been made slowly, now need to be made on an accelerated timeline.   Organizations that are habituated to make decisions through methodical process may not be comfortable or capable of making quick choices and their corporate survival may be at risk.  

Go Beyond the Limits of Corporate Hierarchy Design

Large company processes, culture and systems grew up slowly to support business operations within a predictable external climate.  

Most organizations have formed hierarchical management structures and corporate cultures that primarily empower specialized individuals (monomaths) to thrive surrounded by well-defined corporate process.  

But that’s not what we need to do right now - we need to very quickly cut through the complexity and re-design and adapt - and quickly. We don’t have the benefit of process to provide guidance right now.

Four Steps to Rapid Business Design

In order to survive and later thrive, business re-invention at a pace not previously seen needs to be performed. Leverage the power of the thought-styles in this four-step process for corporate reinvention. This process is an accelerated version of the enterprise innovation process described by Christine Kapp in the “Soft Factors Enabling Innovation” chapter in the Apple Academic Press Book - Ecosystems and Technology.

1. Hunker Down - Preserve Cash and Human Capital

   • Use your FInancial Specialists and Line Managers to identify how to preserve cash and minimize cash outflow while preserving your human capital.

   • Identify the generalists and strategists in your ranks that can help you think outside the box for immediate innovation. These may not be your line managers or current leaders

2. Evaluate Your Business Architecture - Identify Core Business lines and offerings

   • Leverage your Best Creative Senior Leaders - they will not be specialists

   • Leverage Your Polymaths for additional ‘out of the box’ thinking capacity

   • Do not use your specialized line managers

3. Re-Design Your Business Architecture - Define the new key interactions with your customers, seasonality and offerings

   • Continue to leverage Your Polymaths

   • Continue to leverage your Best Creative Senior Leaders

   • Have your specialized line managers assess and assist with defining operational gaps

4. The New Normal - Back to your regular process and your newly designed company

   • Specialized Managers in their operational roles

   • Find a way to keep your Polymaths engaged for continuous innovation.

Next Steps - Cosmic Teamwork

DataPsy previously identified some tips & techniques to help you find your generalists in “Recruiting: Finding the Elusive Polymath”. If you are not a generalist, the process may be difficult because of the “One-Way Mirror”. If you need help with your leader evaluation process, contact DataPsy here: We leverage a combination of assessment-based techniques and our innate talent to help you re-form your VUCA team for business innovation success.

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DataPsy consultants are serial entrepreneurs that are adept at building businesses from the ground up, If your business is struggling to re-start in the current economy, consider learning about the power of Cosmic Teamwork. We will help you identify the polymaths in your people portfolio who will power your re-invention and re-design your business by leveraging the building blocks you already have in place. It's time to eliminate bureaucracy, extra process and re-create agility. The Cosmic Teamwork approach leverages human “thought-styles” as building blocks for corporation reinvention Call (407) 847-8861 for an assessment today!

Use All Your Polymaths to Spark Your Next Innovative Success

Functional Networks in the Brain: A Polymathic Hypothesis

NOTE: DRAFT BLOG POST - PUBLISHED FOR FEEDBACK

Everyone acquires knowledge. During the acquisition process, a mind observes and interprets patterns of light, sound, and other vibrations and stores a representation of this data in our neural networks. After time passes, the same mind receives a question that it needs to answer. The responses to the same question by different people can vary widely.

This happens because people with different natural ‘thought styles’ answer in completely different manners. Specialists regurgitate the knowledge primarily in the form that it was stored - without modification. Memorize —> repeat. A polymath, on the other hand, will most likely synthesize knowledge from multiple domains in the process of answering the question. Someone who is a contrarian in their specialty (a Lone Wolf) may also synthesize knowledge, but they do so within their discipline not across disciplines.

A Business Scenario of Thought-Styles in Action

In this scenario, a new startup is determining a compensation structure for their contractors and salespeople. They need to determine whether to base the contractor pay on the profit that contractor individually generates, or on something else. They also need to determine how to set commissions for sales. Here are two answers to the question by people with different thought-styles and job roles:

1. A specialist - in this case a salesperson answers that the contractors should be paid in such a manner that the gross profit earned from each individual consultant is maximized, sales effort is minimized, and therefore commission is maximized. The salesperson has only the context of money and selling, and is lacking the knowledge of the human aspects of the contractors providing the work including ramifications of not paying them based on merit or performance.

2. A polymath, the VP of Operations, answers that the contractors should be paid in such a manner that the consultants are paid fairly per industry standards and experience, and that sales people should be compensated more highly for placing new contractors in new roles, rather than keeping the same contractor in the same role. The polymath’s perspective draws on information from multiple disciplines and takes a long term view. Contractors may leave the company if not paid fairly, and this will increase the cost of recruiting. Contractors who are paid fairly are more likely to be happy and happiness leads to a desire to help the company. In addition, salespeople will then not be paid forever for the same consultant without doing work. So in order for salespeople to be paid additional commission, they will need to continually work to get more customers.

A Human Mind is a System-of-Systems

What is the mechanism that is making these answers so different? To understand it, it helps to think of a mind as a complex system of systems. “A system-of-systems is an assemblage of components which individually may be regarded as systems, and which possess two additional properties:

• Operational Independence of the Components: If the system-of-system is disassembled into its component systems the component systems must be able to usefully operate independently.  That is, the components fulfill customer-operator purposes on their own.

• Managerial Independence of the Components: The component systems not only can operate independently, they do operate independently.The component systems are separately acquired and integrated but maintain a continuing operational existence independent of the system-of-systems” (Maier, 1998)

Functional Networks in the Brain (White Matter)

In a human mind, the component systems are comprised of modules residing in gray matter. Some components include the parts of the brain involved in memory - such as the cerebellum, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus. But the higher-level function is comprised of interaction between gray-matter components facilitated by white matter circuitry. White matter circuitry enables the assemblage of our brains’ component systems.

In a study of musicians, it was shown that a circuit called the arcuate fasciculus (AF) that connects the classical Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas showed “that musically tone-deaf individuals, who show impairments in pitch discrimination, have reduced connectivity in the AF relative to musically normal-functioning control subjects”. (link) So circuit efficiency matters!

A Polymathic Hypothesis

So let’s hypothesize - Could it be that people with a polymathic “thought-style” could have a brain that possesses highly efficient circuits to combine memory, plus they have a really efficient habit-loop formation mechanism? . We’ll develop this theory in future blog posts and start to back it up with some more neuroscience with any luck.

A Polymath connects the dots between widely disparate disciplines and creates something new

References

Maier, M. W. (1998), Architecting principles for systems-of-systems. Syst. Engin., 1: 267–284. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1520-6858(1998)1:4<267::AID-SYS3>3.0.CO;2-D

Loui, Psyche and Schlaug, Gottfried, Investigating Musical Disorders with Diffusion Tensor Imaging, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (https://www.musicianbrain.com/papers/Loui_Schlaug_Tonedeafness_DTI_nyas_04781.pdf)

Savants

Savants are a different mind altogether.  They were brought into the world to illuminate the brilliance of our brains’ capacity.   There is no one type of Savant.  Yet all are incredible glimpses into how our minds operate.

Savant syndome is a condition in which someone with significant mental (cognitive) disabilities demonstrates certain abilities far in excess of average. The skills at which savants excel are generally related to memory. This can include rapid calculation, artistic ability, map making or musical ability.

Terms such as automatic, mechanical, concrete and habit-like have been applied to this extraordinary memory.

Savant expertise has been described as ‘habit-like’ in research

Communication with Savants

There is no one rule here since each savant is unique in their ability for memory, recall and cognition. However, in general.

·       A Polymath can see a Monomath

·       A Monomath can only see itself - it can’t always “see” the skills of either a Polymath or an Autistic Savant.

·       But a Savant of the right type, can see what makes both Polymaths and Monomaths work.   A savant mind is a pure representations of how different aspects of how a more completely formed mind functions. If you want a first-person account of how a Savant mind functions, read the books by Daniel Trammett.

Habits

:Like Polymaths, Savants innately create habits for efficiency of response to stimuli. The difference is that Polymaths have the quantum pattern-matching ability (cognition/associations) and Savants generally have a more pure trigger-response mechanism.

An Observation

While at a conference a recruiter was giving a presentation about how to make the perfect “elevator pitch”. A person on the autistic spectrum responded with a very clear answer about how she woked in DevOps to automate the human errors out of the server creation process. She used technical words such as YAML, and explained what she did at work in great detail.

With total rudeness, the recruiter said, “I am not sure what you just said, but that was not an elevator pitch”.

It was awful to watch. Because it was a perfectly fine elevator pitch. Simply because the recruiter did not understand the lingo, the recruiter negated the valuable dialogue that the person on the autistic spectrum presented. That recruiter had a pretty hefty one-way mirror. So the one-way mirror of a monomath also cannot comprehend someone on the autistic spectrum with savant abilities.

No wonder we have discrimination against thought-styles in the workplace!

Recruiting: Finding the Elusive Polymath

Let’s say that you are hiring for a position such as an Executive, a Software Architect, a VUCA team leader, or other position requiring broad thinking and ‘dot-connecting’ ability. Or you might need to identify a problem-solver that can handle working within a complex situation (VUCA) and not only thrive, but help others move forward.

You are looking for a Polymath If you are a specialist, you might not be able to see one without some tips. (see: The One-Way Mirror) The illustration above shows what is happening in a Polymaths' mind most of the time. They could be solving a problem, physically cooking, listening to a book on tape, and planning a project simultaneously. You might think that this is impossible, but for someone who is a polymath it is not impossible at all. Their brains process multiple things simultaneously - even though the body can physically only perform one task. Most Polymaths have a superpower of ability to think about multiple things at once. Note: Younger polymaths may still need to learn how to ‘listen’ while performing the parallel processing so they don’t seem distracted.

So how do you identify one if you yourself are a specialist? Here are some tips.

Tips to Identify a Polymath

Below are some things to look for, and questions to ask - if you don’t have another polymath handy to help you with the identification process.

• A Polymath resume’ could have a resume’ with a number of disparate jobs on it.

• They might have many interests outside of work and be highly productive at each of them. Words describe them through words like , “how do you do so much” , “how do you think on so many levels at once”

• They might be an artist of some sort

• A Polymath might have multiple advanced degrees from a College or University

• Polymaths dislike being pigeonholed, so don’t typically value certifications in their industry - they would prefer to prove expertise through demonstrated experience.

• They might be labeled as having ADHD,

• They might describe themselves as a hybrid - performing above average in whatever you throw at them

• They demonstrate continual learning and mastery of topics, without certification most of the time since that is associated with pigeonholing. They probably write blogs, books, or do presentations.

• A Polymath hates the interview question, “What made you want to be XYZ when you grow up”. Because the question is invalid for them. They didn’t want to be one thing, they wanted to learn and learn.

• You can’t categorize them into one discipline in your applicant tracking system because they fit multiple categories equally well

So if this is still challenging, DataPsy, Inc consultants can help you identify the polymaths in your candidate pool.

On BEE-coming a Polymath

Building Brains Through Play

Recently I spent an evening talking with some people born in the 1960’s and 1970’s. They were reminiscing about how they used to “play”. There were no devices, no screens. Just a ton of fun outdoors. They played in ponds, swamps, lakes, junk yards, cranberry bogs, at the creek - basically wherever we could find some combination of mud, plants, and interesting things. That’s where we played. It was just plain fun!

One of the people told a story of how he and his friends found a jackpot in the form of a spool of electrical wire that usually was mounted on a telephone pole. He and his friends decided to make a zip-line. They tied it to two trees on a hill. One on the top and one on the bottom. The first attempt where they put a pipe around the wire and grabbed it to ride failed miserably. Friction deterred them. Then another of the kids remembered that his dad had electrical lubricant so they coated the entire wire, and tried again. Brave kid number three grabbed the pipe, and zipped 40 mph or so down the hill until he slammed into the tree with feet slapping around the tree and his near-lifeless body dropping to the ground.

The other kids gasped. Then ran down the hill and poked him with a stick (yeah - we used to do that when one of us screwed up). The zip-liner woke up in a blur, and popped back to life.

THIS was our childhood. No screens. Just play and roughhousing - a combination of body movement, scientific thinking, and creativity that caused these kids to build the zip line in the first place and try it out. Were there consequences? Yeah - some of us did not survive childhood - but most of us did.

Did we all turn into Polymaths? Nope. But those of us that were fed a steady diet of activity, creativity, curiosity, and language skills sure did! At age four, with candy being thrown at me to eat when I got it right, I learned that “bicycle” was “la bicyclette” in French. Must have helped my Neural networks somehow!

Sensibly Build Your Neural Network

Hadear’s guidance is honestly saying that we need to engage all of our senses in order to build a functioning neural network. We are born with a programmable memory and our network-building instructions come, in part, from our interactions with the outside world. So paying attention to how we engage our sensors to sense, and our bodies to learn to react can set us up well for either later success or failure in life. The Bauhaus movement combining arts and crafts, and the Waldorf school combining handiwork with brain work are 100% accurate for our biological neural network development.

Sports

Physical sports in a set routine can increase the energy flow in your body

Meditation

Through meditation or other techniques to focus, you can deepen your experience of being in your body rather than being your mind. Treat events from a detached platform of observation. Try to create/widen the gap between events that are occurring and your response to it.

This helps you control your negative habits and responses to triggers. We want to increase our ability to use productive habits for efficiency, and decrease our automatic reaction to triggers that cause a negative habitual response. Meditation creates this detachment.

Art & Language Skills

*** Incorporate Boundary-less learning and info from language masterss…

Science

“The secret to teaching kids to be polymaths comes from 4 things: train the body by doing sports, the creative mind thought art, scientific thinking through logic and problem solving and finally learn languages! This creates a very strong Neural-network in the brain that can be used for anything ”

— Hadear Marzooque

T.B.D.

Recruiting: Finding A Productive Specialist

Most recruiters can find a technical specialist that has hoarded knowledge of a particular subject. All they need to do is to search for the relevant keywords and certifications. But will that person be able to operate on that knowledge and do the job? Because sometimes after the hire - those specialists turn out to be narrow-thinkers - unable to leverage and synthesize information - even for the specialist role they were recruited for. And they do not know how to make inferences because of their knowledge to produce results. What you really need to find is a productive specialist!

“This is not easy to understand unless we went through it. During years I could not understand why I would hire people that had good references, good track record and then they couldn't face the challenges I would give them. What happened was that "they do not have the insights potential to convert that knowledge into practical understanding if not linked to a previous proven experience of success". If I placed them doing what they always did, they would be fine, of I would challenge them to go to the next level and boost their career, there was a problem. Now I understand, they couldn't do something different from what they did before without someone to direct them because they could not apply the knowledge further.” — Ana Sequeira - Managing Director at CBS Clarus (Ana Sequeira, A. 2019, Junior Schoeman, LinkedIn, viewed 21 Nov, 2019 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aptdsg_ccpn-activity-6603320600725422080-VuR7 )

So the antidote for this is for the recruiter to pay attention to the depth that you actually need in the role. And the ability of the person being interviewed to actually apply the knowledge in a productive manner. Not everyone needs to be a deep specialist to be a successful contributor in a discipline. In fact, someone less deep in specialized thought patterns may occasionally be able to point out the ‘gotchas’ or ‘flaws’ in the direction of the tasks they have been assigned. This is the stuff that adds value to a team! What is really needed is a productive specialist that has

“Majority of the current disengagement problems can be contributed to the fact that the individual talent potential is not understood or assessed outside performance skills and education base where confirmation bias stops the deeper enquiry of the true potential exist to support the complexity of managing and leading people. Leading to overpromotion” - Junior Schoeman , Innate Talent Discovery Pte Ltd (Junior Schoeman, A. 2019, Junior Schoeman, LinkedIn, viewed 21 Nov, 2019 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aptdsg_ccpn-activity-6603320600725422080-VuR7 )

Let’s look at some approaches to identifying a productive specialist for a role.

Traditional Approach: Leverage a Monomath

Roles where you need people to perform complex tasks and produce specific products our outcomes based on a body of knowledge. Key words here include produce!

Recruiters Have Bias Towards Monomaths

• Monomaths take pride in the details of their roles. You may find words or phrases describing them such as:

  • detail-oriented

  • results-oriented

  • consistently accurate work products

• Monomaths place a great deal of value on the depth of their knowledge. You can identify this by the number of certifications in their discipline, so you will typically see a lot of acronyms after the names in their email signatures. Make sure they have evidence of applying the knowledge and producing results in a business environment.

• Monomaths might be prominent in their field with books, articles, blogs or presentations as evidence. Make sure that they have actually practiced what they teach.

• Note: Many recruiters tend to be biased towards monomaths because they lean heavily on certification evidence of ability to perform a role. Traditional interviewing techniques still need to be used to see how the person actually used the knowledge. Here are some examples of good and bad interview questions for technical professional that determine whether and to what extent someone can operate on their knowledge.

  • Recall-type Interview Question: “Please tell me the components of xyz ” . This question is designed to see if the candidate has the knowledge stored in their memory bank about attributes of xyz. It does not indicate whether or not the person can use xyz in a real-world situation to contribute to building a product. The question does not ask anything about how to use xyz to achieve any business results.

  • Experience-type Interview Question: “Could you please explain how you used xyz to improve something about the product you mention you built at Go-co Inc?" This question is better designed to elicit information about not only the components of xyz, but a good candidate answer will also explain the rationale behind why the xyz was defined by someone in the first place as a good standard solution pattern.

  • Replication-type Interview Question” "Did you implement a ZZZ product before? Tell me about it" This question will inform the interviewer if someone participated in implementing something, but will not dig out the rationale they used for the how or the why of building the ZZZ product. If they did not create the process of how to build the ZZZ product, then they might not be able to build a ZZZ product in a different environment in the future.

Alternate Approach: Leverage a Polymath

Leverage a Polymath with related skills because you can train the polymath quickly to a sufficient level of detail to be proficient. Just don’t keep this thought-style in a single role forever.

• A Polymath probably has more than one resume’ version with different titles on it. All will be valid. Their resumes’ may show less time in a particular role relative to the span of a career. With a Polymath, they will be able to draw inferences from related things they have done in the past. They also learn very quickly when provided the opportunity. They will quickly get to 80% of the knowledge needed to perform in a particular capacity,

• Be patient after hire because Polymaths will surprise you with insights seemingly unrelated to the job they are performing. They synthesize connections from every person they work with.

• Many polymaths have well developed creative sides. They may have portfolios totally unrelated to their day-job such as painting, music, sculpting, or writing.

• Polymaths may have multiple advanced degrees in different areas. This does not indicate lack of focus.

Recruiting Bias via the One-Way Mirror Against Polymaths

Alternate Approach: Leverage a Scanner

Leverage a Polymath or Scanner with related skills because you can train either quickly to a sufficient level of detail to be proficient. Just don’t keep either thought-style in that role forever unless they have found a way to iterate and keep their curiosity moving inside a specialty.

• Scanners may have multiple career changes, or the resume’ may be shorter than the span of their career. Career changes are normal for a scanner.

• This type of person needs to currently be enthusiastic about the particular skill that you are hiring for at the time you are looking.

• Scanners can have trouble with finishing things if they have not learned the self- discipline to counteract their scanning tendencies.

So in conclusion, any type of “thought-style” can perform a specialized task. However, they will come on board with different needs for training, management, and anticipated longevity in the role.

VUCA Teams

Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments come in all shapes and sizes. The acronym VUCA was created in order to describe a post cold-war world after the 1990’s.

• Volatile - accelerating rate of change

• Uncertainty - lack of predictability

• Complexity - interconnectedness, cause-and-effect forces

• Ambiguity - high probability of mis-reads and misunderstandings

VUCA does not have to be huge either - it just has to have all four criteria. In fact, in the information technology industry, a complex system integration project requiring multiple technologies, vendors and staffing companies can create an environment that can be described as VUCA.

Suppose that you are creating an integrated criminal justice system that moves data between disparate vendor systems. Now imagine that each vendor producing each of the integrated systems uses a different approach to their projects. This is a complex, volatile, uncertain and ambiguous environment. Not only are there technology differences, but there are process and approach differences as well. Throw in an offshore vendor with a strict contract limiting what they can and can’t o and you definitely have a VUCA environment.

So how do you build a functional team in a VUCA environment situation? Most people start by looking for specialists in each discipline and throw them together into a team and hope the combination of people works out. But there are two simple steps that can help improve your probability of success. First, pick your team leadership and associated process. Second, pick your specialists carefully to match your team leadership to avoid gaps.

Team Leadership / Architects / Analysts

Best Method: Leverage A Polymath

The best way to create forward momentum on a team in a VUCA environment is to recognize that you need at least one individual in leadership role that is a broad thinker, a forward thinker, someone deeply familiar with multiple disciplines on a team, a dot connector, or someone that thrives in complexity and breaks it down into simple terms. This is a Polymath

Alternate Method: Leverage a Monomath

If you put a Monomath in a leadership role in a VUCA environment, then you will need to augment the team with enough other monomaths plus a defined process to get a result. Collaboration will be needed. You might want to also consider eliminating polymaths on this team unless they are extraordinarily patient because they will quickly become frustrated with the slow pace and the methodical tedious process (from their perspective). A collaborative process can be slow, especially with a large number of contributors to the planning process.

Team Contributors / Individual Contributors

On a VUCA team you will also need a series of specialists for each skill needed on the project. These people are going to thrive in the raw details of one aspect of a project. Pick these people carefully because you will need them to define the detail and be able to communicate those details to a Polymath to aid in adding the context around the detail.

The One Way Mirror - Communication Conflict

The One-Way Mirror of Perceptions

In general, a polymath looking at a monomath looks through a one-way mirror.

On a simplistic level, if what a monomath “knows about” is a subset of the things that a polymath “knows about”, then the monomath can only understand the part of a polymath that is contained within the monomaths’ context.

Because of this, a monomath looking at a polymath sees their own reflection.

A Monomath Sees their reflection in the one-way mirror

Communication Conflict

This one-way mirror creates two types of communication conflict. 

• First, the monomath can perceive the polymath as being “bossy” or “not making sense” when they talk.  

• Second, the polymath can perceive the monomath as “not seeing all the angles” and rapidly become frustrated with the need to explain in great detail.

How to Overcome the One-Way Mirror?

There are a few simple steps that a person with either type of thought-style can take to achieve more effective communication.

• Polymaths talking to Monomaths can slow down and explain their thought process steps of how a particular conclusion was reached. Because Polymaths are making use of knowledge very efficiently, it is easy for them to forget that others do not have the same knowledge and have not made the same connections between disparate thoughts.

  • A Polymaths way of being can be interpreted by others as the false consensus effect leading to judgement of the Polymath by a Monomat as “egotistical”

• Monomaths working with Polymaths can work on being tolerant of the fact that that Polymaths may have connected some dots that the monomath does not know exists. Instead of labeling the polymath as ‘intimidating’, ‘arrogant’, or ‘bossy’, the monomath can simply ask the polymath to explain the thought process steps.

  • A Monomath’s inability to understand a Polymath could be due to the availability heuristic in that we make judgement based only on the information we have available at hand.

Additional Soft-Factors

There are other factors that can ease this communication challenge, such as emotional intelligence (high IQ), and the level of trust that the Monomath provides to others.   And for the Polymath, compassion, patience and the ability to gently influence is important.

When the compassionate (high E.Q.) Monomath listens to a Polymath speak, that Monomath has gained an understanding that the Polymath sees and perceives things across multiple disciplines, space and time that the Monomath cannot see, and so they listen with patience and trust.

When a Polymath is explaining a future state without slowing down enough to explain the steps to a non-compassionate (low E.Q. or low-trust) Monomath – that Monomath will say things to a Polymath such as “stop being negative” , “why are you operating on so many levels at once”, and “why are you so bossy”

Polymaths

A Polymath is a person whose expertise spans multiple disciplines at the level of mastery.  They have an intense curiosity about many things just like a scanner does.  However, they typically connect the disciplines in multiple ways throughout their lives.  They see the patterns across disciplines and use them to match an idea to a previously known idea. From the polymathy perspective, their giftedness is the ability to combine disparate (or even apparently contradictory) ideas, sets of problems, skills, talents, and knowledge in novel and useful ways. From a metadata perspective, these things are the “same”.

For this author, designing software uses the same exact process as designing a sculpture.

Differentiating a Polymath from a Scanner

Both Polymaths and Scanners are voracious learners. They chase their interests with knowledge acquisition and rapidly attain 80% mastery level compared to a Monomath. But there is a distinction between a Polymath and a Scanner related to how they use the power of habit, and how they pattern-match across disciplines. Polymaths live in the metadata about the knowledge. They dive deep into what truly interests them, but the key characteristics that they learn are the metadata about the discipline. Essentially they index the knowledge differently than a monomath or a scanner does and they use it differently as well.

A Polymathic Thought Pattern

Mental Multiprocessing

We only have so many external gadgets with which to do things - hands, arms, bionics, etc. What happens in our minds though is a different situation.   Many polymaths that I have talked to are capable of processing thoughts from multiple problem domains concurrently. They could be at work physically producing a deliverable that is due.  At the same time though, that same person could be figuring out a plan for a party later on in the week, writing a novel, or something else. There could be 3-5 problems being worked on simultaneously at all times in that mind.  The more commonality between the metadata of the problems, the easier it is for the co-processing to happen. And the more familiar the Polymath is with each topic, also the easier it is for co-processing to happen.  

It is the Polymaths responsibility to leave their input channels to others open - in other words, make sure your ear is not just buffering inputs, make sure it is also processing so you can hear key trigger words like your name.  Problem with this is that you might get called out on a cycle where another activity was more important. Learn to process your buffer as you also process the other more interesting thing. 

This can cause interesting interactions with others.   For example, when anyone of any thought style interrupts a particularly fun problem solving exercise in a Polymath’s brain, the Polymath might respond with a snarky ‘tone’.  The Polymath ‘feels interrupted’ even though there was no visible evidence of the Polymath actually ‘doing anything’. 

Tip: Any other thought type - make sure that the Polymath is actually focused on your question 

Group Think 

Polymaths may be able to help combat groupthink because they are not viewing the issues from only a single disciplinary perspective. Cotellessa

Polymaths vs. Scanners

Here’s another way to explain the difference according to Djerassi.  This also illuminates how scanners (dabblers) and polymaths are different, “Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity."

“To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is important. And in the ideal polygamy I suspect there’s no number one wife and no number six wife. You have a deep connection with each person.”

A Polymath has a deep connection with each body of knowledge, they are committed to it, and they innately know how to connect the knowledge together to create new things

Liana Bortolon wrote of Leonardo:

Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge … Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the sixteenth century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe.

““You stop explaining yourself when you realize people only understand from their level of perception.” ”

— Jim Carrey

Use of Habits

All babies are created with an innate ability to program themselves. While we usually associate habits with bad things such as smoking, habits can also be used to increase human efficiency. Our habits can be triggered by a variety of things. For example,

When

Smell or sound or question or taste or touch or any other sensory trigger occurs

Then

execute auto-responder (habit) subroutine.

How do we create habits? By repetition and discipline. We simply repeat the desired behavior until it gets stored in our autonomic processing center and we no longer need to consciously “think” to achieve a result. So habits - are routines - that we can create to increase efficiency. And true Polymaths do this all the time. Scanners don’t. Scanners learn, then get tired of that topic, and move to the next. Polymaths package up their learning for future use via habit recall.

Polymaths create very complicated habits to increase their efficiency

PLACEHOLDER TOPIC Quantum Pattern Matching Ability

** add the stuff about the frontal lobe and the microtubule behaviour here

heuristics too

Scanners

Minds that can be described as scanners generally like the process of exploration of new things.  They like to explore everything.  They try out many different careers and interests, and they “refuse to choose” . They have a breadth of knowledge and not necessarily much depth in any one area.

Scanners seek constantly.  According to Barbara Sher, “To Scanners the world is like a big candy store full of fascinating opportunities, and all they want is to reach out and stuff their pockets.  It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? “

She also says, “The problem is, scanners are starving in the candy store. They believe they’re allowed to pursue only one path. But they want them all. If they force themselves to make a choice, they are forever discontented. But usually Scanners don’t choose anything at all. And they don’t feel good about it.” Read more here

A scanners brain has a preference to use its “seeking circuitry” in a higher proportion than using other circuits. “Researchers have found that the seeking circuitry is what enables us to want and seek anything that involves effortful activity, whether conscious and deliberate effort, or automatic and habitual effort based on learning.” (see Key Brain Circuitries)

When I was 15 I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.” And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them. — Kurt Vonnegut

There is a lot of hope for scanners. Many scanners are completely functional and self-sufficient and don’t worry that they don’t have a single interest - in fact they thrive on it! Patterns of thriving include:

• A scanner may have a single profession that they are good at and enables them to make a good amount of money to live. Along with that, they may continue to pursue many interests “on the side” that change over time.

• A scanner may not have a single profession, they may pursue multiple interests simultaneously. The challenge with this strategy is only that ‘time is not infinite’

Here’s a quote from a self-aware scanner with some knowledge of a lot of topics and activities.

“BTW, before you trot out that "polymath" word, I've come to the conclusion that I am a "polycalc" -- aka, Jack of All Trades/Master of None, i.e., into just about everything, but never with enough depth to master (save, thankfully, for my profession, on which I rely for my pay check!).” - R. B.

This scanner figured out on his own how to succeed in life - anchored by a single profession while still maintaining interest in everything in the candy store! For alternate strategies about how to survive our specialized world as a scanner by limiting concurrent interests, look at https://www.renaissancesouls.com/ .

The following quote describes the difference between a polymath and a scanner from a prolific scanners’ perspective.

"People often ask me, do you intimidate people with your knowledge," says Monkman. "But the opposite is the case. I have wide knowledge but no deep expertise. I am intimidated by experts." Seagull, like Monkman, feels an intense pressure to specialise. They regard themselves as Jacks-of-all-Trades, without being master of one. "When I was young what I really wanted to do was know a lot about a lot," says Monkman. "Now I feel that if I want to make a novel contribution to society, I need to know a great deal about one tiny thing." — Monkman

Monomaths

The work world absolutely LOVES specialists.  After all, most organizations were created by specialists. Another name for a specialist is a Monomath.

Monomaths are a lot like this lacewing larvae that has collected shells to protect itself from predators. Monomaths collect single categories of information

A specialist knows a lot of things about a single discipline or practice. And they know this to the exclusion of other things.  They devote their lives to collecting information that fits neatly into one category alone and operating in that manner in all facets of their lives. 

Examples include

• Radiologist

• Real estate agent

• Board-certified behavior analyst

• Irrigation technician

• Line Cook

• Server

• Java Computer Programmer

• Quality Assurance Specialist

• Ballet Dancer

• Accountant

• Financial Controller

• Greeter

• Database Administrator

• A Professor