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