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

---

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.

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

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!

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.

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