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

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)