From the New York Polymaths Meetup

Renaissance Mutant Ninja Artists by Rachel Loose, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael

Basically they are all turtles. The never finishes his work turtle, the never bathe turtle, the bronze David turtle and the pretty lover turtle…

Polymath is a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning, most often he or she is also an expert in a wide range of fields.

What makes a polymath then?

Does a polymath have better abilities in these wide-ranging fields than that of a sole expert in a specific field? Personally I believe yes, or else it is not cost effective to be a polymath.

Suppose being a polymath is efficient, then there can be two possibilities: there is no actual separation between fields, or connecting different fields in a certain way can boost one’s performance.

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General Intelligence vs. Multiple Intelligence

In order to guess how polymaths are “constructed”, we need to look into the actual question underlaying this topic: how is human intelligence constructed?

Or rather, the more heated question of what is intelligence.

This is the fundamental question in artificial intelligence, I believe, unlike what the popular ideas think that the current bottle neck of artificial intelligence is the computation speed or our limited understanding of human brain, the bottle neck lies in we have not simplified or defined intelligence properly.

Spearman (1904) suggested that in his experiments, when a certain person was doing well on a given cognitive ability test, there is a positive correlation that this person will do well on another cognitive ability, therefore, he argued that there is a general intelligence, called g.

Contrary to Spearman’s theory, Gardner’s (1983) theory suggested multiple intelligences. By studying individuals with brain damages, Gardner found out that those who have a certain area damaged are not able to perform certain tasks. From these experiments he came to conclusion that there should be at least 7 types of specific intelligences.

The multiple intelligence theory became popular, and is mostly used as an excuse if one is not good at the logic-word smart section.

Educators love to use it to criticize the current education system, because how can we ignore children who are not logic-word smart? Some are naturally talented at other things and so on. This is also a favorite for those who oppose any type of IQ test.

I am not interested in making the possessor of any type of intelligence feel better about him or herself. I am only interested in what will be an efficient model of an intelligent machine.

General intelligence and multiple intelligence are two approaches.

You can imagine the general intelligence approach is a stored-program computer, where the hardware is set in the Von Neumann architecture, where you can program the intelligence to perform different tasks, while the multiple intelligence is a fixed-program computer, where it can only be used to perform a fixed task.

For example, in the multiple intelligence model, the theory suggests that a certain part of the cerebrum governs a fixed function.

Frontal Lobe — reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, problem solving Parietal Lobe — movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli Occipital Lobe — visual processing Temporal Lobe — perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech

Is our brain a polymath?

If so, what is controlling the brain’s unifying behavior, be it a real unifying behavior or a synchronization of different behaviors controlled by different parts of the brain that appear to be one behavior.

Before we make our assumption, let’s continue to look at several key info we know about the brain.

We know that the brain’s myelination starts from the back and then moves towards the front of the brain before one reaches 20. Myelin is a fatty white substance that is thought to increase the speed at which impulses propagate in the brain (or in this context impulses of neurons).

The myelination process is almost like the growing of the super-ego. If you observe the functions controlled by the frontal lobe, they almost represent super-ego. While the Parietal Lobe, the Occipital Lobe, and the Temporal Lobe are like the ego, and the limbic system the libido (this comparison is a popular thought I find interesting).

In psychoanalysis, they often emphasize that libido, ego and super-ego are systems, not brain parts. However, the gist of psychoanalysis does not lie in the over criticized “non-scientific” generalization of systems, but in the process of how the psyche develops — starting from libido, then ego, and then super-ego, just like the myelination process. This can offer insights into the design of intelligence.

We know that IQ correlates with the structure of white matter (myelin-coated tracts) , and learning also changes its structure.

TEDxHendrixCollege — Doug Fields — The Other Brain

We know that the glia cells, not the neurons may be responsible for the thinking part of the brain. If this idea is true, then neurons are merely the lights on the computer, not the computer.

This raises a good question, which is what do neurons do? If they are the lights, then who is looking at them. If the glia cells are thinking, why do they need the neurons to show that they are thinking?

We also know that glia cells communicate like broadcasting signals, while neurons communicate like signals going through landlines. Why do we need two types of communication?

The corticospinal tract descends from the cortex through the deep white matter of the cerebrum. It then passes between the caudate nucleus and putamen of the basal nuclei as a bundle called the internal capsule. The tract then passes through the midbrain as the cerebral peduncles, after which it burrows through the pons. Upon entering the medulla, the tracts make up the large white matter tract referred to as the pyramids (Figure). The defining landmark of the medullary-spinal border is the pyramidal decussation, which is where most of the fibers in the corticospinal tract cross over to the opposite side of the brain. At this point, the tract separates into two parts, which have control over different domains of the musculature.

Let’s first look at the communication type we are familiar with, that of the neurons’, and see what it is doing. Looking at the image above — I think it is sorting.

The following are my hypotheses.

The signal starts from the primary motor cortex, travels through filters, and in the end arrives at the muscles. Fascinating, and I believe that makes a lot of sense if the neurons are not the thinking part of the brain.

Suppose some sort of primary thinking is done in the glia cells of the motor cortex, and its result turns into a neuron signal. The signal itself is already a “finished product” that can control the motion, but we need to make the motion accurate and useful, so we need to add filters on it. When the signal travels through other parts of the brain, the glia cells in the other parts of the brain do the sorting.

This is only the situation where the “finished product” of a neuron signal exists. Before there is a “finished product”, there has to be more thinking, and information gathering. In order to cooperate with the other parts of the brain, it communicates in the glia cell’s way, which is broadcasting signals.

And then when the glia cell sense that it needs more information, they can also send out neuron signals to order other body parts to gather information.

Suppose different parts of the Cerebrum can sort information according to their schema, what will happen when a part of the Cerebrum disagrees with another?

The Emperor’s New Groove

I think the parts that win get to control the movements of the body, while in the part where consciousness is recorded, it appears that computational time is allocated to these parts of the brain.

If the brain is a society, it must have a way to determine who is leading the society at a given point of time. If so, the political structure of the brain will have great effects.

I guess during normal and extreme periods the competition for leading the brain is low. In the in between period, the frontal lobe will always want to grab control, and functions as a police to see if the actions committed by the brain fit its long term goals.

The above are mere my assumptions of the operation of the brain. If they hold any water, then we must get into the society of the brain to find out its political structure.

I think given that the brain seems to diversify its functions into different regions, just like how polymaths attempt to diversify their abilities into different fields. The political structure to unite the diversified functions is the key to how efficient the final result is.

Many complex intellectual tasks involve more than one part of the brain.

For example, playing a music instrument is a full brain activity. There is no such thing as the musical part of the brain, or how emotions control music. For a full brain activity like this, whether we can drive the entire brain to think in a coherent fashion is the key.

That is the ideal of the polymath.

Layers of Abstraction

You may then ask, what does this have to do with polymaths? Do we have to look into the brain to see what a polymath is? Well, yes and we must look into the brains of polymaths.

Suppose different parts of the brain have the cooperate or competitive relationship, there must be a way to tell which is the winning side. Whether that exists I will still have to dig into the studies.

The layer of abstraction means how abstract the questions the part of the brain operates on. This is one of my assumptions, where the closer it is to the surface of the brain, the more abstract questions it deals with.

However, the more abstract a question is, the more it sounds like the question that is immediately available to us. For example we may have a question of “What to eat today?” This question is very abstract, because we are not looking at how many steps do we have to walk to get the food, and how many times do our teeth have to chew on the food.

Let’s take a look at these two classic abstractions:

Which one is more abstract?

Which one is more abstract in relation to modern computer’s thinking method?

The Turing machine is more abstract, because there are other architectures other than the Von Neumann architecture to represent the Turing machine.

Why do we have to look at the layers of abstraction at all? One way to think about it is that our brain has different levels of abstraction, and one obvious separation lies in the difference between the conscious and the subconscious.

When using the word subconscious in this context, I mean the parts of the brain that are not controlled by the conscious.

Here is the question again, which is more abstract, the conscious or the subconscious?

The conscious is more abstract.

The reason why we need to look at the level of abstraction is because many complex structures have layers. We are given very little clue when we try to build such structures.

Before we even start building, we need to know in what layer of abstraction the clue rests in, in order to know whether we should move up or down in the building process.

In the layers we are observing, some layers are more useful than others, in terms of building things such as intelligence.

I think the key ability of a polymath is to identify the level of abstraction of a piece of evidence in his or her hand, and then morphs the evidence towards the layer where it is useful.

The reason why this is the key ability of a polymath comes from the fact that polymaths have to jump from different levels of abstraction to be a polymath. Seeing different fields as different fields, and seeing the connections of different fields are already two distinct levels of abstraction.

If we look back to our model of the brain, it is odd that it seems that in order to move from different levels of abstraction, one has to move the same piece of information into different parts of the brain. I will need to investigate into this to know more.

Nevertheless, at least we have came to today’s conclusion — of what makes a polymath — The ability to identify and move among different levels of abstraction.