Scanner Tribe

This is the fun part, because the main inspiration for me to write these guilty pleasure posts was finding three delightful YouTube videos of Stephen Fry talking about his various “guilty pleasures”.

Stephen is best known as an English media personality who has done an enormous variety of work in TV, film, radio, theatre and printed media. He’s also a technology and gadget lover, who was the second person in the UK to own a Mac computer. He had a huge following on Twitter long before Oprah had heard of it, and he does all his own tweeting. He travels all over the world too, and is interested in linguistics and wildlife conservation.

He’s beginning to sound rather like a Scanner, isn’t he? I have no idea whether he’s familiar with Barbara Sher’s work, or her name for people with many interests, but he’s often described as a renaissance man or polymath, which have much the same meaning. You can even join a Facebook group called Stephen Fry: Polymath, Raconteur, Genius that was set up by one of his fans.

So I’d like you to watch these videos and see whether you think he’s a Scanner, and whether his guilty pleasures are anything like yours. They’re from a 2007 BBC TV programme called Stephen Fry: Guilty.

If you enjoyed those and want some more, and you can be in London on 18th October 2009, there’s a Special Audience With Stephen Fry in aid of leukaemia and lymphoma research.

Two of my Scanner friends have guiltily admitted, via Twitter, to liking football (shhhh!).

They weren’t being entirely serious, but it stuck in my mind because it’s not the first time I’ve come across the idea that people with multiple interests should feel embarrassed or guilty about the things they take pleasure in.

On page 12 of her book Refuse to Choose, where Barbara Sher is advising Scanners to keep a special journal or Scanner Daybook for all their ideas, she mentions a scanner who wrote to her and said,

I call the Daybook my “Guilty Pleasures.”

And I know I have some interests that I’m less likely to reveal than others, depending on who I’m talking to. So why do we still feel guilty about some of our interests, even after we’ve discovered that we’re Scanners or Renaissance Souls, and know it’s OK to be interested in lots of different things?

@dreaminaction suggested a possible reason in another tweet.

Maybe that’s it, football really doesn’t go with a cool artsy persona. And perhaps collecting antique thimbles and playing the Northumbrian bagpipes wouldn’t fit with being a footballing type. Enjoying crosswords and amateur operatics would be fine pastimes for a retired librarian, but probably not industrial techno music or researching the history of sex toys. And if you’re a teenager who loves designing fonts, growing giant marrows, and playing carpet bowls, you’re probably going to keep quiet about it in case people think you’re odd.

In other words, you feel guilty because an interest doesn’t fit other people’s image of you, or the image you would like people to have of you, or the image you have of yourself.

That could be for many reasons - maybe it doesn’t fit with your culture or sub-culture or profession; it’s totally unrelated to your other interests; it seems trivial or purposeless, and unworthy of your attention; or too grandiose and unattainable; it’s too lowbrow or too highbrow; it’s inappropriate for your age, or gender, or class, or orientation, or ethnicity; It’s out of your league or below your station; It’s boring to other people, or obscure, or uncool, or out of fashion, or ridiculous.

I think it’s mainly about a fear of disapproval. Sometimes that disapproval is imaginary, but often it’s real and can have harmful or unpleasant consequences. So, as we move through different environments during our scanners’ lives, we learn which interests are safe to reveal in which situations.

As a survival mechanism among people who don’t understand Scanners, I think that’s fine. It would be too stressful to out yourself fully to everyone all the time. But it’s a problem when we internalise the disapproval and let guilt prevent us doing the things we love. Because every one of our interests, however trivial or random it may seem, adds something to our store of skills and knowledge and mental connections, and can lead in completely unforeseen but amazingly wonderful directions. Because that’s the way Scanners’ brains work.

Here’s an example. When I was an 11-year-old schoolgirl in England, during an interview for a scholarship to a posh high school, I said I liked reading westerns. It was before I’d learned to feel guilty about that particular pleasure, and maybe that’s why I didn’t get the scholarship.

Perhaps I should have told them that after reading the westerns I used to look at maps of the USA to see where the stories took place - Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming - I loved the sound of those names! And I used to look at pictures of the places in photography magazines - the Grand Canyon! Wow!! And after reading a story with a civil war background, I went looking for books to read about the history of the American civil war. And so on….

So yes, I think every one of a Scanner’s multifarious interests, even football, makes us more multidimensional, and way cooler than cool.

I was reading this very interesting post about The Highly Sensitive Person at the blog of my fellow scanner Alexia Petrakos. My response is really too long for a comment, so I’ve decided make a post out of it here instead.

Like Alexia, I also have a lot of the signs of high sensitivity mentioned in her post, and in the embedded video by Dr Aron. For example, I can’t stay in the room if there’s a horror film on TV, or one with a lot of violence. I was even scared of Dr Who when I was a kid, although my younger sisters loved it. I have a tendency to overreact to minor events, and I’ve been told off for being too sensitive. Those self-critical voices in my head are still very active, even though I’ve lost much of the shyness my school teachers used to comment on.

But I’m wondering whether high sensitivity is a separate characteristic, or whether it’s part of being a Scanner/Renaissance person. Here’s what Hank Pfeffer has to say about sensitivity and emotional intensity in people with “Too Many Aptitudes” (TMA).

Being a TMA is a very mixed blessing. Strong talents are extremely powerful internal forces. One of the most important implications of my aptitude research is the strong possibility that emotional intensity is directly correlated with the intensity of a talent. Someone operating at a high intensity level of talent (including reasoning) will also be operating at a high intensity level of emotion. Every thought, memory or perception is directly connected to emotion - a wholistic phenomenon.

It is quite possible that TMAs are continually operating in a hypersensitive manner. People hypersensitive to external and internal data in many forms and operating at a high emotional intensity level might very well become overstimulated.

Ongoing overstimulation could explain the paralysis felt by some TMAs. They are so overwhelmed by perceptions, memories, thoughts and feelings that they can’t commit themselves to anything. Many of them need a lot of time alone to regenerate. Yet, this same turbulence can also lead to great insight and creativity.

The existence of a powerful force implies difficulty in learning to harness that force. Having a lot of strong talents is a bit like dealing with high voltage. You can do a lot of things with high voltage. However, it can also fry you. It takes a lot more knowledge and more safety precautions to work with high voltage rather than low. A lot of that voltage for TMAs is emotional. Few people know how to handle normal emotion, let alone powerful, ongoing emotion.

That’s an extract from Hank Pfeffer’s article The Too Many Aptitudes Problem which I told you about in a previous post.

I find it particularly interesting because, in our society, there is a stereotype of highly intelligent people as lacking in emotion and relying purely on reason. Hank suggests, on the contrary, that high reasoning ability and emotional intensity go together.

He doesn’t quite agree that TMA people are the same as Scanners, but there seems to be at least a large amount of overlap between the two groups. People with multiple interests are likely to have many aptitudes too. Barbara Sher says in her book Refuse to Choose that aptitude tests often don’t work for Scanners, because they test high for everything.

I’d love to read your own thoughts (and feelings) about this in the comments here, or over at Alexia’s blog.

During a trip to France earlier this year, while walking through the city of Perpignan, I was very pleased to discover this street named after Benjamin Franklin, the 18th century American statesman.

Rue Benjamin Franklin, Perpignan France, April 2009

That name plate is in French, as you might expect, but over on the other side of the street I saw another one in a different language.

Carrer Benjamin Franklin, Perpignan France, April 2009

That’s because Perpignan is in the French part of Catalunya, and the streets there are all named in two languages – French and Catalan. The old wall with the Catalan sign is also interesting for its construction materials, with red bricks and river stones arranged in a traditional Catalan pattern.

The mixed materials and languages are very appropriate for Ben Franklin Street, because he’s often named as a role model for people who have a mixture of widely varying interests, whether they’re called renaissance people, polymaths or scanners.

Wikipedia describes Benjamin Franklin like this.

A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, soldier, and diplomat.

In her book The Renaissance Soul, Margaret Lobenstine wrote this about him.

One of my favorite Renaissance men is actually from the American colonial era: Benjamin Franklin. As a printer, inventor, scientist, author, and diplomat, he blended the perpetual curiosity of the Renaissance man with the down-to-earth, can-do spirit of America.

And in the prologue of Refuse to Choose, Barbara Sher’s book about the Scanner personality type, she includes Ben Franklin among her examples of famous people in history “whose interests were also all over the map” and who “flitted from one subject to another with complete freedom”.

Ben’s unique character led to him becoming enormously popular during his time in France. His diplomatic work there was very successful, and he even inspired a new women’s hairstyle. This video tells you more about his life, achievements and personality.

It sounds like a fascinating and highly successful life. So let’s keep on walking down Benjamin Franklin Street!

Here’s a selection of articles from various sources that discuss the Scanner personality type, also known as a polymath or renaissance soul.
Whichever label is used,  they are all talking about people who have too many interests to be satisfied with specialising in only one of them.
Are you a Scanner or Deep Diver? - from [...]

Barbara Sher announced today on Twitter that she’s about to send out her latest newsletter. TA DA!!
Maybe that doesn’t sound much like news to you. Your inbox is probably cluttered up with newsletters already. But unlike others I’ve signed up for, Barbara’s newsletters don’t arrive very frequently or regularly. I guess that’s because she’s [...]

I wonder if any of you Scanners have had as many different jobs as the man in this song?

It’s performed by Irish folk band The Dubliners and the singer is Sean Cannon
Here are the words so you can sing along.
The Dublin Jack of All Trades
Oh I am a roving sporting blade, they call me Jack [...]

Refuse to Choose: The Forum for Scanners
“What should you do when you want to do everything? If you’re fascinated by everything, and you’ve been called dabbler, dilettante, undisciplined, indecisive etc., this forum is for you.”
This Scanners’  forum is a  sub-board of Barbara Sher’s main Bulletin Boards. You can go there by clicking the title link [...]

Once upon a time I took an aptitude test. It was part of a course for unemployed people. I was hoping it would give me some pointers to what I really should be doing with my life, and how I could be more successful.
It wasn’t one of those tests where you have to choose between [...]

Many people cry with relief when they read Refuse to Choose for the first time. (It’s Barbara Sher’s book about the kind of people she calls Scanners.) I know that because they come onto her bulletin boards and say so, and more recently on Twitter too.
I suspect the part that causes the most tears may [...]