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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Scanners want to taste everything. They love to learn about the structure of a flower, and they love to learn about the theory of music. And the adventures of travel. And the tangle of politics. To scanners the universe is a treasure house full of a million works of art, and life is hardly long [...]