Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (23 page)

Meditation is a way of thinking. A habit of distance that has the fortunate consequence of being self-reinforcing. One tool in the arsenal of mental techniques that can help you create the right frame of mind to attain the distance necessary for mindful, imaginative thought. It is far more attainable, and far more widely applicable, than the connotations of the word might have you believe.

Consider the case of someone like Ray Dalio. Almost every morning, Dalio meditates. Sometimes he does it before work. Sometimes in his office, right at his desk: he leans back, closes his eyes, clasps his hands in a simple grip. Nothing more is necessary. “It’s just a mental exercise in which you are clearing your mind,” he once told the
New Yorker
in an interview.

Dalio isn’t the person that comes to mind most readily when you think of practitioners of meditation. He isn’t a monk or a yoga fanatic or a hippie New Ager, and he isn’t doing this just for the interest in participating in a psych study. He happens to be the founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, someone who has little time to waste and many ways to spend the time he does have. And yet he chooses, actively, to devote a portion of each day to mediation, in its broadest, most classic sense.

When Dalio meditates, he clears his mind. He prepares it for the day by relaxing and trying to keep all of the thoughts that will proceed to bother him for the next however many hours at bay. Yes, it may seem like
a waste to spend any time at all doing, well, nothing that looks productive. But spending those minutes in the space of his mind will actually make Dalio more productive, more flexible, more imaginative, and more insightful. In short, it will help him be a better decision maker.

But is it for everyone? Meditation, that mental space, is not nothing; it requires real energy and concentration (hence the easier route of physical distance). While someone like Holmes or Dalio may well be able to dive right into blankness to great effect, I’m willing to bet that Watson would struggle. With nothing else to occupy his mind, his breathing alone would likely not be enough to keep all those thoughts in check. It’s far easier to distance yourself with physical cues than it is to have to rely on your mind alone.

Luckily, as I mentioned in passing, meditation need not be blank. In meditation, we can indeed be focusing on something as difficult to capture as breath or emotion or the sensations of the body to the exclusion of everything else. But we can also use what’s known as visualization: a focus on a specific mental image that will replace that blankness with something more tangible and accessible. Go back for a moment to
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, where we left Holmes floating above the Devonshire moors. That, too, is meditation—and it wasn’t at all aimless or blank or devoid of mental imagery. It requires the same focus as any meditation, but is in some ways more approachable. You have a concrete plan, something with which to occupy your mind and keep intrusive thoughts at bay, something on which you can focus your energy that is more vibrant and multidimensional than the rise and fall of your breath. And what’s more, you can focus on attaining the distance that Trope would call hypotheticality, to begin considering the ifs and what-ifs.

Try this exercise. Close your eyes (well, close them once you finish reading the instructions). Think of a specific situation where you felt angry or hostile, your most recent fight with a close friend or significant other, for instance. Do you have a moment in mind? Recall it as closely as you can, as if you were going through it again. Once you’re done, tell me how you feel. And tell me as far as you can what went wrong. Who was to blame? Why? Do you think it’s something that can be fixed?

Close your eyes again. Picture the same situation. Only now, I want
you to imagine that it is happening to two people who are not you. You are just a small fly on the wall, looking down at the scene and taking note of it. You are free to buzz around and observe from all angles and no one will see you. Once again, as soon as you finish, tell me how you feel. And then respond to the same questions as before.

You’ve just completed a classic exercise in mental distancing through visualization. It’s a process of picturing something vividly but from a distance, and so, from a perspective that is inherently different from the actual one you have stored in your memory. From scenario one to scenario two, you have gone from a concrete to an abstract mindset; you’ve likely become calmer emotionally, seen things that you missed the first time around, and you may have even come away with a slightly modified memory of what happened. In fact, you may have even become wiser and better at solving problems
overall
, unrelated to the scenario in question. (And you will have also been practicing a form of meditation. Sneaky, isn’t it?)

Psychologist Ethan Kross has demonstrated that such mental distancing (the above scenario was actually taken from one of his studies) is not just good for emotional regulation. It can also enhance your wisdom, both in terms of dialectism (i.e., being cognizant of change and contradictions in the world) and intellectual humility (i.e., knowing your own limitations), and make you better able to solve problems and make choices. When you distance yourself, you begin to process things more broadly, see connections that you couldn’t see from a closer vantage point. In other words, being wiser also means being more imaginative. It might not lead to a eureka moment, but it will lead to insight. You think
as if
you had actually changed your location, while you remain seated in your armchair.

Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, was one of the most talented and prolific inventors of the twentieth century. Among his 230 U.S. patents is the automatic letter-sorting machine that the postal service still uses to sort the mail, a magnetic memory device that served as a precursor to the hard disk drive, and the straight-arm phonograph. One of the tricks that helped sustain his remarkable creativity and productivity? None other
than visualization. As he once told psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whenever a task proves difficult or takes time or doesn’t have an obvious answer, “I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, ‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.” Visualization helped Rabinow to shift his mindset to one where he was able to tackle things that would otherwise overwhelm him, providing the requisite imaginative space for such problem solving to occur.

The technique is widespread. Athletes often visualize certain elements of a game or move before they actually perform them, acting them out in their minds before they do so in reality: a tennis player envisions a serve before the ball has left his hand; a golfer sees the path of the ball before he lifts his club. Cognitive behavioral therapists use the technique to help people who suffer from phobias or other conditions to relax and be able to experience situations without actually experiencing them. Psychologist Martin Seligman urges that it might even be the single most important tool toward fostering a more imaginative, intuitive mindset. He goes as far as to suggest that by repeated, simulated visual enactment, “intuition may be teachable virtually and on a massive scale.” How’s that for endorsement.

It is all about learning to create distance with the mind by actually picturing a world as if you were seeing and experiencing it for real. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it, “To repeat: don’t think, but look!” That is the essence of visualization: learning to look internally, to create scenarios and alternatives in your mind, to play out nonrealities as if they were real. It helps you see beyond the obvious, to not make the mistakes of a Lestrade or a Gregson by playing through only the scenario that is in front of you, or the only one you want to see. It forces imagination because it necessitates the use of imagination.

It’s easier than you might think. In fact, all it is really is what we do naturally when we try to recall a memory. It even uses the same neural network—the MPFC, lateral temporal cortex, medial and lateral parietal lobes, and the medial temporal lobe (home of the hippocampus). Except,
instead of recalling a memory exactly, we shuffle around details from experience to create something that never actually occurred, be it a not-yet-extant future or a counterfactual past. We test it in our minds instead of having to experience it in reality. And by so doing, we attain the very same thing we do by way of physical distance: we separate ourselves from the situation we are trying to analyze.

It is all meditation of one form or another. When we saw Holmes in
The Valley of Fear
, he asked for a physical change in location, an actual prompt for his mind from the external world. But the same effect can be accomplished without having to go anywhere—from behind your desk, if you’re Dalio, or your armchair, if you’re Holmes, or wherever else you might find yourself. All you have to do is be able to free up the necessary space in your mind. Let it be the blank canvas. And then the whole imaginative world can be your palette.

Sustaining Your Imagination:
The Importance of Curiosity and Play

Once upon a time, Sherlock Holmes urged us to maintain a crisp and clean brain attic: out with the useless junk, in with meticulously organized boxes that are uncluttered by useless paraphernalia. But it’s not quite that simple. Why on earth, for instance, did Holmes, in “The Lion’s Mane,” know about an obscure species of jellyfish in one warm corner of the ocean? Impossible to explain it by virtue of the stark criteria he imposes early on. As with most things, it is safe to assume that Holmes was exaggerating for effect. Uncluttered, yes, but not stark. An attic that contained only the bare essentials for your professional success would be a sad little attic indeed. It would have hardly any material to work with, and it would be practically incapable of any great insight or imagination.

How did the jellyfish make its way into Holmes’s pristine palace? It’s simple. At some point Holmes must have gotten curious. Just like he got curious about the Motets. Just like he gets curious about art long enough to try to convince Scotland Yard that his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, can’t possibly be up to any good. Just as he says to Inspector MacDonald in
The Valley of Fear
, when the inspector indignantly refuses Holmes’s
offer of reading a book on the history of Manor House, “Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our profession. The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest.” Time and time again, Holmes gets curious, and his curiosity leads him to find out more. And that “more” is then tucked away in some obscure (but labeled!) box in his attic.

For that is basically what Holmes is telling us. Your attic has levels of storage.

There is a difference between active and passive knowledge, those boxes that you need to access regularly and as a matter of course and those that you may need to reach one day but don’t necessarily look to on a regular basis. Holmes isn’t asking that we stop being curious, that we stop acquiring those jellyfish. No. He asks that we keep the active knowledge clean and clear—and that we store the passive knowledge cleanly and clearly, in properly labeled boxes and bins, in the right folders and the right drawers.

It’s not that we should all of a sudden go against his earlier admonition and take up our precious mental real estate with junk. Not at all. Only, we don’t always know when something that may at first glance appear to be junklike is not junk at all but an important addition to our mental arsenal. So, we must tuck those items away securely in case of future use. We don’t even need to store the full item; just a trace of what it was, a reminder that will allow us to find it again—just as Holmes looks up the jellyfish particulars in an old book rather than knowing them as a matter of course. All he needs to do is remember that the book and the reference exist.

An organized attic is not a static attic. Imagination allows you to make more out of your mind space than you otherwise could. And the truth is you never quite know what element will be of most use and when it might end up being more useful than you ever thought possible.

Here, then, is Holmes’s all-important caveat: the most surprising of articles can end up being useful in the most surprising of ways. You must open your mind to new inputs, however unrelated they may seem.

And that is where your general mindset comes in. Is there a standing openness to inputs no matter how strange or unnecessary they might
seem, as opposed to a tendency to dismiss anything that is potentially distracting? Is that open-minded stance your habitual approach, the way that you train yourself to think and to look at the world?

With practice, we might become better at sensing what may or may not prove useful, what to store away for future reference and what to throw out for the time being. Something that at first glance may seem like simple intuition is actually far more—a knowledge that is actually based on countless hours of practice, of training yourself to be open, to integrate experiences in your mind until you become familiar with the patterns and directions those experiences tend to take.

Remember those remote-association experiments, where you had to find a word that could complete all three members of a set? In a way, that encapsulates most of life: a series of remote associations that you won’t see unless you take the time to stop, to imagine, and to consider. If your mindset is one that is scared of creativity, scared to go against prevailing customs and mores, it will only hold you back. If you fear creativity, even subconsciously, you will have more difficulty being creative. You will never be like Holmes, try as you may. Never forget that Holmes was a renegade—and a renegade that was as far from a computer as it gets. And that is what makes his approach so powerful.