Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

Holmes’s trick is to treat every thought, every experience, and every perception the way he would a pink elephant. In other words, begin with a healthy dose of skepticism instead of the credulity that is your mind’s natural state of being. Don’t just assume anything is the way it is. Think of everything as being as absurd as an animal that can’t possibly exist in nature. It’s a difficult proposition, especially to take on all at once—after all, it’s the same thing as asking your brain to go from its natural resting state to a mode of constant physical activity, expending important energy even where it would normally yawn, say okay, and move on to the next thing—but not an impossible one, especially if you’ve got Sherlock Holmes on your side. For he, perhaps better than anyone else, can serve as a trusty companion, an ever-present model for how to accomplish what may look at first glance like a herculean task.

By observing Holmes in action, we will become better at observing our own minds. “How the deuce did he know that I had come from Afghanistan?” Watson asks Stamford, the man who has introduced him to Holmes for the first time.

Stamford smiles enigmatically in response. “That’s just his little peculiarity,” he tells Watson. “A good many people have wanted to know how he finds things out.”

That answer only piques Watson’s curiosity further. It’s a curiosity that can only be satisfied over the course of long and detailed observation—which he promptly undertakes.

To Sherlock Holmes, the world has become by default a pink elephant world. It’s a world where every single input is examined with the same care and healthy skepticism as the most absurd of animals. And by the end of this book, if you ask yourself the simple question,
What would Sherlock Holmes do and think in this situation?
you will find that your own world is on its way to being one, too. That thoughts that you never before realized existed are being stopped and questioned before being allowed to infiltrate your mind. That those same thoughts, properly filtered, can no longer slyly influence your behavior without your knowledge.

And just like a muscle that you never knew you had—one that suddenly begins to ache, then develop and bulk up as you begin to use it more and more in a new series of exercises—with practice your mind will see that the constant observation and never-ending scrutiny will become easier. (In fact, as you’ll learn later in the book, it really is like a muscle.) It will become, as it is to Sherlock Holmes, second nature. You will begin to intuit, to deduce, to
think
as a matter of course, and you will find that you no longer have to give it much conscious effort.

Don’t for a second think it’s not doable. Holmes may be fictional, but Joseph Bell was very real. So, too, was Conan Doyle (and George Edalji wasn’t the only beneficiary of his approach; Sir Arthur also worked to overturn the convictions of the falsely imprisoned Oscar Slater).

And maybe Sherlock Holmes so captures our minds for the very reason that he makes it seem possible, effortless even, to think in a way that would bring the average person to exhaustion. He makes the most rigorous scientific approach to thinking seem attainable. Not for nothing does Watson always exclaim, after Holmes gives him an explanation of his methods, that the thing couldn’t have been any clearer. Unlike Watson, though, we can learn to see the clarity before the fact.

The Two Ms: Mindfulness and Motivation

It won’t be easy. As Holmes reminds us, “Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the
highest possible perfection in it.” But it’s also more than mere fancy. In essence, it comes down to one simple formula: to move from a System Watson– to a System Holmes–governed thinking takes mindfulness plus motivation. (That, and a lot of practice.) Mindfulness, in the sense of constant presence of mind, the attentiveness and hereness that is so essential for real, active observation of the world. Motivation, in the sense of active engagement and desire.

When we do such decidedly unremarkable things as misplacing our keys or losing our glasses only to find them on our head, System Watson is to blame: we go on a sort of autopilot and don’t note our actions as we make them. It’s why we often forget what we were doing if we’re interrupted, why we stand in the middle of the kitchen wondering why we’ve entered it. System Holmes offers the type of retracing of steps that requires attentive recall, so that we break the autopilot and instead remember just where and why we did what we did. We aren’t motivated or mindful all the time, and mostly it doesn’t matter. We do things mindlessly to conserve our resources for something more important than the location of our keys.

But in order to break from that autopiloted mode, we have to be motivated to think in a mindful, present fashion, to exert effort on what goes through our heads instead of going with the flow. To think like Sherlock Holmes, we must
want
, actively, to think like him. In fact, motivation is so essential that researchers have often lamented the difficulty of getting accurate performance comparisons on cognitive tasks for older and younger participants. Why? The older adults are often far more motivated to perform well. They try harder. They engage more. They are more serious, more present, more involved. To them, the performance matters a great deal. It says something about their mental capabilities—and they are out to prove that they haven’t lost the touch as they’ve aged. Not so younger adults. There is no comparable imperative. How, then, can you accurately compare the two groups? It’s a question that continues to plague research into aging and cognitive function.

But that’s not the only domain where it matters. Motivated subjects
always
outperform. Students who are motivated perform better on something as seemingly immutable as the IQ test—on average, as much as .064 standard deviations better, in fact. Not only that, but motivation predicts
higher academic performance, fewer criminal convictions, and better employment outcomes. Children who have a so-called “rage to master”—a term coined by Ellen Winner to describe the intrinsic motivation to master a specific domain—are more likely to be successful in any number of endeavors, from art to science. If we are motivated to learn a language, we are more likely to succeed in our quest. Indeed, when we learn anything new, we learn better if we are motivated learners. Even our memory knows if we’re motivated or not: we remember better if we were motivated at the time the memory was formed. It’s called motivated encoding.

And then, of course, there is that final piece of the puzzle: practice, practice, practice. You have to supplement your mindful motivation with brutal training, thousands of hours of it. There is no way around it. Think of the phenomenon of expert knowledge: experts in all fields, from master chess players to master detectives, have superior memory in their field of choice. Holmes’s knowledge of crime is ever at his fingertips. A chess player often holds hundreds of games, with all of their moves, in his head, ready for swift access. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson argues that experts even see the world differently within their area of expertise: they see things that are invisible to a novice; they are able to discern patterns at a glance that are anything but obvious to an untrained eye; they see details as part of a whole and know at once what is crucial and what is incidental.

Even Holmes could not have begun life with System Holmes at the wheel. You can be sure that in his fictional world he was born, just as we are, with Watson at the controls. He just hasn’t let himself stay that way. He took System Watson and taught it to operate by the rules of System Holmes, imposing reflective thought where there should rightly be reflexive reaction.

For the most part, System Watson is the habitual one. But if we are conscious of its power, we can ensure that it is not in control nearly as often as it otherwise would be. As Holmes often notes, he has made it a habit to engage his Holmes system, every moment of every day. In so doing, he has slowly trained his quick-to-judge inner Watson to perform as his public outer Holmes. Through sheer force of habit and will, he has taught his instant judgments to follow the train of thought of a far more reflective approach. And because this foundation is in place, it takes a matter of
seconds for him to make his initial observations of Watson’s character. That’s why Holmes calls it intuition. Accurate intuition, the intuition that Holmes possesses, is of necessity based on training, hours and hours of it. An expert may not always realize consciously where it’s coming from, but it comes from some habit, visible or not. What Holmes has done is to clarify the process, break down how hot can become cool, reflexive become reflective. It’s what Anders Ericsson calls expert knowledge: an ability born from extended and intense practice and not some innate genius. It’s not that Holmes was born to be the consulting detective to end all consulting detectives. It’s that he has practiced his mindful approach to the world and has, over time, perfected his art to the level at which we find it.

As their first case together draws to a close, Dr. Watson compliments his new companion on his masterful accomplishment: “You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.” A high compliment indeed. But in the following pages, you will learn to do the exact same thing for your every thought, from its very inception—just as Arthur Conan Doyle did in his defense of George Edalji, and Joseph Bell in his patient diagnoses.

Sherlock Holmes came of age at a time when psychology was still in its infancy. We are far better equipped than he could have ever been. Let’s learn to put that knowledge to good use.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“How the deuce did he know . . .”
from
A Study in Scarlet
, chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes, p. 7.
¹

“Before turning to those moral and mental aspects . . .” “How much an observant man might learn . . .” “Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis . . .”
from
A Study in Scarlet
, chapter 2: The Science of Deduction, p. 15.

CHAPTER TWO

The Brain Attic: What Is It and What’s in There?

O
ne of the most widely held notions about Sherlock Holmes has to do with his supposed ignorance of Copernican theory. “What the deuce is [the solar system] to me?” he exclaims to Watson in
A Study in Scarlet
. “You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” And now that he knows that fact? “I shall do my best to forget it,” he promises.

It’s fun to home in on that incongruity between the superhuman-seeming detective and a failure to grasp a fact so rudimentary that even a child would know it. And ignorance of the solar system is quite an omission for someone who we might hold up as the model of the scientific method, is it not? Even the BBC series
Sherlock
can’t help but use it as a focal point of one of its episodes.

But two things about that perception bear further mention. First, it isn’t, strictly speaking, true. Witness Holmes’s repeated references to astronomy in future stories—in “The Musgrave Ritual,” he talks about “allowances for personal equation, as the astronomers would have it”; in “The Greek Interpreter,” about the “obliquity of the ecliptic”; in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” about “a planet leaving its orbit.” Indeed, eventually Holmes does use almost all of the knowledge that he denies having at the earliest stages of his friendship with Dr. Watson. (And in true-to-canon form,
Sherlock
the BBC series does end on a note of scientific triumph: Holmes does know astronomy after all, and that knowledge saves the day—and the life of a little boy.)

In fact, I would argue that he exaggerates his ignorance precisely to draw our attention to a second—and, I think, much more important—point. His supposed refusal to commit the solar system to memory serves to illustrate an analogy for the human mind that will prove to be central
to Holmes’s thinking and to our ability to emulate his methodology. As Holmes tells Watson, moments after the Copernican incident, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

When I first heard the term
brain attic
—back in the days of firelight and the old crimson hardcover—all I could picture in my seven-year-old head was the cover of the black-and-white Shel Silverstein book that sat prominently on my bookshelf, with its half-smiling, lopsided face whose forehead was distended to a wrinkled triangle, complete with roof, chimney, and window with open shutters. Behind the shutters, a tiny face peeking out at the world. Is this what Holmes meant? A small room with sloped sides and a foreign creature with a funny face waiting to pull the cord and turn the light off or on?

As it turns out, I wasn’t far from wrong. For Sherlock Holmes, a person’s brain attic really is an incredibly concrete, physical space. Maybe it has a chimney. Maybe it doesn’t. But whatever it looks like, it is a space in your head, specially fashioned for storing the most disparate of objects. And yes, there is certainly a cord that you can pull to turn the light on or off at will. As Holmes explains to Watson, “A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic.”

That comparison, as it turns out, is remarkably accurate. Subsequent research on memory formation, retention, and retrieval has—as you’ll soon see—proven itself to be highly amenable to the attic analogy. In the chapters that follow, we will trace the role of the brain attic from the inception to the culmination of the thought process, exploring how its structure and content work at every point—and what we can do to improve that working on a regular basis.