Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  Imagine that I’ve presented you with sets of five words and have asked you to make four-word sentences out of each set. The words may seem innocuous enough, but hidden among them are the so-called target stimuli: words like lonely, careful, Florida, helpless, knits, and gullible. Do they remind you of anything? If I lump them all together, they very well might remind you of old age. But spread them out over thirty sets of five-word combinations, and the effect is far less striking—so much less so, in fact, that not a single participant who saw the sentences—of a sample of sixty, in the two original studies of thirty participants each—realized that they had any thematic coherence. But that lack of awareness didn’t mean a lack of impact.

  If you’re like one of the hundreds of people on whom this particular priming task has been used since it was originally introduced in 1996, several things will have happened. You will walk slower now than you did before, and you may even hunch just a little (both evidence of the ideomotor effect of the prime—or its influence on actual physical action). You’ll perform worse on a series of cognitive ability tasks. You’ll be slower to respond to certain questions. You may even feel somehow older and wearier than you had previously. Why? You’ve just been exposed to the Florida effect: a series of age-related stereotypes that, without your awareness, activated a series of nodes and concepts in your brain that in turn prompted you to think and act in a certain fashion. It’s priming at its most basic.

  Which particular nodes were touched, however, and how the activation spread depends on your own attic and its specific features. If, for instance, you are from a culture that values highly the wisdom of the elderly, while you would have still likely slowed down your walk, you may have become slightly faster at the same cognitive tasks. If, on the other hand, you are someone who holds a highly negative attitude toward the elderly, you may have experienced physical effects that were the opposite of those exhibited by the others: you may have walked more quickly and stood up just a bit straighter—to prove that you are unlike the target prime. And that’s the point: the prime doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its effects differ. But although individuals may respond differently, they will nevertheless respond.

  That, in essence, is why the same telegram may mean something different for Watson and for Holmes. For Holmes, it triggers the expected pattern associated with a mindset that is habitually set to solve crimes. For Watson, it hardly matters and is soon trumped by the pretty sky and the chirping birds. And is that really such a surprise? In general, I think it’s safe to suppose that Watson sees the world as a friendlier place than does Holmes. He often expresses genuine amazement at Holmes’s suspicions, awe at many of his darker deductions. Where Holmes easily sees sinister intent, Watson notices a beautiful and sympathetic face. Where Holmes brings to bear his encyclopedic knowledge of past crime, and at once applies the past to the present, Watson has no such store to call upon and must rely upon what he does know: medicine, the war, and his brief sojourn with the master detective. Add to that Holmes’s tendency, when on an active case and seeking to piece together its details, to drift into the world of his own mind, closing himself off to external distractions that are irrelevant to the subject at hand, as compared to Watson, who is ever happy to note the beauty of a spring day and the appeal of rolling hills, and you have two attics that differ enough in structure and content that they will likely filter just about any input in quite distinct fashion.

  We must never forget to factor in the habitual mindset. Every situation is a combination of habitual and in-the-moment goals and motivation—our attic’s structure and its current state, so to speak. The prime, be it a sunny day or an anxious telegram or a list of words, may activate our thoughts in a specific direction, but what and how it activates depends on what is inside our attic to begin with and how our attic’s structure has been used over time.

  But here’s the good news: a prime stops being a prime once we’re aware of its existence. Those studies of weather and mood? The effect disappeared if subjects were first made explicitly aware of the rainy day: if they were asked about the weather prior to stating their happiness level, the weather no longer had an impact. In studies of the effect of the environment on emotion, if a nonemotional reason is given for a subject’s state, the prime effect is likewise eliminated. For instance, in one of the classic studies of emotion, if you’re given a shot of adrenaline and then you interact with someone who is displaying strong emotion (which could be either positive or negative), you are likely to mirror that emotion. However, if you are told the shot you received will have physically arousing effects, the mirroring will be mitigated. Indeed, priming studies can be notoriously difficult to replicate: bring any attention at all to the priming mechanism, and you’ll likely find the effect go down to zero. When we are aware of the reason for our action, it stops influencing us: we now have something else to which to attribute whatever emotions or thoughts may have been activated, and so, we no longer think that the impetus is coming from our own minds, the result of our own volition.

  Activating Our Brain’s Passivity

  So, how does Holmes manage to extricate himself from his attic’s instantaneous, pre-attentional judgments? How does he manage to dissociate himself from the external influences that his environment exerts on his mind at any given moment? That very awareness and presence are the key. Holmes has made the passive stage of absorbing information like a leaky sponge—some gets in, some goes in one hole and right out the other, and the sponge has no say or opinion on the process—into an active process, the same type of observation that we will soon discuss in detail. And he has made that active process the brain’s default setting.

  At the most basic level, he realizes—as now you do—how our thought process begins and why it’s so important to pay close attention right from the start. If I were to stop you and explain every reason for your impressions, you may not change them (“But of course I’m still right!”), but at least you will know where they came from. And gradually, you may find yourself catching your mind before it leaps to a judgment—in which case you will be far more likely to listen to its wisdom.

  Holmes takes nothing, not a single impression, for granted. He does not allow just any trigger that happens to catch his eye to dictate what will or won’t make it into his attic and how his attic’s contents will or won’t be activated. He remains constantly active and constantly vigilant, lest a stray prime worm its way into the walls of his pristine mind space. And while that constant attention may be exhausting, in situations that matter the effort may be well worth it—and with time, we may find that it is becoming less and less effortful.

  All it takes, in essence, is to ask yourself the same questions that Holmes poses as a matter of course. Is something superfluous to the matter at hand influencing my judgment at any given point? (The answer will almost always be yes.) If so, how do I adjust my perception accordingly? What has influenced my first impression—and has that first impression in turn influenced others? It’s not that Holmes is not susceptible to priming; it’s that he knows its power all too well. So where Watson at once passes judgment on a woman or a country house, Holmes immediately corrects his impression with a Yes, but. . . . His message is simple: never forget that an initial impression is only that, and take a moment to reflect on what caused it and what that may signify for your overall aim. Our brains will do certain things as a matter of course, whether or not we want it to. We can’t change that. But we can change whether or not we take that initial judgment for granted—or probe it in greater depth. And we should never forget that potent combination of mindfulness and motivation.

  In other words, be skeptical of yourself and of your own mind. Observe actively, going beyond the passivity that is our default state. Was something the result of an actual objective behavior (before you term Mary saintly, did you ever observe her doing something that would lead you to believe it?), or just a subjective impression (well, she looked so incredibly nice)?

  When I was in colleg
e, I helped run a global model United Nations conference. Each year we would travel to a different city and invite university students from all over to join in a simulation. My role was committee chair: I prepared topics, ran debates, and, at the end of the conferences, awarded prizes to the students I felt had performed the best. Straightforward enough. Except, that is, when it came to the prizes.

  My first year I noticed that Oxford and Cambridge went home with a disproportionate number of speaker awards. Were those students simply that much better, or was there something else going on? I suspected the latter. After all, representatives from the best universities in the world were taking part, and while Oxford and Cambridge were certainly exceptional schools, I didn’t know that they would necessarily and consistently have the best delegates. What was going on? Were my fellow award givers somehow, well, biased?

  The following year I decided to see if I could find out. I tried to watch my reaction to each student as he spoke, noting my impressions, the arguments that were raised, how convincing the points were, and how persuasively they were argued. And here’s where I found something that was rather alarming: to my ear, the Oxford and Cambridge students sounded smarter. Put two students next to each other, have them say the exact same thing, and I would like the one with the British accent more. It made no sense whatsoever, but in my mind that accent was clearly activating some sort of stereotype that then biased the rest of the judgment—until, as we neared the end of the conference and the time for prize decisions approached, I was certain that my British delegates were the best of the lot. It was not a pleasant realization.

  My next step was to actively resist it. I tried to focus on content alone: what was each student saying and how was he saying it? Did it add to the discussion? Did it raise points in need of raising? Did it, on the other hand, simply reframe someone else’s observation or fail to add anything truly substantive?

  I’d be lying if I said the process was easy. Try as I might, I kept finding myself ensnared by the intonation and accent, by the cadence of sentences and not their content. And here it gets truly scary: at the end, I still had the urge to give my Oxford delegate the prize for best speaker. She really was the best, I found myself saying. And aren’t I correcting too far in the other direction if I fail to acknowledge as much, in effect penalizing her just for being British? I wasn’t the problem. My awards would be well deserved even if they did happen to go to an Oxford student. It was everyone else who was biased.

  Except, my Oxford delegate wasn’t the best. When I looked at my painstaking notes, I found several students who had consistently outperformed her. My notes and my memory and impression were at complete odds. In the end, I went with the notes. But it was a struggle up until the last moment. And even after, I couldn’t quite kick the nagging feeling that the Oxford girl had been robbed.

  Our intuitions are powerful even when entirely inaccurate. And so it is essential to ask, when in the grip of a profound intuition (this is a wonderful person; a beautiful house; a worthy endeavor; a gifted debater): on what is my intuition based? And can I really trust it—or is it just the result of the tricks of my mind? An objective external check, like my committee notes, is helpful, but it’s not always possible. Sometimes we just need to realize that even if we are certain we aren’t biased in any way, that nothing extraneous is affecting our judgments and choices, chances are that we are not acting in an entirely rational or objective fashion. In that realization—that oftentimes it is best not to trust your own judgment—lies the key to improving your judgment to the point where it can in fact be trusted. What’s more, if we are motivated to be accurate, our initial encoding may have less opportunity to spiral out of control to begin with.

  But even beyond the realization is the constant practice of the thing. Accurate intuition is really nothing more than practice, of letting skill replace learned heuristics. Just as we aren’t inattentive to begin with, we aren’t born destined to act in keeping with our faulty thought habits. We just end up doing so because of repeat exposure and practice—and a lack of the same mindful attention that Holmes makes sure to give to his every thought. We may not realize that we have reinforced our brains to think in a certain way, but that is in fact what we have done. And that’s both the bad news and the good news—if we taught our brains, we can also unteach them, or teach them differently. Any habit is a habit that can be changed into another habit. Over time, the skill can change the heuristic. As Herbert Simon, one of the founders of what we now call the field of judgment and decision making, puts it, “Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

  Holmes has thousands of hours of practice on us. His habits have been formed over countless opportunities, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, for every year since his early childhood. It’s easy to become discouraged in his presence—but it might, in the end, be more productive to simply become inspired instead. If he can do it, so can we. It will just take time. Habits that have been developed over such an extensive period that they form the very fiber of our minds don’t change easily.

  Being aware is the first step. Holmes’s awareness enables him to avoid many of the faults that plague Watson, the inspectors, his clients, and his adversaries. But how does he go from awareness to something more, something actionable? That process begins with observation: once we understand how our brain attic works and where our thought process originates, we are in a position to direct our attention to the things that matter—and away from the things that don’t. And it is to that task of mindful observation that we now turn.

  SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

  “What the deuce is [the solar system] to me?” “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like an empty attic . . .” from A Study in Scarlet, chapter 2: The Science of Deduction, p. 15.

  “Give me problems, give me work . . .” from The Sign of Four, chapter 1: The Science of Deduction, p. 5.

  “Miss Morstan entered the room . . .” “It is of the first importance not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities.” from The Sign of Four, chapter 2: The Statement of the Case, p. 13.

  “ ‘Are they not fresh and beautiful?’ I cried . . .” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” p. 292.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stocking the Brain Attic: The Power of Observation

  It was Sunday night and time for my dad to whip out the evening’s reading. Earlier in the week we had finished The Count of Monte Cristo—after a harrowing journey that took several months to complete—and the bar was set high indeed. And there, far from the castles, fortresses, and treasures of France, I found myself face-to-face with a man who could look at a new acquaintance for the first time and proclaim with utter certainty, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” And Watson’s reply—“How on earth did you know that?”—was exactly how I immediately felt. How in the world did he know that? The matter, it was clear to me, went beyond simple observation of detail.

  Or did it? When Watson wonders how Holmes could have possibly known about his wartime service, he posits that someone told the detective beforehand. It’s simply impossible that someone could tell such a thing just from . . . looking.

  “Nothing of the sort,” says Holmes. It is entirely possible. He continues:

  I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, “Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded
? Clearly in Afghanistan.” The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.

  Sure enough, the starting point seems to be observation, plain and simple. Holmes looks at Watson and gleans at once details of his physical appearance, his demeanor, his manner. And out of those he forms a picture of the man as a whole—just as the real-life Joseph Bell had done in the presence of the astonished Arthur Conan Doyle.

  But that’s not all. Observation with a capital O—the way Holmes uses the word when he gives his new companion a brief history of his life with a single glance—does entail more than, well, observation (the lowercase kind). It’s not just about the passive process of letting objects enter into your visual field. It is about knowing what and how to observe and directing your attention accordingly: what details do you focus on? What details do you omit? And how do you take in and capture those details that you do choose to zoom in on? In other words, how do you maximize your brain attic’s potential? You don’t just throw any old detail up there, if you remember Holmes’s early admonitions; you want to keep it as clean as possible. Everything we choose to notice has the potential to become a future furnishing of our attics—and what’s more, its addition will mean a change in the attic’s landscape that will affect, in turn, each future addition. So we have to choose wisely.

  Choosing wisely means being selective. It means not only looking but looking properly, looking with real thought. It means looking with the full knowledge that what you note—and how you note it—will form the basis of any future deductions you might make. It’s about seeing the full picture, noting the details that matter, and understanding how to contextualize those details within a broader framework of thought.