Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  If you are like over 75 percent of the participants in the now-classic study by the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker, you would likely try one of two routes. You might try to tack the candle onto the wall—but you’ll quickly find that method to be futile. Or you might try to light the candle and use the dripping wax to attach it to the wall, foregoing the box of tacks entirely (after all, you might think, it could be a distracter!). Again, you’d fail. The wax is not strong enough to hold the candle, and your contraption will collapse. What now?

  For the real solution you need some imagination. No one sees it at once. Some people find it after only a minute or two of thought. Others see it after faltering through several unsuccessful attempts. And others fail to solve it without some outside help. Here’s the answer. Take the tacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, and light the candle. Soften the bottom of the candle with a match, so that the wax begins to drip into the box, and place the candle inside the box, on top of the soft pillow of wax. Secure. Run out of the room before the candle burns low enough to set the box on fire. Voilà.

  Why don’t so many people see that alternative? They forget that between observation and deduction there lies an important mental moment. They take the hot System Watson route—action, action, action—underestimating the crucial need for the exact opposite: a moment of quiet reflection. And so they understandably go at once for the most natural or most obvious solutions. The majority of people in this situation do not see that something obvious—a box of tacks—might actually be something less obvious: a box and tacks.

  This is known as functional fixedness. We tend to see objects the way they are presented, as serving a specific function that is already assigned. The box and tacks go together as a box of tacks. The box holds the tacks; it does not have another function. To go past that and actually break the object into two component parts, to realize that the box and matches are two different things, takes an imaginative leap (Duncker, coming from the Gestalt school, was studying precisely this question, of our tendency to see the whole over the parts).

  Indeed, in follow-ups to Duncker’s original study, one experiment showed that if the objects were presented separately, with the tacks sitting beside the box, the percentage of people who solved the problem rose dramatically. Ditto with a simple linguistic tweak: if participants were primed, prior to encountering the candle problem, with a series of words connected with and instead of of, as in, “a box and tacks,” they were much more likely to see the solution. And even if the words were just underlined separately, as five items (candle, book of matches, and box of tacks), participants were also much more likely to solve the problem.

  But the original problem requires some thought, a shift away from the obvious without any external help. It’s not as simple as looking at everything you’ve observed and right away acting or trying to deduce the most likely scenario that would satisfy your objective. Those people who were able to solve it knew the importance of not acting, the value of letting their minds take the situation in and give it some internal, quiet thought. In short, they realized that between observation and deduction lies the crucial, irreplaceable step of imagination.

  It’s easy to see Sherlock Holmes as a hard, cold reasoning machine: the epitome of calculating logic. But that view of Holmes the Logical Automaton couldn’t be further from the truth. Quite the contrary. What makes Holmes who he is, what places him above detectives, inspectors, and civilians alike, is his willingness to engage in the nonlinear, embrace the hypothetical, entertain the conjecture; it’s his capacity for creative thought and imaginative reflection.

  Why then do we tend to miss this softer, almost artistic side and focus instead on the detective’s computer-like powers of rational calculation? Simply put, that view is both easier and safer. It is a line of thinking that is well ingrained into our psychology. We have been trained to do it from an early age. As Albert Einstein put it, “Certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader.” We live in a society that glorifies the computer model, that idolizes the inhuman Holmes, who can take in countless data points as a matter of course, analyze them with startling precision, and spit out a solution. A society that gives short shrift to the power of something as unquantifiable as imagination and focuses instead on the power of the intellect.

  But wait, you might think, that’s completely bogus. We also thrive on the idea of innovation and creativity. We are living in the age of the entrepreneur, of the man of ideas, of Steve Jobs and the “Think Different” motto. Well, yes and no. That is, we value creativity on the surface, but in our heart of hearts, imagination can scare us like crazy.

  As a general rule, we dislike uncertainty. It makes us uneasy. A certain world is a much friendlier place. And so we work hard to reduce whatever uncertainty we can, often by making habitual, practical choices, which protect the status quo. You know the saying, “Better the devil you know”? That about sums it up.

  Creativity, on the other hand, requires novelty. Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don’t exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening—even if we aren’t aware of just how much it frightens us personally. It is also potentially embarrassing (after all, there’s never a guarantee of success). Why do you think Conan Doyle’s inspectors are always so loath to depart from standard protocol, to do anything that might in the least endanger their investigation or delay it by even an instant? Holmes’s imagination frightens them.

  Consider a common paradox: organizations, institutions, and individual decision makers often reject creative ideas even as they state openly that creativity is an important and sometimes central goal. Why? New research suggests that we may hold an unconscious bias against creative ideas much like we do in cases of racism or phobias.

  Remember the Implicit Association Test from chapter two? In a series of studies, Jennifer Mueller and colleagues decided to modify it for something that had never appeared in need of testing: creativity. Participants had to complete the same good/bad category pairing as in the standard IAT, only this time with two words that expressed an attitude that was either practical (functional, constructive, or useful) or creative (novel, inventive, or original). The result indicated that even those people who had explicitly ranked creativity as high on their list of positive attributes showed an implicit bias against it relative to practicality under conditions of uncertainty. And what’s more, they also rated an idea that had been pretested as creative (for example, a running shoe that uses nanotechnology to adjust fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters) as less creative than their more certain counterparts. So not only were they implicitly biased, but they exhibited a failure to see creativity for what it was when directly faced with it.

  True, that effect was seen only in uncertain conditions—but doesn’t that describe most decision-making environments? It certainly applies to detective work. And corporations. And science. And business. And basically anything else you can think of.

  Great thinkers have gotten over that hump, that fear of the void. Einstein had failures. So did Abraham Lincoln, probably one of the few men to go to war a captain and return a private—and to file twice for bankruptcy before assuming the presidency. So did Walt Disney, getting fired from a newspaper for “lack of imagination” (the creativity paradox, if ever there was one, in full force). So did Thomas Edison, inventing over one thousand failed specimens before he came up with a lightbulb that worked. And so did Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler, anyone? Man with the twisted lip? Or how about that Yellow Face, to which we’ll soon return in greater detail?).

  What distinguishes them isn’t a lack of failure but a lack of fear of failure, an openness that is the hallmark of the creative mind. They may have had that same anticreative bias as most of us at one po
int in their lives, but one way or another, they managed to squelch it into submission. Sherlock Holmes has one element that a computer lacks, and it is that very element that both makes him what he is and undercuts the image of the detective as nothing more than logician par excellence: imagination.

  Who hasn’t dismissed a problem because no obvious answer presented itself at once? And which of us hasn’t made a wrong decision or taken a wrong turn because we never stopped to think that clear and obvious might be a trifle too obvious? Who hasn’t persisted in a less-than-ideal setup just because that’s the way things were always done—and though better ways may exist, they would depart too much from the tried and true? Better the devil you know.

  Our fear of uncertainty keeps us in check when we’d do better to accompany Holmes on one of his imaginative wanderings and play out scenarios that may exist—for the time being, at least—only in our heads. Einstein, for one, had nothing but intuition to go on when he proposed his grand theory of general relativity. When George Sylvester Viereck asked him, in 1929, whether his discoveries were the result of intuition or inspiration, Einstein replied, “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Absent imagination, the great scientist would have been stuck in the certainty of the linear and the easily accessible.

  What’s more, many problems don’t even have an obvious answer to turn to. In the case of our Norwood mystery, Lestrade had a ready-made story and suspect. But what if that didn’t exist? What if there was no linear narrative, and the only way to get to the answer was by circuitous and hypothetical meanderings of the mind? (One such case appears in The Valley of Fear, when the victim isn’t at all who he seems to be—and neither is the house. A lack of imagination in that instance equals a lack of solution.) And in a world far removed from detectives and inspectors and builders, what if there’s no obvious job path or better romantic prospect or choice that would make us happier? What if the answer instead requires digging and some creative self-exploration? Not many would change a known devil for an unknown one—and fewer still would exchange it for none at all.

  Without imagination we would never be able to reach the heights of thought that we are capable of; we’d be doomed, at the very best, to become very good at spewing back details and facts—but we’d find it difficult to use those facts in any way that could meaningfully improve our judgment and decision making. We’d have an attic stacked with beautifully organized boxes, folders, and materials. And we wouldn’t know where to begin to go through them all. Instead, we’d have to thumb through the stacks over and over, maybe finding the right approach, maybe not. And if the right element wasn’t there for the taking but had to actually come from two, or even three, different files? Good luck to us.

  Let’s go back for a moment to the case of the Norwood builder. Why is it that, lacking imagination, Lestrade can’t come near solving the mystery and, indeed, comes close to sentencing an innocent man? What does imagination provide here that straightforward analysis does not? Both the inspector and the detective have access to identical information. Holmes doesn’t have some secret knowledge that would enable him to see something that Lestrade does not—or at least any knowledge that Lestrade, too, couldn’t easily apply in much the same fashion. But not only do the two men choose to use different elements of their shared knowledge; they then interpret what they do know in altogether different lights. Lestrade follows the straightforward approach, and Sherlock a more imaginative one that the inspector does not even conceive to be possible.

  At the beginning of the investigation, Holmes and Lestrade start from the exact same point, as John Hector McFarlane gives the entirety of his statement in their joint presence. In fact, it’s Lestrade who has an edge of a sort. He has already been to the scene of the crime, while Holmes is only now hearing of it for the first time. And yet, right away, their approaches diverge. When Lestrade, prior to arresting McFarlane and leading him away, asks Holmes whether he has any further questions, Holmes replies, “Not until I have been to Blackheath.” Blackheath? But the murder took place in Norwood. “You mean Norwood,” Lestrade corrects the detective. “Oh, yes, no doubt that is what I must have meant,” replies Holmes, and proceeds, of course, to Blackheath, the home of the unfortunate Mr. McFarlane’s parents.

  “And why not Norwood?” asks Watson, just as Lestrade had wondered before him.

  “Because,” replies Holmes, “we have in this case one singular incident coming close to the heels of another singular incident. The police are making the mistake of concentrating their attention upon the second, because it happens to be the one which is actually criminal.” Strike one, as you’ll see in a moment, against Lestrade’s overly straightforward approach.

  Holmes is disappointed in his trip. “I tried one or two leads,” he tells Watson upon his return, “but could get at nothing which would help our hypothesis, and several points which would make against it. I gave it up at last, and off I went to Norwood.” But, as we’ll soon see, the time wasn’t wasted—nor does Holmes think it was. For, you never know how the most straightforward-seeming events will unfold once you use that attic space of imagination to its fullest potential. And you never know just what piece of information will make a nonsensical puzzle all of a sudden make sense.

  Still, the case does not seem to be heading toward a successful resolution. As Holmes tells Watson, “Unless some lucky chance comes our way I fear that the Norwood Disappearance Case will not figure in that chronicle of our successes which I foresee that a patient public will sooner or later have to endure.”

  And then, from the most unlikely of places, that very lucky chance appears. Lestrade calls it “important fresh evidence” that definitively establishes McFarlane’s guilt. Holmes is stricken—until he realizes just what that fresh evidence is: McFarlane’s bloody fingerprint on the hallway wall. What to Lestrade is proof positive of guilt to Holmes is the very epitome of McFarlane’s innocence. And what’s more, it confirms a suspicion that has, to that point, been nothing more than a nagging feeling, an “intuition,” as Holmes calls it, that there has been no crime to begin with. Jonas Oldacre is, as a matter of fact, alive and well.

  How can that be? How can the exact same piece of information serve, for the inspector, to condemn a man and, for Holmes, to free him—and to cast doubt on the nature of the entire crime? It all comes down to imagination.

  Let’s go through it step-by-step. First off, there’s Holmes’s initial response to the story: not to rush immediately to the scene of the supposed crime but rather to acquaint himself with all possible angles, which may or may not prove useful. And so, a trip to Blackheath, to those very parents who are supposed to have known Jonas Oldacre when young and who, of course, know McFarlane. While this may not seem to be particularly imaginative, it does entail a more open-minded and less linear approach than the one espoused by Lestrade: straight to the scene of the crime, and the scene of the crime only. Lestrade has, in a way, closed off all alternate possibilities from the get-go. Why bother to look if everything you need is right in one place?

  Much of imagination is about making connections that are not entirely obvious, between elements that may appear disparate at first. When I was younger, my parents gave me a toy of sorts: a wooden pole with a hole in the middle and a ring at the base. Through the hole was threaded a thick string, with two wooden circles on either end. The point of the toy was to get the ring off the pole. It seemed like a piece of cake at first—until I realized that the string with its circles prevented the ring from coming off the obvious way, over the top of the pole. I tried force. And more force. And speed. Maybe I could trick it? I tried to get the string and circles to somehow detach. The ring to slide over the circles that it hadn’t slid over in the past. Nothing worked. None of the solutions that seemed most promising were actually solutions at all. Instead, to remove the ring, you had to take a path so circuitous that it
took me hours of trying—with days in between—to finally have the patience to reach it. For you had to, in a sense, stop trying to take the ring off. I’d always begun with that ring, thinking that it had to be the right way to go. After all, wasn’t the whole point to remove it? It wasn’t until I forgot the ring and took a step back to look at the overall picture and to explore its possibilities that I came upon the solution.

  I, too, had to go to Blackheath before I could figure out what was going on in Norwood. Unlike Lestrade, I had a strict guide: I would know when I had solved the puzzle correctly. And so I didn’t need Holmes’s nudging. I realized I was wrong because I would know without a doubt when I was right. But most problems aren’t so clear-cut. There’s no stubborn ring that gives you only two answers, right and wrong. Instead, there’s a whole mass of misleading turns and false resolutions. And absent Holmes’s reminder, you may be tempted to keep tugging at that ring to get it off—and think that it has been removed when all you’ve really done is lodged it farther up the pole.

  So, Holmes goes to Blackheath. But that’s not the end to his willingness to engage in the imaginative. In order to approach the case of the Norwood builder as the detective does—and accomplish what he accomplishes—you need to begin from a place of open-minded possibility. You cannot equate the most obvious course of events with the only possible course of events. If you do so, you run the risk of never even thinking of any number of possibilities that may end up being the real answer. And, more likely than not, you will fall prey to that nasty confirmation bias that we’ve seen in play in previous chapters.

  In this instance, not only does Holmes hold very real the chance that McFarlane is innocent, but he maintains and plays out a number of hypothetical scenarios that exist only in his mind, whereby each piece of evidence, including the central one of the very death of the builder, is not what it appears to be. In order to realize the true course of events, Holmes must first imagine the possibility of that course of events. Otherwise he’d be like Lestrade, left saying, “I don’t know whether you think that McFarlane came out of jail in the dead of the night in order to strengthen the evidence against himself,” and following up that seemingly rhetorical statement with, “I am a practical man, Mr. Holmes, and when I have got my evidence I come to my conclusions.”