Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  Lestrade’s rhetorical certainty is so misplaced precisely because he is a practical man who goes straight from evidence to conclusions. He forgets that crucial step in between, that space that gives you time to reflect, to think of other possibilities, to consider what may have occurred, and to follow those hypothetical lines out inside your mind, instead of being forced to use only what is in front of you. (But never underestimate the crucial importance of that observational stage that has come before, the filling up of the staging area with pieces of information for your use: Holmes can come to his conclusions about the thumbprint only because he knows that he did not miss it before. “I know that that mark was not there when I examined the hall yesterday,” he tells Watson. He trusts in his observations, in his attention, in the essential soundness of his attic and its contents both. Lestrade, lacking his training and ruled as he is by System Watson, knows no such certainty.)

  A lack of imagination can thus lead to faulty action (the arrest or suspicion of the wrong man) and to the lack of proper action (looking for the actual culprit). If only the most obvious solution is sought, the correct one may never be found at all.

  Reason without imagination is akin to System Watson at the controls. It seems to make sense and it’s what we want to do, but it’s too impulsive and quick. You cannot possibly assess and see the whole picture—even if the solution ends up being rather prosaic—if you don’t take a step back to let imagination have its say.

  Consider this counterexample to the conduct of Lestrade. In “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” Holmes pays one of his rare compliments to Inspector Baynes: “You will rise high in your profession. You have instinct and intuition.” What does Baynes do differently from his Scotland Yard counterparts to earn such praise? He anticipates human nature instead of dismissing it, arresting the wrong man on purpose with the goal of lulling the real criminal into false complacency. (The wrong man, of course, has a preponderance of evidence against him, more than enough for an arrest, and to a Lestrade would seem to be the right man. In fact, Holmes initially mistakes Baynes’s arrest as nothing more than a Lestrade-like blunder.) And in this anticipation lies one of the main virtues of an imaginative approach: going beyond simple logic in interpreting facts and instead using that same logic to create hypothetical alternatives. A Lestrade would never think to do something so nonlinear. Why in the world expend the energy to arrest someone if that someone is not who should be arrested according to the law? Lacking imagination, he can think only in a straight line.

  In 1968, the high jump was a well-established sport. You would run, you would jump, and you would make your way over a pole in one of several ways. In older days you’d likely use the scissors, scissoring out your legs as you glided over, but by the sixties you’d probably be using the straddle or the belly roll, facing down and basically rolling over the bar. Whichever style you used, one thing was certain: you’d be facing forward when you made your jump. Imagine trying to jump backward. That would be ridiculous.

  Dick Fosbury, however, didn’t think so. To him, jumping backward seemed like the way to go. All through high school, he’d been developing a backward-facing style, and now, in college, it was taking him higher than it ever had. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but if he thought about it, he would say that his inspiration came from the East: from Confucius and Lao Tzu. He didn’t care what anyone else was doing. He just jumped with the feeling of the thing. People joked and laughed. Fosbury looked just as ridiculous as they thought he would (and his inspirations sounded a bit ridiculous, too. When asked about his approach, he told Sports Illustrated, “I don’t even think about the high jump. It’s positive thinking. I just let it happen”). Certainly, no one expected him to make the U.S. Olympics team—let alone win the Olympics. But win he did, setting American and Olympic records with his 7-foot-4.25-inch (2.24-meter) jump, only 1.5 inches short of the world record.

  With his unprecedented technique, dubbed the Fosbury Flop, Fosbury did what many other more traditional athletes had never managed to accomplish: he revolutionized, in a very real way, an entire sport. Even after his win, expectations were that he would remain a lone bird, jumping in his esoteric style while the rest of the world looked on. But since 1978 no world record has been set by anyone other than a flopper; and by 1980, thirteen of sixteen Olympic finalists were flopping across the bar. To this day, the flop remains the dominant high jump style. The straddle looks old and cumbersome in comparison. Why hadn’t anyone thought of replacing it earlier?

  Of course, everything seems intuitive in retrospect. But what seems perfectly clear now was completely inventive and unprecedented at the time. No one thought you could possibly jump backward. It seemed absurd. And Fosbury himself? He wasn’t even a particularly talented jumper. As his coach, Berny Wagner, put it, “I have a discus thrower who can jump-reach higher than Dick.” It was all in the approach. Indeed, Fosbury’s height pales in comparison to the current record—8 feet (2.45 meters), held by Javier Sotomayor—and his accomplishment doesn’t even break the top twenty. But the sport has never been the same.

  Imagination allows us to see things that aren’t so, be it a dead man who is actually alive, a way of jumping that, while backward, couldn’t be more forward looking, or a box of tacks that can also be a simple box. It lets us see what might have been and what might be even in the absence of firm evidence. When all of the details are in front of you, how do you arrange them? How do you know which are important? Simple logic gets you part of the way there, it’s true, but it can’t do it alone—and it can’t do it without some breathing space.

  In our resistance to creativity, we are Lestrades. But here’s the good news: our inner Holmes isn’t too far away. Our implicit bias may be strong but it’s not immutable, and it doesn’t need to affect our thinking as much as it does.

  Look at the following picture:

  Try to connect these dots with three lines, without lifting your pencil from the paper or retracing any of the lines you draw. You must also end the drawing where you began it. You can take up to three minutes.

  Have you finished? If you haven’t, fear not; you’re far from being alone. In fact, you’re like 78 percent of study participants who were given the problem to solve. If you have, how long did it take you?

  Consider this: if I had turned on a lightbulb in your line of sight while you were working on the problem, you would have been more likely to solve it if you hadn’t solved it already—a full 44 percent of people who saw a lit lightbulb solved the puzzle, as contrasted with the 22 percent in the original condition (the one that you just experienced)—and you would have solved it faster than you might have otherwise. The bulb will have activated insight-related concepts in your mind, and in so doing will have primed your mind to think in a more creative fashion than it would as a matter of course. It is an example of priming in action. Because we associate the lightbulb with creativity and insight, we are more likely to persist at difficult problems and to think in a creative, nonlinear fashion when we see it turn on. All of the concepts that are stored in our attic next to the idea of “lightbulb moment” or “insight” or “eureka” become activated, and that activation in turn helps us become more creative in our own approaches.

  By the way, here’s the solution to the dot problem.

  Our natural mindset may well be holding us back, but a simple prime is enough to cue it in a very different direction indeed. And it need not be a lightbulb. Works of art on the walls do the trick, too. The color blue. Pictures of famous creative thinkers. Happy faces. Happy music. (In fact, almost all positive cues.) Plants and flowers and scenes of nature. All of these tend to boost our creativity with or without our awareness. That’s cause for celebration.

  Whatever the stimulus, as soon as your mind begins to reflect on the idea, you become more likely to embody that very idea. There are even studies that show that wearing a white coat will make you more likely to think in scientific terms and be better at solving problems—the coat
likely activates the concept of researchers and doctors, and you begin to take on the characteristics you associate with those people.

  But short of lighting bulbs in our blue room with portraits of Einstein and Jobs on the walls while listening to happy music, wearing a white coat, and watering our beautiful roses, how can we best make our way to Holmes’s capacity for imaginative thinking?

  The Importance of Distance

  One of the most important ways to facilitate imaginative thinking, to make sure that we don’t move, like Lestrade, straight from evidence to conclusion, is through distance, in multiple senses of the word. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” a case that comes quite late in the Holmes-Watson partnership, Watson observes:

  One of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action and switching all his thoughts on to lighter things whenever he had convinced himself that he could no longer work to advantage. I remember that during the whole of that memorable day he lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus. For my own part I had none of this power of detachment, and the day, in consequence appeared to be interminable.

  Forcing your mind to take a step back is a tough thing to do. It seems counterintuitive to walk away from a problem that you want to solve. But in reality, the characteristic is not so remarkable either for Holmes or for individuals who are deep thinkers. The fact that it is remarkable for Watson (and that he self-admittedly lacks the skill) goes a long way to explaining why he so often fails when Holmes succeeds.

  Psychologist Yaacov Trope argues that psychological distance may be one of the single most important steps you can take to improve thinking and decision making. It can come in many forms: temporal, or distance in time (both future and past); spatial, or distance in space (how physically close or far you are from something); social, or distance between people (how someone else sees it); and hypothetical, or distance from reality (how things might have happened). But whatever the form, all of these distances have something in common: they all require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require you to take a step back.

  Trope posits that the further we move in distance, the more general and abstract our perspective and our interpretation become; and the further we move from our own perspective, the wider the picture we are able to consider. Conversely, as we move closer once more, our thoughts become more concrete, more specific, more practical—and the closer we remain to our egocentric view, the smaller and more limited the picture that confronts us. Our level of construal influences, in turn, how we evaluate a situation and how we ultimately choose to interact with it. It affects our decisions and our ability to solve problems. It even changes how our brains process information on a neural level (specifically, it tends to engage our prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobe; more on that later).

  In essence, psychological distance accomplishes one major thing: it engages System Holmes. It forces quiet reflection. Distancing has been shown to improve cognitive performance, from actual problem solving to the ability to exercise self-control. Children who use psychological distancing techniques (for example, visualizing marshmallows as puffy clouds, a technique we’ll discuss more in the next section) are better able to delay gratification and hold out for a larger later reward. Adults who are told to take a step back and imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations, and have better self-assessments and lower emotional reactivity. Individuals who employ distancing in typical problem-solving scenarios emerge ahead of their more immersed counterparts. And those who take a distanced view of political questions tend to emerge with evaluations that are better able to stand the test of time.

  You can think of the exercise as a large, complicated puzzle; the box has been lost, so you don’t know what exactly you’re putting together, and pieces from other similar puzzles have gotten mixed in over the years, so you’re not even sure which pieces belong. To solve the puzzle, you must first have a sense of the picture as a whole. Some pieces will jump out right away: the corners, the edges, the colors and patterns that obviously go together. And before you know it, you have a clearer sense of where the puzzle is heading and where and how the remaining pieces should fit. But you’ll never solve it if you don’t take the time to lay the pieces out properly, identify those telling starter moves, and try to form an image in your mind of the complete picture. Trying to force individual pieces at random will take forever, cause needless frustration, and perhaps lead to your never being able to solve the thing at all.

  You need to learn to let the two elements, the concrete, specific pieces (their details and colors, what they tell you, and what they suggest) and the broad, overall picture (the general impression that gives you a sense of the tableau as a whole), work together to help you put the puzzle together. Both are essential. The pieces have been gathered already through close observation; seeing how they fit can be accomplished only by the distance of imagination. It can be any of Trope’s distances—temporal, spatial, social, or hypothetical—but distance it must be.

  When I was little, I used to love yes-or-no riddle games. One person holds the answer to a simple riddle (one of my favorites as a child: Joe and Mandy are lying on the floor, dead; around them are broken glass, a pool of water, and a baseball. What happened?); the rest try to guess the solution by asking questions that require only a yes or no answer. I could play these for hours and forced many a hapless companion to share the somewhat strange pastime.

  Back then I didn’t see the riddles as much more than a fun way to pass the time and test my detective prowess—and part of the reason I loved them was because they made me feel up to the task. Only now do I understand fully how ingenious that forced-question method really is: it forces you to separate observation from deduction, whether you want to or not. In a way, the riddles have a built-in road map for how to get to the solution: incrementally, taking frequent breaks to let your imagination consolidate and re-form what it has learned. You can’t just barrel on through. You observe, you learn, and you take the time to consider the possibilities, look at the angles, try to place the elements in their proper context, see if you might have come to a mistaken conclusion at an earlier point. The yes-or-no riddle forces imaginative distance. (The solution to Joe and Mandy’s dilemma: they are goldfish. The baseball flew in through a window and broke their bowl.)

  But absent such an inbuilt cue, how does one go about creating distance? How can one resist Watson’s lack of detachment and be able, like Holmes, to know when and how to throw his brain out of action and turn it to lighter things? As it happens, even something as seemingly inborn as creativity and imagination can be broken down into steps that traverse that very you-have-it-or-you-don’t divide.

  Distancing Through Unrelated Activity

  What, pray tell, is a three-pipe problem? It certainly doesn’t make it on the list of common problem types in the psychology literature. And yet perhaps it’s time it should.

  In “The Red-Headed League,” Sherlock Holmes is presented with an unusual conundrum, which at first glance has no reasonable solution. Why in the world would someone be singled out for the color of his hair, and then be paid to do nothing but sit around, along with the hair in question, in a closed room for hours on end?

  When Mr. Wilson, the man of the flaming-red hair, leaves Holmes after telling his story, Holmes tells Watson that he must give his prompt attention to the matter. “What are you going to do, then?” asks Watson, anxious as ever to know how the case will be resolved. Holmes’s reply may come as somewhat of a surprise:

  “To smoke,” he answered. “It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.” He curled himself up in his chair, with his thick knees drawn up to his hawk-like nose, and there he sat with his eyes closed and his black clay pipe thrusting out like the bill of some strange bird. I had come to the conclusion that he ha
d dropped asleep, and indeed was nodding myself, when he suddenly sprang out of his chair with the gesture of a man who has made up his mind, and put his pipe down upon the mantel-piece.

  A three-pipe problem, then: one that requires doing something other than thinking directly about the problem—i.e., smoking a pipe—in concentrated silence (and, one expects, smoke), for the time that it takes to smoke three pipes. Presumably, one of a subset of problems ranging from the single-pipe problem to the largest number you can smoke without making yourself sick and so putting the entire effort to waste.

  Holmes, of course, means something quite a bit more by his response. For him, the pipe is but a means—and one means of many—to an end: creating psychological distance between himself and the problem at hand, so that he can let his observations (in this case, what he has learned from the visitor’s story and appearance) percolate in his mind, mixing with all of the matter in his brain attic in leisurely fashion, in order to know what the actual next step in the case should be. Watson would have him do something at once, as suggested by his question. Holmes, however, puts a pipe in between himself and the problem. He gives his imagination time to do its thing undisturbed.

  The pipe is but a means to an end, yes, but it is an important, physical means as well. It’s significant here that we are dealing with an actual object and an actual activity. A change in activity, to something seemingly unrelated to the problem in question, is one of the elements that is most conducive to creating the requisite distance for imagination to take hold. Indeed, it is a tactic that Holmes employs often and to good effect. He smokes his pipe, but he also plays his violin, visits the opera, and listens to music; these are his preferred distancing mechanisms.