Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  The precise activity isn’t as important as its physical nature and its ability to train your thoughts in a different direction. It needs to have several characteristics: it needs to be unrelated to what you are trying to accomplish (if you are solving a crime, you shouldn’t switch to solving another crime; if you are deciding on an important purchase, you shouldn’t go shopping for something else; and so on); it needs to be something that doesn’t take too much effort on your part (if you’re trying to learn a new skill, for instance, your brain will be so preoccupied that it won’t be able to free up the resources needed to root through your attic; Holmes’s violin playing—unless you are, like him, a virtuoso, you need not apply that particular route); and yet it needs to be something that engages you on some level (if Holmes hated pipe smoking, he would hardly benefit from a three-pipe problem; likewise, if he found pipe smoking boring, his mind might be too dulled to do any real thinking, on whatever level—or might find itself unable to detach, in the manner that so afflicts Watson).

  When we switch gears, we in effect move the problem that we have been trying to solve from our conscious brain to our unconscious. While we may think we are doing something else—and indeed, our attentional networks become engaged in something else—our brains don’t actually stop work on the original problem. We may have left our attic to smoke a pipe or play a sonata, but our staging area remains a place of busy activity, with various items being dragged into the light, various combinations being tried, and various approaches being evaluated.

  The key to diagnosing Watson’s inability to create distance between himself and a case may well be that he hasn’t found a suitably engaging yet not overwhelming activity as a substitute. In some instances he tries reading. Too difficult of a task: not only does he fail to concentrate on the reading, thereby losing the intent of the activity, but he can’t stop his mind from returning to the very thing he shouldn’t be thinking about. (And yet for Holmes, reading is indeed a suitable distancing method. “Polyphonic Motets of Lassus” anyone?) Other times, Watson tries sitting in contemplation. Too boring, as he himself puts it; he soon finds himself almost nodding off.

  In either case, the distancing fails. The mind is simply not doing what it is supposed to—dissociating itself from the present environment and thus engaging its more diffuse attentional network (that same default network that is active when our brains are at rest). It’s the opposite of the distraction problem that we encountered in the last chapter. Watson now can’t be distracted enough. What he should be doing is distracting himself from the case, but instead he is letting the case distract him from his chosen distraction and so failing to get the benefit of either concentrated thought or diffuse attention. Distraction isn’t always a bad thing. It all depends on the timing and type. (Interesting fact: we get better at solving insight problems when we are tired or intoxicated. Why? Our executive function is inhibited, so information that would normally be deemed distracting is allowed to filter in. We thus become better at seeing remote associations.) The last chapter was all about mindless distraction; this, on the contrary, is mindful distraction.

  But for it to work it’s essential to choose the right activity, be it the pipe or the violin or an opera or something else entirely. Something that is engaging enough that it distracts you properly—and yet not so overwhelming that it prevents reflection from taking place in the background. Once you find your sin of choice, you can term the problems and decisions you face accordingly: three-pipe, two-movement, one-museum visit, you get the idea.

  In fact, there’s one activity that is almost tailor-made to work. And it is a simple one indeed: walking (the very thing that Holmes was doing when he had his insight in “The Lion’s Mane”). Walks have been shown repeatedly to stimulate creative thought and problem solving, especially if these walks take place in natural surroundings, like the woods, rather than in more urbanized environments (but both types are better than none—and even walking along a tree-lined street can help). After a walk, people become better at solving problems; they persist longer at difficult tasks; and they become more likely to be able to grasp an insightful solution (like being able to connect those four dots you saw earlier). And all from walking past some trees and some sky.

  Indeed, being surrounded by nature tends to increase feelings of well-being, and such feelings, in turn, tend to facilitate problem solving and creative thinking, modulating attention and cognitive control mechanisms in the brain in a way that predisposes us to engage in more Holmes-like imagination. Even the walk can—at times when the pressure seems just too high to handle so that, like Watson, you can’t even begin to contemplate doing something else—be forfeited in favor of looking at screen shots of natural scenes. It’s not ideal but it just might do the trick in a pinch.

  Showers are likewise often associated with imaginative thought, facilitating the same type of distance as Holmes’s pipe or a walk in the park. (You can shower for only so long, however. A three-pipe problem would signify quite the shower ahead of you. In such cases, the walk might be the better solution.) Ditto listening to music—Holmes’s violin and opera in action—and engaging in visually stimulating activities, such as looking at visual illusions or abstract art.

  In every case, that diffuse attentional network is able to do its thing. As our inhibition is lowered, the attentional network takes over whatever is bothering us. It ramps up, so to speak, for whatever comes next. It makes us more likely to grasp remote connections, to activate unrelated memories, thoughts, and experiences that may help in this instance, to synthesize the material that needs to be synthesized. Our unconscious processing is a powerful tool, if only we give it the space and time to work.

  Consider a classic problem-solving paradigm known as compound remote associates. Look at these words:

  CRAB PINE SAUCE

  Now, try to think of a single word that can be added to each of these to form a compound or a two-word phrase.

  Done? How long did it take? And how did you come about your solution?

  There are two ways to solve this problem. One comes from insight, or seeing the right word after a few seconds of searching, and the other comes from an analytical approach, or trying out word after word until one fits. Here, the proper answer is apple (crab apple, pineapple, applesauce), and one can arrive at it either by seeing the solution or going through a list of possible candidates (Cake? Works for crab but not pine. Grass? Ditto. Etcetera). The former is the equivalent of picking out those items in the opposite corners of your attic and making them into a third related, yet unrelated, thing that makes complete sense the moment you see it. The latter is the equivalent of rummaging through your attic slowly and painfully, box by box, and discarding object after object that does not match until you find the one that does.

  Absent imagination, you’re stuck with that second not very palatable alternative, as Watson would be. And while Watson might get to the right answer eventually in the case of a puzzle like the word associates, in the real world there’s no guarantee of his success, since he doesn’t have the elements laid out in front of him as nicely as those three words, crab, pine, sauce. He hasn’t created the requisite mind space for insight to even be possible. He has no idea which elements may need to come together. He has, in other words, no conception of the problem.

  Even his brain will be different from Holmes’s as he approaches the problem, be it the word association or the case of the builder. At first glance, if Watson were to come to the right answer on his own, we might not see an immediate difference. In either Holmes or Watson’s case, a brain scan would show us that a solution has been reached approximately three hundred milliseconds before the solver realizes it himself. Specifically, we would see a burst of activity from the right anterior temporal lobe (an area just above his right ear that is implicated in complex cognitive processing), and an increased activation in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (an area that has been associated with perceiving emotional prosody—or the rh
ythm and intonation of language that conveys a certain feeling—and bringing together disparate information in complex language comprehension).

  But Watson may well never reach that point of solution—and we’d likely know he’s doomed long before he himself does. While he’s struggling with the puzzle, we would be able to predict if he was heading in the right direction by looking at neural activity in two areas: the left and right temporal lobes, associated with the processing of lexical and semantic information, and the mid-frontal cortex, including the anterior cingulate, associated with attention switching and the detection of inconsistent and competing activity. That latter activation would be particularly intriguing, as it suggests the process by which we’re able to gain insight into a preciously inscrutable problem: the anterior cingulate is likely waiting to detect disparate signals from the brain, even weak ones that we are unaware of sending, and turning its attention to them to gain a possible solution, amplifying, so to speak, information that already exists but that needs a little push to be integrated and processed as a general whole. In Watson’s brain, we’re not likely to see much action. But Holmes’s would tell a different story.

  In fact, were we to simply compare Watson’s brain to Holmes’s, we would find telltale signs of Holmes’s predisposition to such insights—and Watson’s lack thereof—even absent a target for his mind to latch on to. Specifically, we would discover that the detective’s brain was more active in the right-hemisphere regions associated with lexical and semantic processing than your average Watson brain, and that it exhibited greater diffuse activation of the visual system.

  What would these differences mean? The right hemisphere is more involved in processing such loose or remote associations as often come together in moments of insight, while the left tends to focus on tighter, more explicit connections. More likely than not, the specific patterns that accompany insight signal a mind that is ever ready to process associations that, at first glance, don’t seem to be associations at all. In other words, a mind that can find connections between the seemingly unconnected can access its vast network of ideas and impressions and detect even faint links that can then be amplified to recognize a broader significance, if such a significance exists. Insight may seem to come from nowhere, but really, it comes from somewhere quite specific: from the attic and the processing that has been taking place while you’ve been busy doing other things.

  The pipe, the violin, the walk, the concert, the shower, they all have something else in common, beyond the earlier criteria we used to nominate them as good potential activities for creating distance. They allow your mind to relax. They take the pressure off. In essence, all of the mentioned characteristics—unrelated, not too effortful, and yet effortful enough—come together to offer the proper environment for neural relaxation. You can’t relax if you’re supposed to be working on a problem; hence the unrelatedness. Nor can you relax if you’re finding something effortful. And too lax, well, you may not be stimulated to do anything, or you might relax a bit too much and fall asleep.

  Even if you don’t come to any conclusions or gain any perspective in your time off from a problem, chances are you will return to it both reenergized and ready to expend more effort. In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could remember only orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would do: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between eighteen and twenty-two tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles), but half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones—over two times better, in fact.

  Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending. Your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working—and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. It’s the same Need for Closure that we’ve encountered before, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion. And a motivated mind, as we already know, is a far more powerful mind.

  Distancing Through Actual Distance

  And what if, like Watson, you simply can’t fathom doing something that would enable you to think of something else, even if you have all of these suggestions to choose from? Luckily, distance isn’t limited to a change in activity (though that does happen to be one of the easier routes). Another way to cue psychological distance is to acquire literal distance. To physically move to another point. For Watson, that would be the equivalent of getting up and walking out of Baker Street instead of sitting there looking at his flatmate. Holmes may be able to change location mentally, but an actual physical change may help the lesser willed—and could even aid the great detective himself when imaginative inspiration is not otherwise forthcoming.

  In The Valley of Fear, Holmes proposes to return in the evening to the scene of the crime under investigation, leaving the hotel where he has been doing most of his thinking.

  “An evening alone!” Watson exclaims. Surely, that would be more morbid than anything else. Nonsense, Holmes counters. It could actually be quite illustrative. “I propose to go up there presently. I have arranged it with the estimable Ames, who is by no means whole-hearted about Barker. I shall sit in that room and see if its atmosphere brings me inspiration. I’m a believer in the genius loci. You smile, Friend Watson. Well, we shall see.” And with that, Holmes is off to the study.

  And does he find inspiration? He does. The next morning he is ready with his solution to the mystery. How is that possible? Could the genius loci have really brought the inspiration that Holmes had hoped?

  Indeed it could have. Location affects thought in the most direct way possible—in fact, it even affects us physically. It all goes back to one of the most famous experiments in psychology: Pavlov’s dogs. Ivan Pavlov wanted to show that a physical cue (in this case it was a sound, but it can just as easily be something visual or a smell or a general location) could eventually elicit the same response as an actual reward. So, he would ring a bell and then present his dogs with food. At the sight of the food, the dogs would—naturally—salivate. But soon enough, they began to salivate at the bell itself, before any sight or smell of food was present. The bell triggered the anticipation of food and with it, a physical reaction.

  We now know that this type of learned association goes far beyond dogs and bells and meat. Humans tend to build such patterns as a matter of course, eventually leading innocuous things like bells to trigger predictable reactions in our brains. When you enter a doctor’s office, for example, the smell alone may be enough to trigger butterflies—not because you know there will be something painful (you might be coming in to drop off some forms, for all that) but because you have learned to associate that environment with the anxiety of a medical visit.

  The power of learned associations is ubiquitous. We tend, for instance, to remember material better in the location where we first learned it. Students who take tests in the room where they did their studying tend to do better than if they take those same tests in a new environment. And the opposite is true: if a particular location is tied to frustration or boredom or distraction, it doesn’t make for a good study choice.

  At every level, physical and neural, locations get linked to memories. Places tend to get associated with the type of activity that occurs there, and the pattern can be remarkably difficult to break. Watching television in bed, for instance, may make it difficult to get to sleep (unless, that is, you go to sleep while watching TV). Sitting at the same desk all day may make it difficult to unstick yourself if your mind gets stuck.<
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  The tie between location and thought explains why so many people can’t work from home and need to go to a specified office. At home, they are not used to working, and they find themselves being distracted by the same types of things that they would normally do around the house. Those neural associations are not the ones that would be conducive to getting things—work-related things, that is—done. The memory traces simply aren’t there, and the ones that are there aren’t the ones you want to activate. It also illustrates why walking might be so effective. It’s much more difficult to fall into a counterproductive thought pattern if your scenery is changing all the time.

  Location affects thought. A change in location cues us, so to speak, to think differently. It renders our ingrained associations irrelevant and, in so doing frees us to form new ones, to explore ways of thinking and paths of thought that we hadn’t previously considered. Whereas our imagination may be stymied by our usual locations, it is set loose when we separate it from learned constraints. We have no memories, no neural links that kick in to tie us down. And in that lies the secret link between imagination and physical distance. The most important thing that a change in physical perspective can do is to prompt a change in mental perspective. Even Holmes, who unlike Watson doesn’t need to be led by the hand and forcibly removed from Baker Street in order to profit from some mental distance, benefits from this property.

  Let’s return once more to Holmes’s strange request in The Valley of Fear to spend his night alone in the room where a murder has taken place. In light of the link between location, memory, and imaginative distance, his belief in the genius loci no longer seems nearly as strange. Holmes doesn’t actually think that he can re-create events by being in the room where they took place; instead, he banks on doing precisely what we’ve just discussed. He wants to trigger a change of perspective by a literal change of location, in this case a very specific location and a very specific perspective, that of the people involved in the crime at hand. In doing so, he frees up his imagination to take not the path of his own experiences, memories, and connections but that of the people involved in the events themselves. What associations might the room have triggered for them? What might it have inspired?