Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  The technique is widespread. Athletes often visualize certain elements of a game or move before they actually perform them, acting them out in their minds before they do so in reality: a tennis player envisions a serve before the ball has left his hand; a golfer sees the path of the ball before he lifts his club. Cognitive behavioral therapists use the technique to help people who suffer from phobias or other conditions to relax and be able to experience situations without actually experiencing them. Psychologist Martin Seligman urges that it might even be the single most important tool toward fostering a more imaginative, intuitive mindset. He goes as far as to suggest that by repeated, simulated visual enactment, “intuition may be teachable virtually and on a massive scale.” How’s that for endorsement.

  It is all about learning to create distance with the mind by actually picturing a world as if you were seeing and experiencing it for real. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it, “To repeat: don’t think, but look!” That is the essence of visualization: learning to look internally, to create scenarios and alternatives in your mind, to play out nonrealities as if they were real. It helps you see beyond the obvious, to not make the mistakes of a Lestrade or a Gregson by playing through only the scenario that is in front of you, or the only one you want to see. It forces imagination because it necessitates the use of imagination.

  It’s easier than you might think. In fact, all it is really is what we do naturally when we try to recall a memory. It even uses the same neural network—the MPFC, lateral temporal cortex, medial and lateral parietal lobes, and the medial temporal lobe (home of the hippocampus). Except, instead of recalling a memory exactly, we shuffle around details from experience to create something that never actually occurred, be it a not-yet-extant future or a counterfactual past. We test it in our minds instead of having to experience it in reality. And by so doing, we attain the very same thing we do by way of physical distance: we separate ourselves from the situation we are trying to analyze.

  It is all meditation of one form or another. When we saw Holmes in The Valley of Fear, he asked for a physical change in location, an actual prompt for his mind from the external world. But the same effect can be accomplished without having to go anywhere—from behind your desk, if you’re Dalio, or your armchair, if you’re Holmes, or wherever else you might find yourself. All you have to do is be able to free up the necessary space in your mind. Let it be the blank canvas. And then the whole imaginative world can be your palette.

  Sustaining Your Imagination:

  The Importance of Curiosity and Play

  Once upon a time, Sherlock Holmes urged us to maintain a crisp and clean brain attic: out with the useless junk, in with meticulously organized boxes that are uncluttered by useless paraphernalia. But it’s not quite that simple. Why on earth, for instance, did Holmes, in “The Lion’s Mane,” know about an obscure species of jellyfish in one warm corner of the ocean? Impossible to explain it by virtue of the stark criteria he imposes early on. As with most things, it is safe to assume that Holmes was exaggerating for effect. Uncluttered, yes, but not stark. An attic that contained only the bare essentials for your professional success would be a sad little attic indeed. It would have hardly any material to work with, and it would be practically incapable of any great insight or imagination.

  How did the jellyfish make its way into Holmes’s pristine palace? It’s simple. At some point Holmes must have gotten curious. Just like he got curious about the Motets. Just like he gets curious about art long enough to try to convince Scotland Yard that his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, can’t possibly be up to any good. Just as he says to Inspector MacDonald in The Valley of Fear, when the inspector indignantly refuses Holmes’s offer of reading a book on the history of Manor House, “Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our profession. The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest.” Time and time again, Holmes gets curious, and his curiosity leads him to find out more. And that “more” is then tucked away in some obscure (but labeled!) box in his attic.

  For that is basically what Holmes is telling us. Your attic has levels of storage.

  There is a difference between active and passive knowledge, those boxes that you need to access regularly and as a matter of course and those that you may need to reach one day but don’t necessarily look to on a regular basis. Holmes isn’t asking that we stop being curious, that we stop acquiring those jellyfish. No. He asks that we keep the active knowledge clean and clear—and that we store the passive knowledge cleanly and clearly, in properly labeled boxes and bins, in the right folders and the right drawers.

  It’s not that we should all of a sudden go against his earlier admonition and take up our precious mental real estate with junk. Not at all. Only, we don’t always know when something that may at first glance appear to be junklike is not junk at all but an important addition to our mental arsenal. So, we must tuck those items away securely in case of future use. We don’t even need to store the full item; just a trace of what it was, a reminder that will allow us to find it again—just as Holmes looks up the jellyfish particulars in an old book rather than knowing them as a matter of course. All he needs to do is remember that the book and the reference exist.

  An organized attic is not a static attic. Imagination allows you to make more out of your mind space than you otherwise could. And the truth is you never quite know what element will be of most use and when it might end up being more useful than you ever thought possible.

  Here, then, is Holmes’s all-important caveat: the most surprising of articles can end up being useful in the most surprising of ways. You must open your mind to new inputs, however unrelated they may seem.

  And that is where your general mindset comes in. Is there a standing openness to inputs no matter how strange or unnecessary they might seem, as opposed to a tendency to dismiss anything that is potentially distracting? Is that open-minded stance your habitual approach, the way that you train yourself to think and to look at the world?

  With practice, we might become better at sensing what may or may not prove useful, what to store away for future reference and what to throw out for the time being. Something that at first glance may seem like simple intuition is actually far more—a knowledge that is actually based on countless hours of practice, of training yourself to be open, to integrate experiences in your mind until you become familiar with the patterns and directions those experiences tend to take.

  Remember those remote-association experiments, where you had to find a word that could complete all three members of a set? In a way, that encapsulates most of life: a series of remote associations that you won’t see unless you take the time to stop, to imagine, and to consider. If your mindset is one that is scared of creativity, scared to go against prevailing customs and mores, it will only hold you back. If you fear creativity, even subconsciously, you will have more difficulty being creative. You will never be like Holmes, try as you may. Never forget that Holmes was a renegade—and a renegade that was as far from a computer as it gets. And that is what makes his approach so powerful.

  Holmes gets to the very heart of the matter in The Valley of Fear, when he admonishes Watson that “there should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation. Simply as a mental exercise, without any assertion that it is true, let me indicate a possible line of thought. It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

  “Here is a young man who learns suddenly . . .” “Not until I have been to Blackheath.” from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” p. 829.

  “You will rise high in your profession.” from His Last Bow, “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” p. 1231.

  “One of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action . . .” from His Last Bow, “The Adven
ture of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” p. 297.

  “It is quite a three-pipe problem . . .” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “The Red-Headed League,” p. 50.

  “I have been to Devonshire.” from The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 3: The Problem, p. 22.

  “I’m a believer in the genius loci.” “Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our profession.” from chapter 6: A Dawning Light, p. 51; chapter 7: The Solution, p. 62 The Valley of Fear.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Navigating the Brain Attic: Deduction from the Facts

  Imagine you are Holmes, and I, Maria, a potential client. You’ve spent the last hundred-odd pages being presented with information, much as you would if you were to observe me in your sitting room for some time. Take a minute to think, to consider what you may know about me as a person. What can you infer based on what I’ve written?

  I won’t go down the list of all possible answers, but here’s one to make you pause: the first time I ever heard the name Sherlock Holmes was in Russian. Those stories my dad read by the fire? Russian translations, not English originals. You see, we had only recently come to the United States, and when he read to us, it was in the language that my family uses to this day with one another at home. Alexandre Dumas, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: all men whose voices I first heard in Russian.

  What does this have to do with anything? Simply this: Holmes would have known without my having to tell him. He would have made a simple deduction based on the available facts, infused with just a bit of that imaginative quality we spoke about in the last chapter. And he would have realized that I couldn’t have possibly had my first encounter with his methods in any language but Russian. Don’t believe me? All of the elements are there, I promise. And by the end of this chapter, you, too, should be in a position to follow Holmes in putting them together into the only explanation that would suit all of the available facts. As the detective says over and over, when all avenues are exhausted, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  And so we turn finally to that most flashy of steps: deduction. The grand finale. The fireworks at the end of a hard day’s work. The moment when you can finally complete your thought process and come to your conclusion, make your decision, do whatever it was that you had set out to do. Everything has been gathered and analyzed. All that remains is to see what it all means and what that meaning implies for you, to draw the implications out to their logical conclusion.

  It’s the moment when Sherlock Holmes utters that immortal line in “The Crooked Man,” elementary.

  “I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear Watson,” said he. “When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy enough to justify the hansom.”

  “Excellent!” I cried.

  “Elementary,” said he. “It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction.”

  What does deduction actually entail? Deduction is that final navigation of your brain attic, the moment when you put together all of the elements that came before in a single, cohesive whole that makes sense of the full picture, the attic yielding in orderly fashion what it has gathered so methodically. What Holmes means by deduction and what formal logic means by deduction are not one and the same. In the purely logical sense, deduction is the arrival at a specific instance from a general principle. Perhaps the most famous example:

  All men are mortal.

  Socrates is a man.

  Socrates is mortal.

  But for Holmes, this is but one possible way to reach the conclusion. His deduction includes multiple ways of reasoning—as long as you proceed from fact and reach a statement that must necessarily be true, to the exclusion of other alternatives.3

  Whether it’s solving a crime, making a decision, or coming to some personal determination, the process remains essentially the same. You take all of your observations—those attic contents that you’ve decided to store and integrate into your existing attic structure and that you’ve already mulled over and reconfigured in your imagination—you put them in order, starting from the beginning and leaving nothing out, and you see what possible answer remains that will both incorporate all of them and answer your initial question. Or, to put it in Holmesian terms, you lay out your chain of reasoning and test possibilities until whatever remains (improbability aside) is the truth: “That process starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” he tells us. “It may well be that several explanations remain, in which case one tries test after test until one or other of them has a convincing amount of support.”

  That, in essence, is deduction, or what Holmes calls “systematized common sense.” But the common sense is not as common, or as straightforward, as one might hope. Whenever Watson himself tries to emulate Holmes, he often finds himself in error. And it’s only natural. Even if we’ve been accurate up to this point, we have to push back one more time lest System Watson leads us astray at the eleventh hour.

  Why is deduction far more difficult than it appears? Why is it that Watson so often falters when he tries to follow in his companion’s footsteps. What gets in the way of our final reasoning? Why is it so often so difficult to think clearly, even when we have everything we need to do so? And how can we circumvent those difficulties so that, unlike Watson, who is stuck to repeat his mistakes over and over, we can use System Holmes to help us out of the quagmire and deduce properly?

  The Difficulty of Proper Deduction:

  Our Inner Storyteller at the Wheel

  A trio of notorious robbers sets its sights on Abbey Grange, the residence of Sir Eustace Brackenstall, one of the richest men in Kent. One night, when all are presumed to be sleeping, the three men make their way through the dining room window, preparing to ransack the wealthy residence much as they did a nearby estate a fortnight prior. Their plan, however, is foiled when Lady Brackenstall enters the room. Quickly, they hit her over the head and tie her to one of the dining room chairs. All would seem to be well, were it not for Sir Brackenstall, who comes in to investigate the strange noises. He is not so lucky as his wife: he is knocked over the head with a poker and he collapses, dead, onto the floor. The robbers hastily clear the sideboard of its silver but, too agitated by the murder to do much else, exit thereafter. But first they open a bottle of wine to calm their nerves.

  Or so it would seem, according to the testimony of the only living witness, Lady Brackenstall. But in “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” few things are what they appear to be.

  The story seems sound enough. The lady’s explanation is confirmed by her maid, Theresa, and all signs point to events unfolding much in the manner she has described. And yet, something doesn’t feel right to Sherlock Holmes. “Every instinct that I possess cries out against it,” he tells Watson. “It’s wrong—it’s all wrong—I’ll swear that it’s wrong.” He begins enumerating the possible flaws, and as he does so, details that seem entirely plausible, when taken one by one, now together begin to cast doubt on the likelihood of the story. It is not, however, until he comes to the wineglasses that Holmes knows for sure he is correct. “And now, on the top of this, comes the incident of the wineglasses,” he says to his companion.

  “Can you see them in your mind’s eye?”

  “I see them clearly.”

  “We are told that three men drank from them. Does that strike you as likely?”

  “Why not? There was wine in each glass.”

  “Exactly, but there was beeswing only in one glass. You must have noticed that fact. What does that suggest to your mind?”

  “That last glass filled would
be most likely to contain beeswing.”

  “Not at all. The bottle was full of it, and it is inconceivable that the first two glasses were clear and the third heaving charged with it. There are two possible explanations, and only two. One is that after the second glass was filled the bottle was violently agitated, and so the third glass received the beeswing. That does not appear probable. No, no, I am sure that I am right.”

  “What, then, do you suppose?”

  “That only two glasses were used, and that the dregs of both were poured into a third glass, so as to give the false impression that three people had been there.”

  What does Watson know about the physics of wine? Not much, I venture to guess, but when Holmes asks him about the beeswing, he at once comes up with a ready answer: it must have been the last glass to be poured. The reason seems sensible enough, and yet comes from nowhere. I’d bet that Watson hadn’t even given it so much as a second thought until Holmes prompted him to do so. But when asked, he is only too happy to create an explanation that makes sense. Watson doesn’t even realize that he has done it, and were Holmes not to stop him for a moment, he would likely hold it as future fact, as further proof of the veracity of the original story rather than as a potential hole in the story’s fabric.

  Absent Holmes, the Watson storytelling approach is the natural, instinctive one. And absent Holmes’s insistence, it is incredibly difficult to resist our desire to form narratives, to tell stories even if they may not be altogether correct, or correct at all. We like simplicity. We like concrete reasons. We like causes. We like things that make intuitive sense (even if that sense happens to be wrong).