Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  Holmes has a ready answer:

  “What, indeed? It is art for art’s sake. Watson, I suppose when you doctored you found yourself studying cases without a thought of a fee?”

  “For my education, Holmes.”

  “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. This is an instructive case. There is neither money nor credit in it, and yet one would wish to tidy it up. When dusk comes we should find ourselves one stage advanced in our investigation.”

  It doesn’t matter to Holmes that the initial goal has been attained. It doesn’t matter that the further pursuit of the matter is dangerous in the extreme. You don’t just abandon something when your original goal is complete, if that something has proven itself more complex than it may have seemed at first. The case is instructive. If nothing else, there is still more to learn. When Holmes says that education never ends, his message to us isn’t as one-dimensional as it may seem. Of course it’s good to keep learning: it keeps our minds sharp and alert and prevents us from settling in our ways. But for Holmes, education means something more. Education in the Holmesian sense is a way to keep challenging yourself and questioning your habits, of never allowing System Watson to take over altogether—even though he may have learned a great deal from System Holmes along the way. It’s a way of constantly shaking up our habitual behaviors, and of never forgetting that, no matter how expert we think we are at something, we must remain mindful and motivated in everything we do.

  This whole book has stressed the necessity of practice. Holmes got to where he is because of constantly practicing those mindful habits of thought that form the core of his approach to the world. As we practice, however, as things become more and more simple and second nature, they move into the purview of System Watson. Even though the habits may now be Holmesian ones, they have all the same become habits, things we do as a matter of course—and therefore, if we’re not careful, mindlessly. It’s when we take our thinking for granted and stop paying attention to what is actually going on in our brain attic that we are prone to mess up, even if that attic is now the most streamlined and polished place you ever saw. Holmes must keep challenging himself lest he succumb to the very same thing. For even though his mindful habits are sharp indeed, even they can lead him astray if he doesn’t keep applying them. If we don’t keep challenging our habits of thought, we risk letting the mindfulness we’ve so carefully cultivated slip back into its pre-Holmesian, mindless existence.

  It’s a difficult task, and our brain, as usual, is of little help. When we feel like we’ve completed something worthwhile, be it a simple task like cleaning up a pesky closet, or something a bit more involved, like the resolution of a mystery, our Watson brain would like nothing better than to rest, to reward itself for a job well done. Why go further if you’ve done what you’ve set out to do?

  Human learning is largely driven by something known as the reward prediction error (RPE). When something is more rewarding than expected—I made the left turn! I didn’t hit the cone! in the case of learning to drive—the RPE leads to a release of dopamine into the brain. That release occurs frequently when we begin to learn something new. With each step, it is easy to see gratifying results: we begin to understand what we’re doing, our performance improves, we make fewer mistakes. And each point of accomplishment does actually entail some gain for us. Not only are we performing better (which presumably will make us happy) but our brain is being rewarded for its learning and improvement.

  But then, all of a sudden, it stops. It’s no longer surprising that I can drive smoothly. It’s no longer surprising that I’m not making mistakes on my typing. It’s no longer surprising that I can tell that Watson came from Afghanistan. I know I’ll be able to do it before I actually do it. And so there’s no RPE. No RPE, no dopamine. No pleasure. No need for further learning. We’ve achieved a suitable plateau and we decide—on a neural level as well as a conscious one—that we’ve learned all we need to know.

  The trick is to train your brain to move past that point of immediate reward, to find the uncertainty of the future rewarding in itself. It’s not easy—for as I’ve said before, future uncertainty is precisely the thing we don’t much like. Far better to reap the benefits now, and bask in the dopamine ride and its aftereffects.

  Inertia is a powerful force. We are creatures of habit—and not just observable habits, such as, for instance, always putting on the TV when we walk into our living room after work, or opening the fridge just to see what’s in there, but thought habits, predictable loops of thinking that, when triggered, go down a predictable path. And thought habits are tough to break.

  One of the most powerful forces of choice is the default effect—the tendency, as we’ve already discussed, to choose the path of least resistance, going with what is in front of us as long as that is a reasonable enough option. We see it playing out all the time. At work, employees tend to contribute to retirement plans when the contribution is the default and to stop contributing—even when matched generously by employers—when they need to opt in. Countries where organ donation is the default (each person is an organ donor unless he actively specifies that he doesn’t want to be) have significantly higher percentages of donors than countries where donors must opt in. Effectively, when given a choice between doing something and nothing, we choose the nothing—and tend to forget that that, too, is doing something. But it’s doing something quite passive and complacent, the polar opposite of the active engagement that Holmes always stresses.

  And here’s the odd thing: the better we are, the better we’ve become, the more we’ve learned, the more powerful is the urge to just rest already. We feel like we somehow deserve it, instead of realizing that it is the greatest disservice we could possibly do ourselves.

  We see this pattern playing itself out not merely at the individual levels but throughout organizations and corporations. Think about how many companies have produced breakthrough innovations only to find themselves swamped by competitors and left behind a few years later. (Consider, for instance, Kodak or Atari or RIM, creator of the Black-Berry.) And this tendency isn’t limited to the business world. The pattern of spectacular innovation followed by just as spectacular stagnation describes a more general trend that occurs in academia, the military, and almost any industry or profession you can name. And it’s all rooted in how our brain’s reward system is set up.

  Why are these patterns so common? It goes back to those default effects, that inertia, on a much broader level: to the entrenchment of habit. And the more rewarded a habit is, the harder it is to break. If a gold star on a spelling test is enough to send dopamine firing in a child’s brain, just imagine what multibillion-dollar success, soaring market shares, bestseller or award-winning or tenure-worthy academic fame can do.

  We’ve spoken before about the difference between short- and long-term memory, those things we hold on to just briefly before letting them go and those we store in our brain attic more permanently. The latter seems to come in two flavors (though its exact mechanisms are still being investigated): declarative, or explicit memory, and procedural, or implicit memory. Think of the first as a kind of encyclopedia of knowledge about events (episodic memory) or facts (semantic memory) or other things that you can recall explicitly. Each time you learn a new one, you can write it down under its own, separate entry. Then, if you’re asked about that particular entry, you can flip to that page of the book and—if everything goes well and you’ve written it down properly and the ink hasn’t faded—retrieve it. But what if something can’t be written down per se? What if it’s just something you kind of feel or know how to do? Then you’ve moved to the realm of procedural, or implicit memory. Experience. It’s no longer as easy as an encyclopedia entry. If I were to ask you about it directly, you may not be able to tell me, and it might even disrupt the very thing I was asking you about. The two systems are not entirely separate and do interact quite a bit, but for our purposes you can think of them as
two different types of information that are stored in your attic. Both are there, but they are not equally conscious or accessible. And you can move from one to the other without quite realizing you’ve done so.

  Think of it like learning to drive a car. At first, you explicitly remember everything you need to do: turn the key, check your mirrors, take the car out of park, and on and on. You have to consciously execute each step. But soon you stop thinking of the steps. They become second nature. And if I were to ask you what you were doing, you might not even be able to tell me. You’ve moved from explicit to implicit memory, from active knowledge to habit. And in the realm of implicit memory, it is far more difficult to improve consciously or to be mindful and present. You have to work much harder to maintain the same level of alertness as when you were just learning. (That’s why so much learning reaches what K. Anders Ericsson terms a plateau, a point beyond which we can’t seem to improve. As we’ll find out, that is not actually true, but it is difficult to overcome.)

  When we are first learning, we are in the realm of declarative, or explicit memory. That’s the memory that is encoded in the hippocampus and then consolidated and stored (if all goes well) for future use. It’s the memory we use as we memorize dates in history or learn the steps of a new procedure at work. It’s also the memory I tried to use in memorizing the numbers of stairs in all possible houses (and failed at miserably) when I completely misunderstood Holmes’s point, and the memory we use as we try to embrace Holmes’s thought process step-by-step, so that we can begin to approximate his powers of insight.

  But it’s not the same memory that Holmes uses when he does the same thing. He has already mastered those steps of thought. To him they have become second nature. Holmes doesn’t need to think about thinking, in the proper fashion; he does it automatically—just as we automatically default to our inner Watson because it’s what we’ve learned to do and are now unlearning.

  Until we unlearn, what to Holmes is effortless couldn’t be more effortful to our Watson selves. We must stop Watson at every point and ask instead the opinion of Holmes. But as we practice this more and more, as we force ourselves to observe, to imagine, to deduce over and over and over—and to do it even in those circumstances where it may seem silly, like deciding what to have for lunch—a change takes place. Suddenly, things flow a little more smoothly. We proceed a little more quickly. It feels a little more natural, a little more effortless.

  In essence, what is happening is that we are switching memory systems. We are moving from the explicit to the implicit, the habitual, the procedural. Our thinking is becoming akin to the memory that we have when we drive, when we ride a bike, when we complete a task that we’ve done countless times. We’ve gone from being goal directed (in the case of thinking, of consciously going through Holmes’s steps, making sure to execute each one properly) to being automated (we no longer have to think about the steps; our minds go through them as a matter of course). From something that is based largely on effortful memory to something that triggers that dopamine reward system without our necessarily realizing it (think of an addict’s behavior—an extreme example). And here allow me to repeat myself, because it bears repeating: the more rewarded something is, the quicker it will become a habit, and the harder it will be to break.

  Bringing Habits Back from Mindlessness into Mindfulness

  “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” takes place when Holmes and Watson no longer live together. One September evening, Watson receives a message from his former flatmate. “Come at once if convenient,” it reads. “If inconvenient come all the same.” Clearly, Holmes wants to see the good doctor—and as promptly as possible. But why? What could Watson have that Holmes so urgently needs, that can’t wait or be communicated by message or messenger? If you think back on their time together, it’s not clear that Watson has ever served a role much beyond that of faithful supporter and chronicler. Surely, he was never the one to solve the crime, come upon the key insight, or influence the case in any meaningful way. Surely, Sherlock Holmes’s summons now couldn’t be all that urgent—a message that is meant to ask for Watson’s aid in solving a case.

  But that is precisely what it is. As it turns out, Watson is—and has long been—far, far more than chronicler and friend, faithful companion and moral supporter. Watson is, in fact, part of the reason that Sherlock Holmes has managed to remain as sharp and ever mindful as he has been for as long as he has. Watson has been essential (indeed, irreplaceable) in solving a case, and will continue to be so, again and again. And soon, you will see precisely why that is.

  Habit is useful. I’ll even go a step further and say that habit is essential. It frees us up cognitively to think of broader, more strategic issues instead of worrying about the nitty-gritty. It allows us to think on a higher level and an altogether different plain than we would otherwise be able to do. In expertise lies great freedom and possibility.

  On the other hand, habit is also perilously close to mindlessness. It is very easy to stop thinking once something becomes easy and automatic. Our effortful journey to attain the Holmesian habits of thought is goal directed. We are focused on reaching a future reward that comes of learning to think mindfully, of making better, more informed, and more thorough choices, of being in control of our minds instead of letting them control us. Habits are the opposite. When something is a habit, it has moved from the mindful, motivated System Holmes brain to the mindless, unthinking System Watson brain, which possesses all of those biases and heuristics, those hidden forces that begin to affect your behavior without your knowledge. You’ve stopped being aware of it, and because of that, you are far less able to pay attention to it.

  And yet what about Sherlock Holmes? How does he manage to stay mindful? Doesn’t that mean that habits need not be incompatible with mindfulness?

  Let’s go back to Holmes’s urgent message to Watson, his call to come no matter how inconvenient the visit might be. Watson knows exactly why he is being called upon—though he may not realize just how essential he is. Holmes, says Watson, is “a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books.” And what, precisely, is the role of Watson-as-an-institution? “I was a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me—many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead—but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject.” And that’s not all. “If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality,” Watson continues, “that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble rôle in our alliance.”

  Holmes has other ways, to be sure—and Watson’s role is but a component of a wider theme, as we’ll soon see—but Watson is an irreplaceable tool in Holmes’s multidimensional arsenal, and his function as tool (or institution, if you’d prefer) is to make sure that Holmes’s habits of thought do not fall into mindless routine, that they remain ever mindful, ever present, and ever sharpened.

  Earlier we talked about learning to drive and the danger we face when we’ve become proficient enough that we stop thinking about our actions, and so may find our attention drifting, our minds shifting into mindlessness. If all is as usual, we’d be fine. But what if something went awry? Our reaction time wouldn’t be nearly as quick as it had been in the initial learning stages when we had focused on the road.

  But what if we were forced to really think about our driving once more?

  Someone taught us how to drive, and we might be called upon to teach someone else. If we are, we would be wise indeed to take up the challenge. When we talk something through to another person, break it down for his understanding, not only are we once again forced to pay attention to what we’re doing, but we might even see our own driving improving
. We might see ourselves thinking of the steps differently and becoming more mindful of what we’re doing as we do it—if only to set a good example. We might see ourselves looking at the road in a fresh way, to be able to formulate what it is that our novice driver needs to know and notice, how he should watch and react. We might see patterns emerge that we hadn’t taken into account—or been able to see, really—the first time around, when we were so busy mastering the composite steps. Not only will our cognitive resources be freer to see these things, but we will be present enough to take advantage of the freedom.

  Likewise, Holmes. It’s not just in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” that he needs Watson’s presence. Notice how in each case he is always teaching his companion, always telling him how he reached this or that conclusion, what his mind did and what path it took. And to do that, he must reflect back on the thought process. He must focus back in on what has become habit. He must be mindful of even those conclusions that he reached mindlessly, like knowing why Watson came from Afghanistan. (Though, as we’ve already discussed, Holmesian mindlessness is far different from Watsonian.) Watson prevents Holmes’s mind from forgetting to think about those elements that come naturally.

  What’s more, Watson serves as a constant reminder of what errors are possible. As Holmes puts it, “In noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.” And that is no small thing. Even in asking the smallest questions, ones that seem entirely obvious to Holmes, Watson nevertheless forces Holmes to look twice at the very obviousness of the thing, to either question it or explain why it is as plain as all that. Watson is, in other words, indispensable.

  And Holmes knows it well. Look at his list of external habits: the violin, the tobacco and pipe, the index book. Each of his habits has been chosen mindfully. Each facilitates thought. What did he do pre-Watson? Whatever it was, he certainly realized very quickly that a post-Watson world was far preferable. “It may be that you are not yourself luminous,” he tells Watson, not altogether unkindly on one occasion, “but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.” In his debt he most certainly is.