Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  Finally, overconfidence increases with action. As we actively engage, we become more confident in what we are doing. In another classic study, Langer found that individuals who flipped a coin themselves, in contrast to watching someone else flip it, were more confident in being able to predict heads or tails accurately, even though, objectively, the probabilities remained unchanged. Furthermore, individuals who chose their own lottery ticket were more confident in a lucky outcome than they were if a lottery ticket was chosen for them. And in the real world, the effects are just as pronounced. Let’s take the case of traders once again. The more they trade, the more confident they tend to become in their ability to make good trades. As a result, they often overtrade, and in so doing undermine their prior performance.

  But forewarned is forearmed. An awareness of these elements can help you counteract them. It all goes back to the message at the beginning of the chapter: we must continue to learn. The best thing you can do is to acknowledge that you, too, will inevitably stumble, be it from stagnation or overconfidence, its closely related near opposite (I say near because overconfidence creates the illusion of movement, as opposed to habitual stagnation, but that movement isn’t necessarily taking you anywhere), and to keep on learning.

  As “The Yellow Face” draws to a close, Holmes has one final message for his companion. “Watson, if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.” Holmes was right about one thing: he shouldn’t have missed the case for worlds. Even the best of us—especially the best of us—need a reminder of our fallibility and ability to deceive ourselves into a very confident blunder.

  Now for the Good News:

  It’s Never Too Late to Keep Learning, Even After You’ve Stopped.

  We opened the chapter with “The Red Circle,” Holmes’s triumph of never-ending education. The year of that feat of undying curiosity and ever-present desire to continue to challenge the mind with new, more difficult cases and ideas? 1902.4 As for the year of “The Yellow Face,” when victory of confidence over the very education Holmes urges befell the great detective? 1888.1 raise this chronology to point out one somewhat obvious and yet absolutely central element of the human mind: we never stop learning. The Holmes that took the case of a mysterious lodger and ended up embroiled in a saga of secret societies and international crime rings (for that is the meaning of Red Circle: a secret Italian crime syndicate with many evil deeds to its name) is no longer the same Holmes who made such seemingly careless errors in “The Yellow Face.”

  Holmes may have his Norburys. But he has chosen to learn from them and make himself a better thinker in the process, ever perfecting a mind that already seems sharp beyond anything else. We, too, never stop learning, whether we know it or not. At the time of “The Red Circle,” Holmes was forty-eight years old. By traditional standards, we might have thought him incapable of any profound change by that point in life, at least on the fundamental level of the brain. Until recently, the twenties were considered the final decade during which substantial neural changes could take place, the point where our wiring is basically complete. But new evidence points to an altogether different reality. Not only can we keep learning but our brains’ very structure can change and develop in more complex ways for far longer, even into old age.

  In one study, adults were taught to juggle three balls over a three-month period. Their brains, along with those of matched non-juggling adults who received no training, were scanned at three points in time: before the training began, at a point when they reached juggling proficiency (i.e., could sustain the routine for at least sixty seconds), and three months after the proficiency point, during which time they were asked to stop juggling altogether. At first there were no differences in gray matter between jugglers and non-jugglers. By the time the jugglers had reached proficiency, however, a marked change was apparent: their gray matter had increased bilaterally (i.e., in both hemispheres) in the mid-temporal area and the left posterior intraparietal sulcus, areas associated with the processing and retention of complex visual-motion information. Not only were the jugglers learning, but so were their brains—and learning at a more fundamental level than previously thought possible.

  What’s more, these neural changes can happen far more rapidly than we’ve ever realized. When researchers taught a group of adults to distinguish newly defined and named categories for two colors, green and blue, over a period of two hours (they took four colors that could be told apart visually but not lexically and assigned arbitrary names to each one), they observed an increase in gray-matter volume in the region of the visual cortex that is known to mediate color vision, V2/3. So in just two hours the brain was already showing itself receptive to new inputs and training, at a deep, structural level.

  Even something that has been traditionally seen as the purview of the young—the ability to learn new languages—continues to change the landscape of the brain late into life. When a group of adults took a nine-month intensive course in modern standard Chinese, their brains’ white matter reorganized progressively (as measured monthly) in the left hemisphere language areas and their right hemisphere counterparts—as well as in the genu (anterior end) of the corpus collosum, that network of neural fibers that connects the two hemispheres, which we encountered in the discussion of split-brain patients.

  And just think of the rewiring that takes place in extreme cases, when a person loses his vision or function in some limb or undergoes some other drastic change in the body. Entire areas of the brain become reassigned to novel functions, taking up the real estate of the lost faculty in intricate and innovative ways. Our brains are capable of learning feats that are nothing short of miraculous.

  But there’s more. It now seems clear that with application and practice even the elderly can reverse signs of cognitive decline that has already occurred. I place that emphasis out of pure excitement. How amazing to consider that even if we’ve been lazy all our lives, we can make a substantial difference and reverse damage that has already been done, if only we apply ourselves and remember Holmes’s most enduring lesson.

  There is, of course, a downside in all this. If our brains can keep learning—and keep changing as we learn—throughout our lives, so, too, can they keep unlearning. Consider this: in that juggling study, by the time of the third scan, the gray-matter expansion that had been so pronounced three months prior had decreased drastically. All of that training? It had started to unravel at every level, performance and neural. What does that mean? Our brains are learning whether we know it or not. If we are not strengthening connections, we are losing them.

  Our education might stop, if we so choose. Our brains’ never does. The brain will keep reacting to how we decide to use it. The difference is not whether or not we learn, but what and how we learn. We can learn to be passive, to stop, to, in effect, not learn, just as we can learn to be curious, to search, to keep educating ourselves about things that we didn’t even know we needed to know. If we follow Holmes’s advice, we teach our brains to be active. If we don’t, if we’re content, if we get to a certain point and decide that that point is good enough, we teach them the opposite.

  SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

  “It’s a police matter, Mr. Holmes!” “It is art for art’s sake.” from His Last Bow, “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” p. 1272.

  “Come at once if convenient.” “As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books.” from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “The Crooked Man,” p. 138.

  “There’s blackmail in it, or I am much mistaken.” from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “The Yellow Face,” p. 30.

  “Like most clever criminals, he may be too confident in his own cleverness . . .” from The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 12: Death on the Moor, p. 121.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER SEVEN<
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  The Dynamic Attic: Putting It All Together

  In the opening pages of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson enters the sitting room of 221B Baker Street to find a walking stick that has been left behind by a certain James Mortimer. When he takes the opportunity to try to put Holmes’s methods into practice, seeing what he can deduce about the doctor from the appearance of the stick, he finds his thoughts interrupted by his friend.

  “Well, Watson, what do you make of it?” Holmes asks.

  Watson is shocked. Holmes had been sitting at the breakfast table, with his back turned. How could he have known what the doctor was doing or thinking? Surely, he must have eyes in the back of his head.

  Not quite, says Holmes. “I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me. But tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor’s stick?” he presses. “Let me hear you reconstruct the man by an examination of it.”

  Watson gamely takes up the challenge, trying his best to mirror his companion’s usual approach. “I think that Dr. Mortimer is a successful, elderly medical man, well-esteemed, since those who know him give him this mark of their appreciation,” he begins. “I also think that the probability is in favour of his being a country practitioner who does a great deal of his visiting on foot.”

  The first part initially sounds reasonable enough. But why does Watson deduce the second? “Because this stick, though originally a very handsome one, has been so knocked about that I can hardly imagine a town practitioner carrying it,” he says.

  Holmes is pleased. “Perfectly sound!” he exclaims. And what else?

  “And then again, there is the ‘friends of the C.C.H.,’” Watson notes the inscription on the stick. “I should guess that to be the Something Hunt, the local hunt to whose members he has possibly given some surgical assistance,” he continues, “and which has made him a small presentation in return.”

  “Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” Holmes responds. He then goes on to praise Watson as a “conductor of light” and a stimulator of genius, ending his paean with the words, “I must confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”

  Has Watson finally learned the trick? Has he mastered Holmes’s reasoning process? Well, for at least a moment he basks in the compliment. Until, that is, Holmes picks up the stick himself and comments that there are indeed “one or two indications” that can furnish the basis for deduction.

  “Has anything escaped me?” Watson asks with admitted self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”

  Not exactly. “I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous,” Holmes says. “When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal.”

  Watson takes that to mean that he had, in point of fact, been right. Well, only insofar as he got those details accurately. But is he still right if he fails to see the bigger picture?

  Not according to Holmes. He suggests, for instance, that C.C.H. is much more likely to refer to Charing Cross Hospital than to any local hunt, and that from there stem multiple inferences. What may those be, wonders Watson?

  “Do none suggest themselves?” Holmes asks. “You know my methods. Apply them!”

  And with that famed interjection, that challenge, if you will, Holmes embarks on his own logical tour de force, which ends with the arrival of Dr. Mortimer himself, followed closely by the curly-haired spaniel whose existence the detective has just deduced.

  This little repartee brings together all of the elements of the scientific approach to thought that we’ve spent this book exploring and serves as a near-ideal jumping-off point for discussing how to bring the thought process together as a whole—and how that coming together may fall short. That walking stick illustrates both how to think properly and how one can fail to do so. It presents that crucial line between theory and practice, between the knowledge of how we’re to think and the practice of actually doing so.

  Watson has observed Holmes at work many a time, and yet when it comes to applying the process himself, he remains unsuccessful. Why? And how can we do him one better?

  1. Know Yourself—And Your Environment

  We begin, as always, with the basics. What are we ourselves bringing to a situation? How do we assess the scene even before we begin the observational process?

  To Watson, the question at hand begins with the walking stick: “a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a ‘Penang lawyer,’ ” which is “just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry—dignified, solid, and reassuring.” That first bit is just fine, a description of the stick’s outward qualities. But take a close look at the second part. Is that true observation, or is it more like inference?

  Hardly has Watson started to describe the stick and already his personal biases are flooding his perception, his own experience and history and views framing his thoughts without his realizing it. The stick is no longer just a stick. It is the stick of the old-fashioned family practitioner, with all the characteristics that follow from that connection. The instantaneously conjured image of the family doctor will color every judgment that Watson makes from this point forward—and he will have no idea that it is doing so. In fact, he will even fail to consider that C.C.H. might stand for a prominent hospital, something that he as a doctor himself should be well aware of, if only he’d not gone off on the country doctor tangent and failed to consider it entirely.

  This is the frame, or the subconscious prime, in all its glory. And who knows what other biases, stereotypes, and the like will be rustled up out of the corners of Watson’s brain attic along with it? Certainly not he. But we can know one thing. Any heuristics—or rules of thumb, as you’ll recall—that will affect his eventual judgment will likely have their root in this initial, thoughtless assessment.

  Holmes, on the other hand, realizes that there is always a step that comes before you begin to work your mind to its full potential. Unlike Watson, he doesn’t begin to observe without quite being aware of it, but rather takes hold of the process from the very beginning—and starting well before the stick itself. He takes in the whole situation, doctor and stick and all, long before he starts to make detailed observations about the object of interest itself. And to do it, he does something far more prosaic than Watson could ever suppose: he looks in a polished silver coffeepot. He doesn’t need to use his deductional powers where he has use of a reflective surface; why waste them needlessly?

  So, too, must we always look around us to see if there’s a ready-and-waiting mirror, before plunging in without a second thought—and then use it to take stock of the entire situation instead of letting the mind thoughtlessly get ahead of itself and begin grabbing who knows what out of our attic without our full knowledge and control.

  Evaluating our environment means different things, depending on the choices we are making. For Holmes, it was observing the room, Watson’s actions, and the easily available coffeepot. Whatever it is, we can rest assured that it will require a pause before the dive. We can’t forget to look at our surroundings before launching into action—or even into the Holmesian thought process. For, after all, pausing and reflecting is the first step to that process. It’s point zero of observation. Before we begin to gather detail, we need to know what detail, if any, we’ll be gathering.

  Remember: specific, mindful motivation matters. It matters a great deal. We have to frame our goals ahead of time. Let them inform how we proceed. Let them inform how we allocate our precious cognitive resources. We have to think them through, write them down, to make sure they are as clear-cut as they can possibly be. Holmes doesn’t need to take notes, to be sure, but most of us certainly do, at least for the truly important choices. It will help clarify the important points before we e
mbark on our journey of thought: What do I want to accomplish? And what does that mean for my future thought process? Not looking necessarily means not finding. And to find, we first need to know where to look.

  2. Observe—Carefully and Thoughtfully

  When Watson looks at the stick, he notes its size and heft. He also remarks the beat-up bottom—a sign of frequent walking in terrain that is less than hospitable. Finally, he looks to the inscription, C.C.H., and with that concludes his observations, confident as ever that nothing has escaped his notice.

  Holmes, on the other hand, is not so sure. First off, he does not limit his observation to the stick as physical object; after all, the original goal, the frame set in the first step of the process, was to learn about the man who owned it. “It is only an absent-minded one who leaves his stick and not his visiting-card after waiting an hour in your room,” he tells Watson. But of course: the stick was left behind. Watson knows that, naturally—and yet he fails to know it.

  What’s more, the stick creates its own context, its own version of the owner’s history, if you will, by virtue of the inscription. While Watson reads the C.C.H. only in light of his unconscious preconceptions of the country practitioner, Holmes realizes that it must be observed on its own terms, without any prior assumptions, and that in that light, it tells its own story. Why would a doctor receive a stick as a gift? Or, as Holmes puts it, “On what occasion would it be most probable that such a presentation would be made? When would his friends unite to give him a pledge of their good will?” That is the point of departure suggested by a true observation of the inscription, not a biased one, and that point suggests a background story that can be reached through careful deduction. The context is an integral part of the situation, not a take-it-or-leave-it accessory.