Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  For those choices for which we haven’t written any observations or made any lists, we can still try our best to put down what was going through our mind at the time. What was I considering? What was I basing my decision on? What was I feeling in the moment? What was the context (was I stressed? emotional? lazy? was it a regular day or not? what, if anything, stood out?)? Who else, if anyone, was involved? What were the stakes? What was my goal, my initial motivation? Did I accomplish what I’d set out to do? Did something distract me? In other words, we should try to capture as much as possible of our thought process and its result.

  And then, when we’ve gathered a dozen (or more) entries or so, we can start to read back. In one sitting, we can look through it all. All of those thoughts on all of those unrelated issues, from beginning to end. Chances are that we’ll see the exact same thing Amy did when she reread her migraine entries: that we make the same habitual mistakes, that we think in the same habitual ways, that we’re prey to the same contextual cues over and over. And that we’ve never quite seen what those habitual patterns are—much as Holmes never realizes how little credit he gives to others when it comes to the power of disguise.

  Indeed, writing things down that you think you know cold, keeping track of steps that you think need no tracking, can be an incredibly useful habit even for the most expert of experts. In 2006, a group of physicians released a groundbreaking study: they had managed to lower the rate of catheter-related bloodstream infections—a costly and potentially lethal phenomenon, estimated at about 80,000 cases (and up to 28,000 deaths) per year, at a cost of $45,000 per patient—in Michigan ICUs from a median rate of 2.7 infections in 1,000 patients to 0 in only three months. After sixteen and eighteen months, the mean rate per 1,000 had decreased from a baseline of 7.7 to 1.4 infections. How was this possible? Had the doctors discovered some new miracle technique?

  Actually, they had done something so simple that many a physician rebelled at such a snub to their authority. They had instituted a mandatory checklist. The checklist had only five items, as simple as handwashing and making sure to clean a patient’s skin prior to inserting the catheter. Surely, no one needed such elementary reminders. And yet—with the reminders in place, the rate of infection dropped precipitously, to almost zero. (Consider the natural implication: prior to the checklist, some of those obvious things weren’t getting done, or weren’t getting done regularly.)

  Clearly, no matter how expert at something we become, we can forget the simplest of elements if we go through the motions of our tasks mindlessly, regardless of how motivated we may be to succeed. Anything that prompts a moment of mindful reflection, be it a checklist or something else entirely, can have profound influence on our ability to maintain the same high level of expertise and success that got us there to begin with.

  Humans are remarkably adaptable. As I’ve emphasized over and over, our brains can wire and rewire for a long, long time. Cells that fire together wire together. And if they start firing in different combinations, with enough repetition, that wiring, too, will change.

  The reason I keep focusing on the necessity of practice is that practice is the only thing that will allow us to apply Holmes’s methodology in real life, in the situations that are far more charged emotionally than any thought experiment can ever lead you to believe. We need to train ourselves mentally for those emotional moments, for those times when the deck is stacked as high against us as it will ever be. It’s easy to forget how quickly our minds grasp for familiar pathways when given little time to think or when otherwise pressured. But it’s up to us to determine what those pathways will be.

  It is most difficult to apply Holmes’s logic in those moments that matter the most. And so, all we can do is practice, until our habits are such that even the most severe stressors will bring out the very thought patterns that we’ve worked so hard to master.

  SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

  “You know my methods. Apply them!” “Well, Watson, what do you make of it?” from The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes, p. 5.

  “If I take it up, I must understand every detail” from His Last Bow, “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” p. 1272.

  “That razor brain blunted and rusted with inaction” from The Valley of Fear, chapter 2: Mr. Sherlock Holmes Discourses, p. 11.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We’re Only Human

  On a morning in May 1920, Mr. Edward Gardner received a letter from a friend. Inside were two small photographs. In one, a group of what looked to be fairies were dancing on a stream bank while a little girl looked on. In another, a winged creature (a gnome perhaps, he thought) sat near another girl’s beckoning hand.

  Gardner was a theosophist, someone who believed that knowledge of God may be achieved through spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relation (a popular fusion of Eastern ideas about reincarnation and the possibility of spirit travel). Fairies and gnomes seemed a far cry from any reality he’d ever experienced outside of books, but where another may have laughed and cast aside pictures and letter both, he was willing to dig a little deeper. And so, he wrote back to the friend: Might he be able to obtain the photo negatives?

  When the plates arrived, Gardner promptly delivered them to a Mr. Harold Snelling, photography expert extraordinaire. No fakery, it was said, could get past Snelling’s eye. As the summer drew on, Gardner awaited the expert’s verdict. Was it possible that the photographs were something more than a clever staging?

  By the end of July, Gardner got his answer: “These two negatives,” Snelling wrote, “are entirely genuine unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, show movement in the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc. In my opinion, they are both straight untouched pictures.”

  Gardner was ecstatic. But not everyone was equally convinced. It seemed so altogether improbable. One man, however, heard enough to pursue the matter further: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Conan Doyle was nothing if not meticulous. In that, at least, he took his creation’s methodology to heart. And so, he asked for further validation, this time from an undisputed authority in photography, Kodak—who also happened to have manufactured the camera that had been used to take the picture.

  Kodak refused to offer an official endorsement. The photographs were indeed single exposure, the experts stated, and showed no outward signs of being faked, but as for their genuineness, well, that would be taking it one step too far. The photographs could have been faked, even absent outward signs, and anyhow, fairies did not exist. Ergo, the pictures could not possibly be real.

  Conan Doyle dismissed that last bit as faulty logic, a circular argument if ever there was one. The other statements, however, seemed sound enough. No signs of fakery. Single exposure. It certainly seemed convincing, especially when added to Snelling’s endorsement. The only negative finding that Kodak had offered was pure conjecture—and who better than Holmes’s creator to know to throw those out of consideration?

  There remained, however, one final piece of evidence to verify: what about the girls depicted in the photographs? What evidence, be it supportive or damning, could they offer? Alas, Sir Arthur was leaving on a trip to Australia that would not be put off, and so, he asked Gardner to travel in his stead to the scene of the pictures, a small West Yorkshire town called Cottingley, to speak with the family in question.

  In August 1920, Edward Gardner met Elsie Wright and her six-years-younger cousin, Frances Griffiths, for the first time. They’d taken the photographs, they told him, three years prior, when Elsie was sixteen and Frances ten. Their parents hadn’t believed their tale of fairies by the stream, they said, and so they had decided to document it. The photographs were the result.

  The girls, it seemed to Gardner, were humble and sincere. They were well-raised country girls, after all, and they could hardly have been after personal gain, refusing, as they did, all
mention of payment for the pictures. They even asked that their names be withheld were the photographs to be made public. And though Mr. Wright (Elsie’s father) remained skeptical and called the prints nothing more than a childish prank, Mr. Gardner was convinced that these photos were genuine: the fairies were real. These girls weren’t lying. Upon his return to London, he sent a satisfied report to Conan Doyle. So far, everything seemed to be holding together.

  Still, Conan Doyle decided that more proof was in order. Scientific experiments, after all, needed to be replicated if their results were to be held valid. So Gardner traveled once more to the country, this time with two cameras and two dozen specially marked plates that couldn’t be substituted without drawing attention to the change. He left these with the girls with the instructions to capture the fairies again, preferably on a sunny day when the light was best.

  He wasn’t disappointed. In early fall, he received three more photographs. The fairies were there. The plates were the original ones he’d supplied. No evidence of tampering was found.

  Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced. The experts agreed (though, of course, one without offering official endorsement). The replication had gone smoothly. The girls seemed genuine and trustworthy.

  In December, the famed creator of Mr. Sherlock Holmes published the original photographs, along with an account of the verification process, in The Strand Magazine—the home publication of none other than Holmes himself. The title: “Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event.” Two years later, he released a book, The Coming of the Fairies, which expanded on his initial investigation and included additional corroboration of the fairies’ existence by the clairvoyant Mr. Geoffrey Hodson. Conan Doyle had made up his mind, and he wasn’t about to change it.

  How had Conan Doyle failed the test of Holmesian thinking? What led such an obviously intelligent individual down a path to concluding that fairies existed simply because an expert had affirmed that the Cottingley photographs had not been faked?

  Sir Arthur spent so much effort confirming the veracity of the photos that he never stopped to ask an obvious question: why, in all of the inquiries into whether the prints were genuine, did no one ask whether the fairies themselves might have been more easily manufactured? We can easily agree with the logic that it would seem improbable for a ten-year-old and a sixteen-year-old to fabricate photographs that could confound the experts, but what about fabricating a fairy? Take a look at the pictures on the preceding pages. It seems obvious in retrospect that they can’t be real. Do those fairies look alive to you? Or do they more resemble paper cutouts, however artfully arranged? Why are they of such differing contrast? Why aren’t their wings moving? Why did no one stay with the girls to see the fairies in person?

  Conan Doyle could—and should—have dug deeper when it came to the young ladies in question. Had he done so, he would have discovered, for one, that young Elsie was a gifted artist—and one who, it just so happened, had been employed by a photography studio. He may have also discovered a certain book, published in 1915, whose pictures bore an uncanny resemblance to the fairies that appeared on the camera in the original prints.

  Holmes surely wouldn’t have been taken in so easily by the Cottingley photographs. Could the fairies have had human agents as well, agents who may have helped them get on camera, eased them into existence, so to speak? That would have been his first question. Something improbable is not yet impossible—but it requires a correspondingly large burden of proof. And that, it seems quite clear, was something Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not quite provide. Why? As we will see, when we really want to believe something, we become far less skeptical and inquisitive, letting evidence pass muster with far less scrutiny than we would ever admit for a phenomenon we didn’t want to believe. We don’t, in other words, require as large or diligent a burden of proof. And for Conan Doyle, the existence of fairies was just such an instance.

  When we make a decision, we decide within the context of knowledge that is available to us in the moment and not in retrospect. And within that context, it can be difficult indeed to balance the requisite open-mindedness with what passes for rationality given the context of the times. We, too, can be fooled into believing that fairies—or our version thereof—are real. All it takes is the right environment and the right motivation. Think of that before you leap to judge Conan Doyle’s folly (something that, I hope, you will be less inclined to do before the chapter’s end).

  Prisoners of Our Knowledge and Motivation

  Close your eyes and picture a tiger. It’s lying on a patch of green grass, basking in the sun. It licks its paws. With a lazy yawn, it turns over onto its back. There’s a rustle off to the side. It might just be the wind, but the tiger tenses up. In an instant, he is crouching on all fours, back arched, head drawn in between his shoulders.

  Can you see it? What does it look like? What color is its fur? Does it have stripes? What color are those? What about the eyes? The face (are there whiskers)? The texture of the fur? Did you see its teeth when it opened its mouth?

  If you’re like most people, your tiger was a kind of orange, with dark black stripes lining its face and sides. Maybe you remembered to add the characteristic white spots to the face and underbelly, the tips of the paws and base of the neck. Maybe you didn’t and your tiger was more monochrome than most. Maybe your tiger’s eyes were black. Maybe they were blue. Both are certainly possible. Maybe you saw its incisors bared. Maybe you didn’t.

  But one detail is constant for nearly everyone: one thing your tiger was not is any predominant color other than that burnt orange-red hue that seems something between fire and molasses. It probably wasn’t the rare white tiger, the albino-like creature whose white fur is caused by a double recessive gene that occurs so infrequently that experts estimate its natural incidence at only one out of approximately ten thousand tigers born in the wild. (Actually, they aren’t albinos at all. The condition is called leucism and it results in a reduction of all skin pigments, not just melanin.) Nor is it likely to have been a black tiger, otherwise known as a melanistic tiger. That particular coloration—no stripes, no gradation, just pure, jet-black fur—is caused by a polymorphism that results in a non-agouti mutation (the agouti gene, essentially, determines whether a coat will be banded, the usual process of coloring each individual hair, or solid, non-agouti). Neither kind is common. Neither kind seems to be the typical tiger that the word brings to mind. And yet, all three are members of the exact same species, panthera tigris.

  Now close your eyes and picture another animal: a mimic octopus. It’s perched on the ocean floor, near some reefs. The water is a misty blue. Nearby, a school offish passes.

  Stumped? Here’s some help. This octopus is about two feet long, and has brown and white stripes or spots—except when it doesn’t. You see, the mimic can copy over fifteen different sea animals. It can look like that jellyfish from “The Lion’s Mane” that claimed so many victims right under the nose of a baffled Holmes. It can take the shape of a banded sea snake, a leaf-shaped sole, or something resembling a furry turkey with human legs. It can change color, size, and geometry all at a moment’s notice. In other words, it’s almost impossible to imagine it as any one thing. It is myriad animals at once, and none that you can pinpoint at any one instant.

  Now I’m going to tell you one more thing. One of those animals mentioned in the preceding paragraphs doesn’t actually exist. It may one day be real, but as of now it’s the stuff of legend. Which one do you think it is? The orange tiger? The white one? The black one? The mimic octopus?

  Here’s the answer: the black tiger. While genetically it seems plausible—and what we know about the tiger’s patterns of inheritance and genome confirms that it remains a theoretical possibility—a true melanistic tiger has never been seen. There have been allegations. There have been pseudo-melanistic examples (whose stripes are so thick and close as to almost give off the impression of melanism). There have been brown tigers with dark stripes. There have been bla
ck tigers that ended up being black leopards—the most common source of confusion. But there hasn’t ever been a black tiger. Not one confirmed, verified case. Not ever.

  And yet chances are you had little trouble believing in its existence. People have certainly wanted them to exist for centuries. The dark beasts figure in a Vietnamese legend; they’ve been the subject of numerous bounties; one was even presented as a gift to Napoleon from the king of Java (alas, it was a leopard). And they make sense. They fit in with the general pattern of animals that we expect to be real. And anyway, why ever not?

  The mimic octopus, on the other hand, was indeed the stuff of legend until not too long ago. It was discovered only in 1998, by a group of fishermen off the coast of Indonesia. So strange was the report and so seemingly implausible that it took hours of footage to convince skeptical scientists that the creature was for real. After all, while mimicry is fairly common in the animal kingdom, never before had a single species been able to take on multiple guises—and never before had an octopus actually assumed the appearance of another animal.

  The point is that it’s easy to be fooled by seemingly scientific context into thinking something real when it’s not. The more numbers we are given, the more details we see, the more we read big, scientific-seeming words like melanism instead of plain black, agouti and non-agouti instead of banded or solid, mutation, polymorphism, allele, genetics, piling them on word after word, the more likely we are to believe that the thing described is real. Conversely, it’s all too easy to think that because something sounds implausible or out-there or discordant, because it has never before been seen and wasn’t even suspected, it must be nonexistent.