Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  Imagine for a moment that the Cottingley photographs had instead depicted the young girls with a never-before-seen variety of insect. What if, for instance, the picture had been of the girls handling this creature instead.

  A miniature dragon, no less. (Actually, draco sumatranus, a gliding lizard native to Indonesia—but would anyone in England during Conan Doyle’s time have been so wise?) Or this.

  A creature of the deep, dark imagination, something out of a book of horrors, perhaps. But real? (Actually, the star-nosed mole, condylura cristata, is found in eastern Canada. Hardly common knowledge even in the pre-Internet days, let alone back in the Victorian era.)

  Or indeed any number of animals that had seemed foreign and strange only decades earlier—and some that seem strange even today. Would they have been held to the same burden of proof—or would the lack of obvious fakery in the photograph have been enough?

  What we believe about the world—and the burden of proof that we require to accept something as fact—is constantly shifting. These beliefs aren’t quite the information that’s in our brain attic, nor are they pure observation, but they are something that colors every step of the problem-solving process nevertheless. What we believe is possible or plausible shapes our basic assumptions in how we formulate and investigate questions. As we’ll see, Conan Doyle was predisposed to believe in the possibility of fairies. He wanted them to be real. The predisposition in turn shaped his intuition about the Cottingley photographs, and that made all the difference in his failure to see through them, even though he acted with what he thought was great rigor in trying to establish their veracity.

  An intuition colors how we interpret data. Certain things “seem” more plausible than others, and on the flip side, certain things just “don’t make sense,” no matter how much evidence there may be to support them. It’s the confirmation bias (and many other biases at that: the illusion of validity and understanding, the law of small numbers, and anchoring and representativeness, all in one) all over again.

  Psychologist Jonathan Haidt summarizes the dilemma in The Righteous Mind, when he writes, “We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.” It’s easy enough for most of us to spot the flaws in the fairies, because we have no emotional stake in their potential reality. But take something that touches us personally, where our very reputation might be on the line, and will it still be so simple?

  It’s easy to tell our minds stories about what is, and equally easy to tell them stories about what is not. It depends deeply on our motivation. Even still, we might think that fairies seem a far cry from a creature of the deep like the mimic octopus, no matter how hard it might be to fathom such a creature. After all, we know there are octopi. We know that new species of animals are discovered every day. We know some of them may seem a bit bizarre. Fairies, on the other hand, challenge every rational understanding we have of how the world works. And this is where context comes in.

  A Recklessness of Mind?

  Conan Doyle wasn’t altogether reckless in authenticating the Cottingley photos. Yes, he did not gather the same exacting proof he would doubtless have demanded of his detective. (And it bears remembering that Sir Arthur was no slouch when it came to that type of thing. He was instrumental, you’ll recall, in clearing the name of two falsely accused murder suspects, George Edalji and Oscar Slater.) But he did ask the best photography experts he knew. And he did try for replication—of a sort. And was it so difficult to believe that two girls of ten and sixteen would not be capable of the type of technical expertise that had been suggested as a means of falsifying the negatives?

  It helps us to more clearly understand Conan Doyle’s motivations if we try to see the photographs as he and his contemporaries would have seen them. Remember, this was before the age of digital cameras and Photoshopping and editing ad infinitum, when anyone can create just about anything that can be imagined—and do so in a much more convincing fashion than the Cottingley Fairies. Back then, photography was a relatively new art. It was labor intensive, time consuming, and technically challenging. It wasn’t something that just anyone could do, let alone manipulate in a convincing fashion. When we look at the pictures today, we see them with different eyes than the eyes of 1920. We have different standards. We have grown up with different examples. There was a time when a photograph was considered high proof indeed, so difficult was it to take and to alter. It’s nearly impossible to look back and realize how much has changed and how different the world once appeared.

  Still, the Cottingley Fairies suffered from one major—and, it turned out for Conan Doyle’s reputation, insurmountable—limitation. Fairies do not and cannot exist. It’s just as that Kodak employee pointed out to Sir Arthur: the evidence did not matter, whatever it was. Fairies are creatures of the imagination and not of reality. End of story.

  Our own view of what is and is not possible in reality affects how we perceive identical evidence. But that view shifts with time, and thus, evidence that might at one point seem meaningless can come to hold a great deal of meaning. Think of how many ideas seemed outlandish when first put forward, seemed so impossible that they couldn’t be true: the earth being round; the earth going around the sun; the universe being made up almost entirely of something that we can’t see, dark matter and energy. And don’t forget that magical things did keep happening all around as Conan Doyle came of age: the invention of the X-ray (or the Röntgen ray, as it was called), the discovery of the germ, the microbe, radiation—all things that went from invisible and thus nonexistent to visible and apparent. Unseen things that no one had suspected were there were, in fact, very there indeed.

  In that context, is it so crazy that Arthur Conan Doyle became a spiritualist? When he officially embraced Spiritualism in 1918, he was hardly alone in his belief—or knowledge, as he would have it. Spiritualism itself, while never mainstream, had prominent supporters on both sides of the ocean. William James, for one, felt that it was essential for the new discipline of psychology to test the possibilities of psychical research, writing: “Hardly, as yet, has the surface of the facts called ‘psychic’ begun to be scratched for scientific purposes. It is through following these facts, I am persuaded, that the greatest scientific conquests of the coming generation will be achieved.” The psychic was the future, he thought, of the knowledge of the century. It was the way forward, not just for psychology, but for all of scientific conquest.

  This from the man considered the father of modern psychology. Not to mention some of the other names who filled out the ranks of the psychical community. Physiologist and comparative anatomist William B. Carpenter, whose work included influential writings on comparative neurology; the renowned astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb; naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who proposed the theory of evolution simultaneously with Charles Darwin; chemist and physicist William Crookes, discoverer of new elements and new methods for studying them; physicist Oliver Lodge, closely involved in the development of the wireless telegraph; psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, founder of one of the most precisely scientific areas of psychological research, psychophysics; physiologist Charles Richet, awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on anaphylaxis; and the list goes on.

  And have we come that much further today? In the United States, as of 2004, 78 percent of people believed in angels. As for the spiritual realm as such, consider this. In 2011, Daryl Bem, one of the grand sires of modern psychology—who made his name with a theory that contends that we perceive our own mental and emotional states much as we do others’, by looking at physical signs—published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most respected and highly impactful publications in the discipline. The topic: proof of the existence of extrasensory perception, or ESP. Human beings, he contends, can see the future.

  In one study, for instance, Cornell University students saw two curtains on a s
creen. They had to say which curtain hid a picture. After they chose, the curtain was opened, and the researcher would show them the picture’s location.

  What’s the point, you might (reasonably enough) wonder, to show a location after you’ve already made your choice? Bem argues that if we are able to see even a tiny bit into the future, we will be able to retroactively use that information to make better-than-average guesses in the present.

  It gets even better. There were two types of photographs: neutral ones, and ones showing erotic scenes. In Bem’s estimation, there was a chance that we’d be better at seeing the future if it was worth seeing (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). If he was correct, we’d be better than the fifty-fifty predicted by chance at guessing the image. Lo and behold, rates for the erotic images hovered around 53 percent. ESP is real. Everyone, rejoice. Or, in the more measured words of psychologist Jonathan Schooler (one of the reviewers of the article), “I truly believe that this kind of finding from a well-respected, careful researcher deserves public airing.” It’s harder than we thought to leave the land of fairies and Spiritualism behind. It’s all the more difficult to do when it deals with something we want to believe.

  Bem’s work has launched the exact same cries of “crisis of the discipline” that arose with William James’s public embrace of Spiritualism over one hundred years ago. In fact, it is called out as such in the very same issue that carries the study—a rare instance of article and rebuttal appearing simultaneously. Might JPSP have seen the future and tried to stay a step ahead of the controversial decision to publish at all?

  Not much has changed. Except now, instead of psychical research and Spiritualism it’s called psi, parapsychology, and ESP. (On the flip side, how many people refuse to believe Stanley Milgram’s results on obedience, which showed that the vast majority of people will deliver lethal levels of shock when ordered to do so, with full knowledge of what they are doing, even when confronted with them?) Our instincts are tough to beat, whichever way they go. It takes a mindful effort of will.

  Our intuition is shaped by context, and that context is deeply informed by the world we live in. It can thus serve as a blinder—or blind spot—of sorts, much as it did for Conan Doyle and his fairies. With mindfulness, however, we can strive to find a balance between fact-checking our intuitions and remaining open-minded. We can then make our best judgments, with the information we have and no more, but with, as well, the understanding that time may change the shape and color of that information.

  Can we really blame, then, Arthur Conan Doyle’s devotion to his fairy stories? Against the backdrop of Victorian England, where fairies populated the pages of nigh every children’s book (not least of all Peter Pan, by Sir Arthur’s own good friend J. M. Barrie), where even the physicists and psychologists, the chemists and the astronomers were willing to grant that there might be something to it, was he so far off? After all, he was only human, just like us.

  We will never know it all. The most we can do is remember Holmes’s precepts and apply them faithfully. And to remember that open-mindedness is one of them—hence the maxim (or axiom, as he calls it on this particular occasion in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”), “When all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  But how do we do this in practice? How do we go beyond theoretically understanding this need for balance and open-mindedness and applying it practically, in the moment, in situations where we might not have as much time to contemplate our judgments as we do in the leisure of our reading?

  It all goes back to the very beginning: the habitual mindset that we cultivate, the structure that we try to maintain for our brain attic no matter what.

  The Mindset of a Hunter

  One of the images of Sherlock Holmes that recurs most often in the stories is that of Holmes the hunter, the ever-ready predator looking to capture his next prey even when he appears to be lounging calmly in the shade, the vigilant marksman alert to the slightest activity even as he balances his rifle across his knees during a midafternoon break.

  Consider Watson’s description of his companion in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.”

  One realized the red-hot energy which underlay Holmes’s phlegmatic exterior when one saw the sudden change which came over him from the moment that he entered the fatal apartment. In an instant he was tense and alert, his eyes shining, his face set, his limbs quivering with eager activity . . . for all the world like a dashing foxhound drawing a cover.

  It’s the perfect image, really. No energy wasted needlessly, but an ever-alert, habitual state of attention that makes you ready to act at a moment’s notice, be it as a hunter who has glimpsed a lion, a lion who has glimpsed a gazelle, or a foxhound who has sensed the fox near and whose body has become newly alerted to the pursuit. In the symbol of the hunter, all of the qualities of thought that Sherlock Holmes epitomizes merge together into a single, elegant shape. And in cultivating that mindset, in all of its precepts, we come one step closer to being able to do in practice what we understand in theory. The mind of a hunter encapsulates the elements of Holmesian thought that might otherwise get away from us, and learning to use that mindset regularly can remind us of principles that we might otherwise let slide.

  Ever-Ready Attention

  Being a hunter doesn’t mean always hunting. It means always being ready to go on alert, when the circumstances warrant it, but not squandering your energy needlessly when they don’t. Being attuned to the signs that need attending to, but knowing which ones to ignore. As any good hunter knows, you need to gather up your resources for the moments that matter.

  Holmes’s lethargy—that “phlegmatic exterior” that in others might signal melancholy or depression or pure laziness—is calculated. There is nothing lethargic about it. In those deceptive moments of inaction, his energy is pent up in his mind attic, circulating around, peering into the corners, gathering its strength in order to snap into focus the moment it is called on to do so. At times, the detective even refuses to eat because he doesn’t want to draw blood from his thoughts. “The faculties become refined when you starve them,” Holmes tells Watson in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,” when Watson urges him to consume at least some food. “Why, surely, as a doctor, my dear Watson, you must admit that what your digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the brain. I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. Therefore, it is the brain I must consider.”

  We can never forget that our attention—and our cognitive abilities more broadly—are part of a finite pool that will dry out if not managed properly and replenished regularly. And so, we must employ our attentional resources mindfully—and selectively. Be ready to pounce when that tiger does make an appearance, to tense up when the scent of the fox carries on the breeze, the same breeze that to a less attentive nose than yours signifies nothing but spring and fresh flowers. Know when to engage, when to withdraw—and when something is beside the point entirely.

  Environmental Appropriateness

  A hunter knows what game he is hunting, and he modifies his approach accordingly. After all, you’d hardly hunt a fox as you would a tiger, approach the shooting of a partridge as you would the stalking of a deer. Unless you’re content with hunting the same type of prey over and over, you must learn to be appropriate to the circumstances, to modify your weapon, your approach, your very demeanor according to the dictates of the specific situation.

  Just as a hunter’s endgame is always the same—kill the prey—Holmes’s goal is always to obtain information that will lead him to the suspect. And yet, consider how Holmes’s approach differs depending on the person he is dealing with, the specific “prey” at hand. He reads the person, and he proceeds accordingly.

  In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Watson marvels at Holmes’s ability to get information that, only moments earlier, was not forthcoming. Holmes explains how he was able to do it: “When you see a man with whiskers of
that cut and the ‘Pink ’un’ protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a bet,” said he. “I daresay that if I had put £100 down in front of him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager.”

  Contrast this tactic with that employed in The Sign of Four, when Holmes sets out to learn the particulars of the steam launch Aurora. “The main thing with people of that sort,” he tells Watson, “is never to let them think that their information can be of the slightest importance to you. If you do they will instantly shut up like an oyster. If you listen to them under protest, as it were, you are very likely to get what you want.”

  You don’t bribe someone who thinks himself above it. But you do approach him with a bet if you see the signs of betting about his person. You don’t hang on to every word with someone who doesn’t want to be giving information to just anybody. But you do let them prattle along and pretend to indulge them if you see any tendency to gossip. Every person is different, every situation requires an approach of its own. It’s the reckless hunter indeed who goes to hunt the tiger with the same gun he reserves for the pheasant shoot. There is no such thing as one size fits all. Once you have the tools, once you’ve mastered them, you can wield them with greater authority and not use a hammer where a gentle tap would do. There’s a time for straightforward methods, and a time for more unorthodox ones. The hunter knows which is which and when to use them.

  Adaptability

  A hunter will adapt when his circumstances change in an unpredictable fashion. What if you should be out hunting ducks and just so happen to spot a deer in the nearby thicket? Some may say, No thanks, but many would adapt to the challenge, using the opportunity to get at a more valuable, so to speak, prey.