Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  In a recent study, a group of psychologists decided to see if this differential reaction is simply behavioral, or if it actually goes deeper, to the level of brain performance. The researchers measured response-locked event-related potentials (ERPs)—electric neural signals that result from either an internal or external event—in the brains of college students as they took part in a simple flanker task. The students were shown a string of five letters and asked to quickly identify the middle letter. The letters could be congruent—for instance, MMMMM—or they might be incongruent—for example, MMNMM.

  While performance accuracy was generally high, around 91 percent, the specific task parameters were hard enough that everyone made some mistakes. But where individuals differed was in how both they—and, crucially, their brains—responded to the mistakes. Those who had an incremental mindset (i.e., believed that intelligence was fluid) performed better following error trials than those who had an entity mindset (i.e., believed intelligence was fixed). Moreover, as that incremental mindset increased, positivity ERPs on error trials as opposed to correct trials increased as well. And the larger the error positivity amplitude on error trials, the more accurate the post-error performance.

  So what exactly does that mean? From the data, it seems that a growth mindset, whereby you believe that intelligence can improve, lends itself to a more adaptive response to mistakes—not just behaviorally but neurally. The more someone believes in improvement, the larger the amplitude of a brain signal that reflects a conscious allocation of attention to errors. And the larger that neural signal, the better the subsequent performance. That mediation suggests that individuals with an incremental theory of intelligence may actually have better self-monitoring and control systems on a very basic neural level: their brains are better at monitoring their own, self-generated errors and at adjusting their behavior accordingly. It’s a story of improved online error awareness—of noticing mistakes as they happen, and correcting for them immediately.

  The way our brains act is infinitely sensitive to the way we, their owners, think. And it’s not just about learning. Even something as theoretical as belief in free will can change how our brains respond (if we don’t believe in it, our brains actually become more lethargic in their preparation). From broad theories to specific mechanisms, we have an uncanny ability to influence how our minds work, and how we perform, act, and interact as a result. If we think of ourselves as able to learn, learn we will. And if we think we are doomed to fail, we doom ourselves to do precisely that, not just behaviorally but at the most fundamental level of the neuron.

  But mindset isn’t predetermined, just as intelligence isn’t a monolithic thing that is preset from birth. We can learn, we can improve, we can change our habitual approach to the world. Take the example of stereotype threat, an instance where others’ perception of us—or what we think that perception is—influences how we in turn act, and does so on the same subconscious level as all primes. Being a token member of a group (for example, a single woman among men) can increase self-consciousness and negatively impact performance. Having to write down your ethnicity or gender before taking a test has a negative impact on math scores for females and overall scores for minorities. (On the GREs, for instance, having race made salient lowers black students’ performance.) Asian women perform better on a math test when their Asian identity is made salient, and worse when their female identity is. White men perform worse on athletic tasks when they think performance is based on natural ability, and black men when they are told it is based on athletic intelligence. It’s called stereotype threat.

  But a simple intervention can help. Women who are given examples of females successful in scientific and technical fields don’t experience the negative performance effects on math tests. College students exposed to Dweck’s theories of intelligence—specifically, the incremental theory—have higher grades and identify more with the academic process at the end of the semester. In one study, minority students who wrote about the personal significance of a self-defining value (such as family relationships or musical interests) three to five times during the school year had a GPA that was 0.24 grade points higher over the course of two years than those who wrote about neutral topics—and low-achieving African Americans showed improvements of 0.41 points on average. Moreover, the rate of remediation dropped from 18 percent to 5 percent.

  What is the mindset you typically have when it comes to yourself? If you don’t realize you have it, you can’t do anything to combat the influences that come with it when they are working against you, as happens with negative stereotypes that hinder performance, and you can’t tap into the benefits when they are working for you (as can happen if you activate positively associated stereotypes). What we believe is, in large part, how we are.

  It is an entity world that Watson sees when he declares himself beaten–black and white, you know it or you don’t, and if you come up against something that seems too difficult, well, you may as well not even try lest you embarrass yourself in the process. As for Holmes, everything is incremental. You can’t know if you haven’t tried. And each challenge is an opportunity to learn something new, to expand your mind, to improve your abilities and add more tools to your attic for future use. Where Watson’s attic is static, Holmes’s is dynamic.

  Our brains never stop growing new connections and pruning unused ones. And they never stop growing stronger in those areas where we strengthen them, like that muscle we encountered in the early pages of the book, that keeps strengthening with use (but atrophies with disuse), that can be trained to perform feats of strength we’d never before thought possible.

  How can you doubt the brain’s transformational ability when it comes to something like thinking when it is capable of producing talent of all guises in people who had never before thought they had it in them? Take the case of the artist Ofey. When Ofey first started to paint, he was a middle-aged physicist who hadn’t drawn a day in his life. He wasn’t sure he’d ever learn how. But learn he did, going on to have his own one-man show and to sell his art to collectors all over the world.

  Ofey, of course, is not your typical case. He wasn’t just any physicist. He happens to have been the Nobel Prize–winning Richard Feynman, a man of uncommon genius in nearly all of his pursuits. Feynman had created Ofey as a pseudonym to ensure that his art was valued on its own terms and not on those of his laurels elsewhere. And yet there are multiple other cases. While Feynman may be unique in his contributions to physics, he certainly is not in representing the brain’s ability to change—and to change in profound ways—late in life.

  Anna Mary Robertson Moses—better known as Grandma Moses—did not begin to paint until she was seventy-five. She went on to be compared to Pieter Bruegel in her artistic talent. In 2006, her painting Sugaring Off sold for $1.2 million.

  Václav Havel was a playwright and writer—until he became the center of the Czech opposition movement and then the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia at the age of fifty-three.

  Richard Adams did not publish Watership Down until he was fifty-two. He’d never even thought of himself as a writer. The book that was to sell over fifty million copies (and counting) was born out of a story that he told to his daughters.

  Harlan David Sanders—better known as Colonel Sanders—didn’t start his Kentucky Fried Chicken company until the age of sixty-five, but he went on to become one of the most successful businessmen of his generation.

  The Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn competed in his first Olympic games in 1908, when he was sixty years old. He won two gold and one bronze medals, and when he turned seventy-two, he became the oldest Olympian ever and the oldest medalist in history after his bronze-winning performance at the 1920 games. The list is long, the examples varied, the accomplishments all over the map.

  And yes, there are the Holmeses who have the gift of clear thought from early on, who don’t have to change or strike out in a new direction after years of bad habits. But never forget that ev
en Holmes had to train himself, that even he was not born thinking like Sherlock Holmes. Nothing just happens out of the blue. We have to work for it. But with proper attention, it happens. It is a remarkable thing, the human brain.

  As it turns out, Holmes’s insights can apply to most anything. It’s all about the attitude, the mindset, the habits of thinking, the enduring approach to the world that you develop. The specific application itself is far less important.

  If you get only one thing out of this book, it should be this: the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn’t often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.

  The message may be getting across. A recent New York Times piece spoke of the new practice of squatting while texting: remaining in parked cars in order to engage in texting, emailing, Twittering, or whatever it is you do instead of driving off to vacate parking spaces. The practice may provoke parking rage for people looking for spots, but it also shows an increased awareness that doing anything while driving may not be the best idea. “It’s time to kill multitasking” rang a headline at the popular blog The 99%.

  We can take the loudness of our world as a limiting factor, an excuse as to why we cannot have the same presence of mind that Sherlock Holmes did—after all, he wasn’t constantly bombarded by media, by technology, by the ever more frantic pace of modern life. He had it so much easier. Or, we can take it as a challenge to do Holmes one better. To show that it doesn’t really matter—we can still be just as mindful as he ever was, and then some, if only we make the effort. And the greater the effort, we might say, the greater the gain and the more stable the shift in habits from the mindless toward the mindful.

  We can even embrace technology as an unexpected boon that Holmes would have been all too happy to have. Consider this: a recent study demonstrated that when people are primed to think about computers, or when they expect to have access to information in the future, they are far less able to recall the information. However—and this is key—they are far better able to remember where (and how) to find the information at a later point.

  In the digital age, our mind attics are no longer subject to the same constraints as were Holmes’s and Watson’s. We’ve in effect expanded our storage space with a virtual ability that would have been unimaginable in Conan Doyle’s day. And that addition presents an intriguing opportunity. We can store “clutter” that might be useful in the future and know exactly how to access it should the need arise. If we’re not sure whether something deserves a prime spot in the attic, we need not throw it out. All we need to do is remember that we’ve stored it for possible future use. But with the opportunity comes the need for caution. We might be tempted to store outside our mind attics that which should rightly be in our mind attics, and the curatorial process (what to keep, what to toss) becomes increasingly difficult.

  Holmes had his filing system. We have Google. We have Wikipedia. We have books and articles and stories from centuries ago to the present day, all neatly available for our consumption. We have our own digital files.

  But we can’t expect to consult everything for every choice that we make. Nor can we expect to remember everything that we are exposed to—and the thing is, we shouldn’t want to. We need to learn instead the art of curating our attics better than ever. If we do that, our limits have indeed been expanded in unprecedented ways. But if we allow ourselves to get bogged down in the morass of information flow, if we store the irrelevant instead of those items that would be best suited to the limited storage space that we always carry with us, in our heads, the digital age can be detrimental.

  Our world is changing. We have more resources than Holmes could have ever imagined. The confines of our mind attic have shifted. They have expanded. They have increased the sphere of the possible. We should strive to be cognizant of that change, and to take advantage of the shift instead of letting it take advantage of us. It all comes back to that very basic notion of attention, of presence, of mindfulness, of the mindset and the motivation that accompany us throughout out lives.

  We will never be perfect. But we can approach our imperfections mindfully, and in so doing let them make us into more capable thinkers in the long term.

  “Strange how the brain controls the brain!” Holmes exclaims in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” And it always will. But just maybe we can get better at understanding the process and lending it our input.

  ENDNOTES

  1. All page numbers for this and subsequent “Further Reading” sections taken from editions specified at the end of the book.

  2. You can take the IAT yourself online, at Harvard University’s “Project Implicit” website, implicit.harvard.edu.

  3. Indeed, some of his deduction would, in logic’s terms, be more properly called induction or abduction. All references to deduction or deductive reasoning use it in the Holmesian sense, and not the formal logic sense.

  4. All cases and Holmes’s life chronology are taken from Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (NY: W. W. Norton, 2004).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many extraordinary people have helped to make this book possible that it would take another chapter—at the very least; I’m not always known for my conciseness—to thank them all properly. I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has been there to guide and support me throughout it all: to my family and wonderful friends, I love you all and wouldn’t have even gotten started, let alone finished, with this book without you; and to all of the scientists, researchers, scholars, and Sherlock Holmes aficionados who have helped guide me along the way, a huge thank you for your tireless assistance and endless expertise.

  I’d like to thank especially Steven Pinker, the most wonderful mentor and friend I could ever imagine, who has been selfless in sharing his time and wisdom with me for close to ten years (as if he had nothing better to do). His books were the reason I first decided to study psychology—and his support is the reason I am still here. Richard Panek, who helped shepherd the project from its inception through to its final stages, and whose advice and tireless assistance were essential to getting it off the ground (and keeping it there). Katherine Vaz, who has believed in my writing from the very beginning and has remained for many years a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. And Leslie Klinger, whose early interest in my work on Mr. Holmes and unparalleled expertise on the world of 221B Baker Street were essential to the success of the journey.

  My amazing agent, Seth Fishman, deserves constant praise; I’m lucky to have him on my side. Thank you to the rest of the team at the Gernert Company—and a special thanks to Rebecca Gardner and Will Roberts. My wonderful editors, Kevin Doughten and Wendy Wolf, have taken the manuscript from nonexistent to ready-for-the-world in under a year—something I never thought possible. I’m grateful as well to the rest of the team at Viking/Penguin, especially Yen Cheong, Patricia Nicolescu, Veronica Windholz, and Brittney Ross. Thank you to Nick Davies for his insightful edits and to everyone at Canongate for their belief in the project.

  This book began as a series of articles in Big Think and Scientific American. A huge thank you to Peter Hopkins, Victoria Brown, and everyone at Big Think and to Bora Zivkovic and everyone at Scientific American for giving me the space and freedom to explore these ideas as I wanted to.

  Far more people than I could list have been generous with their time, support, and encouragement throughout this process, but there are a few in particular I would like to thank here: Walter Mischel, Elizabeth Greenspan, Lyndsay Faye, and all of the lovely ladies of ASH, everyone at the Columbia University Department of Psychology, Charlie Rose, Harvey Mansfield, Jenny 8. Lee, Sandra Upson, Meg Wolitzer, Meredith Kaffel, Allison Lorentzen, Amelia Lester, Leslie Jamison, Shawn Otto, Scott Hueler, Michael Dirda, Michael Sims, Shara Zaval, and Joanna Levine.

  Last of all, I’d like to thank my husband, Geoff, without whom none of this would be possible. I love you a
nd am incredibly lucky to have you in my life.

  FURTHER READING

  The further reading sections at the end of each chapter reference page numbers from the following editions:

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2009). The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Penguin Books: New York.

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2001). The Hound of the Baskervilles. Penguin Classics: London.

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2011). The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Penguin Books: New York.

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2001). The Sign of Four. Penguin Classics: London.

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2001). A Study in Scarlet. Penguin Classics: London.

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2001). The Valley of Fear and Selected Cases. Penguin Classics: London.

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2005). The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. Norton: New York. Vol. II.

  In addition, many articles and books helped inform my writing. For a full list of sources, please visit my website, www.mariakonnikova.com. Below are a few highlighted readings for each chapter. They are not intended to list every study used or every psychologist whose work helped shaped the writing, but rather to highlight some key books and researchers in each area.

  Prelude

  For those interested in a more detailed history of mindfulness and its impact, I would recommend Ellen Langer’s classic Mindfulness. Langer has also published an update to her original work, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.