Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books

Ltd,

14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

www.canongate.tv

This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate

Books

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Portions of this book appeared in a different form on the

website Big Think (www.bigthink.com) and in Scientific

American

First published in the United States of America by Viking

Penguin, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10013, USA

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85786 724 7

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To Geoff

Choice of attention—to pay attention to

this and ignore that—is to the inner life

what choice of action is to the outer. In

both cases man is responsible for his

choice and must accept the consequences.

As Ortega y Gasset said: “Tell me to what

you pay attention, and I will tell you who

you are.”

—W. H. AUDEN

CONTENTS

Prelude

PART ONE

UNDERSTANDING (YOURSELF)

CHAPTER ONE

The Scientific Method of the Mind

CHAPTER TWO

The Brain Attic: What Is It and What’s

in There?

PART TWO

FROM

OBSERVATION

IMAGINATION

CHAPTER THREE

Stocking the Brain Attic: The Power of

Observation

CHAPTER FOUR

Exploring the Brain Attic: The Value of

Creativity and Imagination

PART THREE

THE ART OF DEDUCTION

CHAPTER FIVE

Navigating the Brain Attic: Deduction

from the Facts

CHAPTER SIX

Maintaining the Brain Attic: Education

Never Stops

PART FOUR

THE SCIENCE AND ART OF SELF-

KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Dynamic Attic: Putting It All

Together

CHAPTER EIGHT

We’re Only Human

Postlude

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Index

Prelude

When I was little, my dad used to read us

Sherlock Holmes stories before bed.

While my brother often took the

opportunity to fall promptly asleep on his

corner of the couch, the rest of us listened

intently. I remember the big leather

armchair where my dad sat, holding the

book out in front of him with one arm, the

dancing

flames

from

the

fireplace

reflecting in his black-framed glasses. I

remember the rise and fall of his voice as

the suspense mounted beyond all breaking

points, and finally, finally, at long last the

awaited solution, when it all made sense

and I’d shake my head, just like Dr.

Watson, and think, Of course; it’s all so

simple now that he says it. I remember

the smell of the pipe that my dad himself

would smoke every so often, a fruity,

earthy mix that made its way into the folds

of the leather chair, and the outlines of the

night through the curtained French

windows. His pipe, of course, was ever-

so-slightly curved just like Holmes’s. And

I remember that final slam of the book, the

thick pages coming together between the

crimson covers, when he’d announce,

“That’s it for tonight.” And off we’d go—

no matter how much begging and pleading

we’d try and what sad faces we’d make—

upstairs, up to bed.

And then there’s the one thing that

wedged its way so deeply into my brain

that it remained there, taunting me, for

years to come, when the rest of the stories

had

long

since

faded

into

some

indeterminate

background

and

the

adventures of Holmes and his faithful

Boswell were all but forgotten: the steps.

The steps to 221B Baker Street. How

many were there? It’s the question Holmes

brought before Watson in “A Scandal in

Bohemia,” and a question that never once

since left my mind. As Holmes and

Watson sit in their matching armchairs, the

detective instructs the doctor on the

difference between seeing and observing.

Watson is baffled. And then, all at once

everything becomes crystal clear.

“When I hear you give your reasons,”

[Watson] remarked, “the thing always

appears to me to be so ridiculously simple

that I could easily do it myself, though at

each

successive

instance

your

reasoning, I am baffled until you explain

your process. And yet I believe that my

eyes are as good as yours.”

“Quite

so,”

[Holmes]

answered,

lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself

down into an armchair. “You see, but you

do not observe. The distinction is clear.

For example, you have frequently seen the

steps which lead up from the hall to this

room.”

“Frequently.”

“How often?”

“Well, some hundreds of times.”

“Then how many are there?”

“How many? I don’t know.”

“Quite so! You have not observed. And

yet you have seen. That is just my point.

Now, I know that there are seventeen

steps, because I have both seen and

observed.”

When I first heard it, on one firelit,

pipe-smoke-filled evening, the exchange

shook me. Feverishly, I tried to remember

how many steps there were in our own

house (I had not the faintest idea), how

many led up to our front door (I drew a

beautiful blank), how many led down to

the basement (ten? twenty? I couldn’t even

approximate). And for a long time

afterward, I tried to count stairs and steps

whenever I could, lodging the proper

number in my memory in case anyone ever

called upon me to report. I’d make

Holmes proud.

Of course, I’d promptly forget each

number I so diligently tried to remember

—and it wasn’t until later that I realized

that

focusing

intently

memorization, I’d missed the point

entirely. My efforts had been doomed

from the start.

What I couldn’t understand then was

that Holmes had quite a bit more than a leg

up on me. For most of his life, he had been

honing a method of mindful interaction

with the world. The Baker Street steps?

Just a way of showing off a skill that now

came so naturally to him that it didn’t

require the least bit of thought. A by-the-

way manifestation of a process that was

habitually,

almost

subconsciously,

unfolding in his constantly active mind. A

trick, if you will, of no real consequence,

and

yet

with

the

most

profound

implications if you stopped to consider

what made it possible. A trick that

inspired me to write an entire book in its

honor.

The idea of mindfulness itself is by no

means a new one. As early as the end of

the nineteenth century, William James, the

father of modern psychology, wrote that

“the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a

wandering attention, over and over again,

is the very root of judgment, character,

and will. . . . An education which should

improve this faculty would be the

education par excellence.” That faculty, at

its core, is the very essence of

mindfulness. And the education that James

proposes, an education in a mindful

approach to life and to thought.

the

1970s,

Ellen

Langer

demonstrated that mindfulness could reach

even further than improving “judgment,

character, and will.” A mindful approach

could go as far as to make elderly adults

feel and act younger—and could even

improve their vital signs, such as blood

pressure, and their cognitive function. In

recent years, studies have shown that

meditation-like thought (an exercise in the

very attentional control that forms the

center of mindfulness), for as little as

fifteen minutes a day, can shift frontal

brain activity toward a pattern that has

been associated with more positive and

more approach-oriented emotional states,

and that looking at scenes of nature, for

even a short while, can help us become

more insightful, more creative, and more

productive.

also

know,

definitively than we ever have, that our

brains are not built for multitasking—

something that precludes mindfulness

altogether. When we are forced to do

multiple things at once, not only do we

perform worse on all of them but our

memory decreases and our general well-

being suffers a palpable hit.

But for Sherlock Holmes, mindful

presence is just a first step. It’s a means to

a far larger, far more practical and

practically

gratifying

goal.

Holmes

provides precisely what William James

had prescribed: an education in improving

our faculty of mindful thought and in using

it in order to accomplish more, think

better, and decide more optimally. In its

broadest application, it is a means for

improving overall decision making and

judgment ability, starting from the most

basic building block of your own mind.

What Homes is really telling Watson

when he contrasts seeing and observing is

to never mistake mindlessness for

mindfulness, a passive approach with an

active involvement. We see automatically:

a stream of sensory inputs that requires no

effort on our part, save that of opening our

eyes. And we see unthinkingly, absorbing

countless elements from the world without

necessarily

processing

what

those

elements might be. We may not even

realize we’ve seen something that was

right before our eyes. But when we

observe, we are forced to pay attention.

We have to move from passive absorption

to active awareness. We have to engage.

It’s true for everything—not just sight, but

each sense, each input, each thought.

All too often, when it comes to our own

minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We

sail on, blithely unaware of how much we

are missing, of how little we grasp of our

own thought process—and how much

better we could be if only we’d taken the

time to understand and to reflect. Like

Watson, we plod along the same staircase

tens, hundreds, thousands of times,

multiple times a day, and we can’t begin

to recall the most mundane of details

about them (I wouldn’t be surprised if

Holmes had asked about color instead of

number of steps and had found Watson

equally ignorant).

But it’s not that we aren’t capable of

doing it; it’s just that we don’t choose to

do it. Think back to your childhood.

Chances are, if I asked you to tell me

about the street where you grew up, you’d

be able to recall any number of details.

The colors of the houses. The quirks of the

neighbors. The smells of the seasons.

How different the street was at different

times of day. Where you played. Where

you walked. Where you were afraid of

walking. I bet you could go on for hours.

As children, we are remarkably aware.

We absorb and process information at a

speed that we’ll never again come close

to achieving. New sights, new sounds,

new smells, new people, new emotions,

new experiences: we are learning about

our world and its possibilities. Everything

is new, everything is exciting, everything

engenders curiosity. And because of the

inherent newness of our surroundings, we

are exquisitely alert; we are absorbed; we

take it all in. And what’s more, we

remember: because we are motivated and

engaged (two qualities we’ll return to

repeatedly), we not only take the world in

more fully than we are ever likely to do

again, but we store it for the future. Who

knows when it might come in handy?

But as we grow older, the blasé factor

increases exponentially. Been there, done

that, don’t need to pay attention to this,

and when in the world will I ever need to

know or use that? Before we know it, we

have shed that innate attentiveness,

engagement, and curiosity for a host of

passive, mindless habits. And even when

we want to engage, we no longer have that

childhood luxury. Gone are the days

where our main job was to learn, to

absorb, to interact; we now have other,

pressing

(or

think)

responsibilities to attend to and demands

on our minds to address. And as the

demands on our attention increase—an all

too real concern as the pressures of

multitasking grow in the increasingly 24/7

digital age—so, too, does our actual

attention decrease. As it does so, we

become less and less able to know or

notice our own thought habits, and more

and more allow our minds to dictate our

judgments and decisions, instead of the

other way around. And while that’s not

inherently a bad thing—in fact, we’ll be

talking repeatedly about the need to

automate certain processes that are at first

difficult and cognitively costly—it is

dangerously close to mindlessness. It’s a

fine

line

between

efficiency

and

thoughtlessness—and one that we need to

take care not to cross.

You’ve likely had the experience where

you need to deviate from a stable routine

only to find that you’ve somehow

forgotten to do so. Let’s say you need to

stop by the drugstore on your way home.

All day long, you remember your errand.

You rehearse it; you even picture the extra

turn you’ll have to take to get there, just a

quick step from your usual route. And yet

somehow, you find yourself back at your

front door, without having ever stopped

off. You’ve forgotten to take that turn and

you don’t even remember passing it. It’s

the habit mindlessly taking over, the

routine asserting itself against whatever

part of your mind knew that it needed to

do something else.

It happens all the time. You get so set in

a specific pattern that you go through

entire chunks of your day in a mindless

daze (and if you are still thinking about

work? worrying about an email? planning

ahead for dinner? forget it). And that

automatic forgetfulness, that ascendancy of

routine and the ease with which a thought

can be distracted, is just the smallest part

—albeit a particularly noticeable one,

because we have the luxury of realizing

that we’ve forgotten to do something—of

a much larger phenomenon. It happens

much more regularly than we can point to

—and more often than not, we aren’t even

aware of our own mindlessness. How

many thoughts float in and out of your head

without your stopping to identify them?

How many ideas and insights have

escaped because you forgot to pay

attention? How many decisions or

judgments have you made without

realizing how or why you made them,

driven by some internal default settings of

whose existence you’re only vaguely, if at

all, aware? How many days have gone by

where you suddenly wonder what exactly

you did and how you got to where you

are?

This book aims to help. It takes

Holmes’s methodology to explore and

explain the steps necessary for building up

habits of thought that will allow you to

engage mindfully with yourself and your

world as a matter of course. So that you,

too, can offhandedly mention that number

steps

dazzle

less-with-it

companion.

So, light that fire, curl up on that couch,

and prepare once more to join Sherlock

Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson on their

adventures through the crime-filled streets

of London—and into the deepest crevices

of the human mind.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Scientific Method of the

Mind

Something sinister was happening to the

farm animals of Great Wyrley. Sheep,

cows, horses—one by one, they were

falling dead in the middle of the night. The

cause of death: a long, shallow cut to the

stomach that caused a slow and painful

bleeding. Farmers were outraged; the

community, shocked. Who would want to

cause such pain to defenseless creatures?

The police thought they had their

answer: George Edalji, the half-Indian son

of the local vicar. In 1903, twenty-seven-

year-old Edalji was sentenced to seven

years of hard labor for one of the sixteen

mutilations, that of a pony whose body had

been found in a pit near the vicar’s

residence. Little did it matter that the vicar

swore his son was asleep at the time of

the crime. Or that the killings continued

after George’s imprisonment. Or, indeed,

that the evidence was largely based on

anonymous letters that George was said to

have written—in which he implicated

himself as the killer. The police, led by

Staffordshire chief constable captain

George Anson, were certain they had their

man.

Three years later, Edalji was released.

Two petitions protesting his innocence—

one, signed by ten thousand people, the

other, from a group of three hundred

lawyers—had been sent to the Home

Office, citing a lack of evidence in the

case. And yet, the story was far from over.

Edalji may have been free in person, but

in name, he was still guilty. Prior to his

arrest he had been a solicitor. Now he

could not be readmitted to his practice.

In 1906, George Edalji caught a lucky

break: Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed

creator of Sherlock Holmes, had become

interested in the case. That winter, Conan

Doyle agreed to meet Edalji at the Grand

Hotel, at Charing Cross. And there, across

the lobby, any lingering doubts Sir Arthur

may have had about the young man’s

innocence were dispelled. As he later

wrote:

He had come to my hotel by appointment,

but I had been delayed, and he was

passing the time by reading the paper. I

recognized my man by his dark face, so I

stood and observed him. He held the

paper close to his eyes and rather

sideways, proving not only a high degree

of myopia, but marked astigmatism. The

idea of such a man scouring fields at night

and assaulting cattle while avoiding the

watching police was ludicrous. . . . There,

in a single physical defect, lay the moral

certainty of his innocence.

But though Conan Doyle himself was

convinced, he knew it would take more to

capture the attention of the Home Office.

And so, he traveled to Great Wyrley to

gather

evidence

the

case.

interviewed locals. He investigated the

scenes of the crimes, the evidence, the

circumstances.

met

with

the

increasingly hostile Captain Anson. He

visited George’s old school. He reviewed

old records of anonymous letters and

pranks against the family. He traced the

handwriting expert who had proclaimed

that Edalji’s hand matched that of the

anonymous missives. And then he put his

findings together for the Home Office.

The bloody razors? Nothing but old rust

—and, in any case, incapable of making

the type of wounds that had been suffered

by the animals. The dirt on Edalji’s

clothes? Not the same as the dirt in the

field where the pony was discovered. The

handwriting expert? He had previously

made mistaken identifications, which had

led to false convictions. And, of course,

there was the question of the eyesight:

could someone with such astigmatism and

severe myopia really navigate nocturnal

fields in order to maim animals?

In the spring of 1907, Edalji was finally

cleared of the charge of animal slaughter.

It was less than the complete victory for

which Conan Doyle had hoped—George

was not entitled to any compensation for

his arrest and jail time—but it was

something. Edalji was readmitted to his

legal practice. The Committee of Inquiry

found, as summarized by Conan Doyle,

that “the police commenced and carried

on their investigations, not for the purpose

of finding out who was the guilty party,

b ut for the purpose of finding evidence

against Edalji, who they were already

sure was the guilty man.” And in August of

that year, England saw the creation of its

first court of appeals, to deal with future

miscarriages of justice in a more

systematic fashion. The Edalji case was

widely considered one of the main

impetuses behind its creation.

Conan Doyle’s friends were impressed.

None, however, hit the nail on the head

quite so much as the novelist George

Meredith. “I shall not mention the name

which must have become wearisome to

your ears,” Meredith told Conan Doyle,

“but the creator of the marvellous Amateur

Detective has shown what he can do in the

life of breath.” Sherlock Holmes might

have been fiction, but his rigorous

approach to thought was very real indeed.

If properly applied, his methods could

leap off the page and result in tangible,

positive changes—and they could, too, go

far beyond the world of crime.

Say the name Sherlock Holmes, and

doubtless, any number of images will

come to mind. The pipe. The deerstalker.

The cloak. The violin. The hawklike

profile. Perhaps William Gillette or Basil

Rathbone or Jeremy Brett or any number

of the luminaries who have, over the

years,

taken

Holmes’s

mantle,

including the current portrayals by

Benedict

Cumberbatch

and

Robert

Downey, Jr. Whatever the pictures your

mind brings up, I would venture to guess

that the word psychologist isn’t one of

them. And yet, perhaps it’s time that it

was.

Holmes was a detective second to none,

it is true. But his insights into the human

mind rival his greatest feats of criminal

justice. What Sherlock Holmes offers isn’t

just a way of solving crime. It is an entire

way of thinking, a mindset that can be

applied to countless enterprises far

removed from the foggy streets of the

London underworld. It is an approach

born out of the scientific method that

transcends science and crime both and can

serve as a model for thinking, a way of

being, even, just as powerful in our time

as it was in Conan Doyle’s. And that, I

would argue, is the secret to Holmes’s

enduring, overwhelming, and ubiquitous

appeal.

When Conan Doyle created Sherlock

Holmes, he didn’t think much of his hero.

It’s doubtful that he set out intentionally to

create a model for thought, for decision

making, for how to structure, lay out, and

solve problems in our minds. And yet that

is precisely what he did. He created, in

effect, the perfect spokesperson for the

revolution in science and thought that had

been unfolding in the preceding decades

and would continue into the dawn of the

new century. In 1887, Holmes became a

new kind of detective, an unprecedented

thinker who deployed his mind in

unprecedented ways. Today, Holmes

serves an ideal model for how we can

think better than we do as a matter of

course.

In many ways, Sherlock Holmes was a

visionary.

His

explanations,

his

methodology, his entire approach to

thought

presaged

developments

psychology

and

neuroscience

that

occurred over a hundred years after his

birth—and over eighty years after his

creator’s death. But somehow, too, his

way of thought seems almost inevitable, a

clear product of its time and place in

history. If the scientific method was

coming into its prime in all manner of

thinkings and doings—from evolution to

radiography, general relativity to the

discovery of germs and anesthesia,

behaviorism to psychoanalysis—then why

ever not in the principles of thought itself?

Arthur

Conan

Doyle’s

own

estimation, Sherlock Holmes was meant

from the onset to be an embodiment of the

scientific, an ideal that we could aspire to,

if never emulate altogether (after all, what

are ideals for if not to be just a little bit out of reach?). Holmes’s very name

speaks at once of an intent beyond a

simple detective of the old-fashioned sort:

it is very likely that Conan Doyle chose it

as a deliberate tribute to one of his

childhood idols, the philosopher-doctor

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a figure

known as much for his writing as for his

contributions to medical practice. The

detective’s character, in turn, was

modeled after another mentor, Dr. Joseph

Bell, a surgeon known for his powers of

close observation. It was said that Dr.

Bell could tell from a single glance that a

patient

was

recently

discharged

noncommissioned officer in a Highland

regiment, who had just returned from

service in Barbados, and that he tested

routinely his students’ own powers of

perception with methods that included

self-experimentation with various noxious

substances. To students of Holmes, that

may all sound rather familiar. As Conan

Doyle wrote to Bell, “Round the centre of

deduction and inference and observation

which I have heard you inculcate, I have

tried to build up a man who pushed the

thing as far as it would go—further

occasionally. . . .” It is here, in

observation and inference and deduction,

that we come to the heart of what it is

exactly that makes Holmes who he is,

distinct from every other detective who

appeared before, or indeed, after: the

detective who elevated the art of detection

to a precise science.

We first learn of the quintessential

Sherlock Holmes approach in A Study in

Scarlet, the detective’s first appearance in

the public eye. To Holmes, we soon

discover, each case is not just a case as it

would appear to the officials of Scotland

Yard—a crime, some facts, some persons

of interest, all coming together to bring a

criminal to justice—but is something both

more and less. More, in that it takes on a

larger, more general significance, as an

object of broad speculation and inquiry, a

scientific conundrum, if you will. It has

contours that inevitably were seen before

in earlier problems and will certainly

repeat again, broader principles that can

apply to other moments that may not even

seem at first glance related. Less, in that it

is stripped of any accompanying emotion

and conjecture—all elements that are

deemed extraneous to clarity of thought—

and made as objective as a nonscientific

reality could ever be. The result: the

crime as an object of strict scientific

inquiry, to be approached by the

principles of the scientific method. Its

servant: the human mind.

What Is the Scientific Method of

Thought?

When we think of the scientific method,

we tend to think of an experimenter in his

laboratory, probably holding a test tube

and wearing a white coat, who follows a

series of steps that runs something like

this: make some observations about a

phenomenon; create a hypothesis to

explain those observations; design an

experiment to test the hypothesis; run the

experiment; see if the results match your

expectations; rework your hypothesis if

you must; lather, rinse, and repeat. Simple

seeming enough. But how to go beyond

that? Can we train our minds to work like

that automatically, all the time?

Holmes recommends we start with the

basics. As he says in our first meeting

with him, “Before turning to those moral

and mental aspects of the matter which

present the greatest difficulties, let the

enquirer

begin

mastering

elementary problems.” The scientific

method begins with the most mundane

seeming of things: observation. Before

you even begin to ask the questions that

will define the investigation of a crime, a

scientific experiment, or a decision as

apparently simple as whether or not to

invite a certain friend to dinner, you must

first explore the essential groundwork. It’s

not for nothing that Holmes calls the

foundations of his inquiry “elementary.”

For, that is precisely what they are, the

very basis of how something works and

what makes it what it is.

And that is something that not even

every scientist acknowledges outright, so

ingrained is it in his way of thinking.

When a physicist dreams up a new

experiment or a biologist decides to test

the properties of a newly isolated

compound, he doesn’t always realize that

his specific question, his approach, his

hypothesis, his very view of what he is

doing would be impossible without the

elemental knowledge at his disposal, that

he has built up over the years. Indeed, he

may have a hard time telling you from

where exactly he got the idea for a study

—and why he first thought it would make

sense.

After World War II, physicist Richard

Feynman was asked to serve on the State

Curriculum Commission, to choose high

school science textbooks for California.

To his consternation, the texts appeared to

leave students more confused than

enlightened. Each book he examined was

worse than the one prior. Finally, he came

upon a promising beginning: a series of

pictures, of a windup toy, an automobile,

and a boy on a bicycle. Under each was a

question: “What makes it go?” At last, he

thought, something that was going to

explain the basic science, starting with the

fundamentals of mechanics (the toy),

chemistry (the car), and biology (the boy).

Alas, his elation was short lived. Where

he thought to finally see explanation, real

understanding, he found instead four

words: “Energy makes it go.” But what

was that? Why did it make it go? How did

it make it go? These questions weren’t

ever

acknowledged,

never

mind

answered. As Feynman put it, “That

doesn’t mean anything. . . . It’s just a

word!” Instead, he argued, “What they

should have done is to look at the windup

toy, see that there are springs inside, learn

about springs, learn about wheels, and

never mind ‘energy.’ Later on, when the

children know something about how the

toy actually works, they can discuss the

more general principles of energy.”

Feynman is one of the few who rarely

took his knowledge base for granted, who

always remembered the building blocks,

the elements that lay underneath each

question and each principle. And that is

precisely what Holmes means when he

tells us that we must begin with the basics,

with such mundane problems that they

might seem beneath our notice. How can

you hypothesize, how can you make

testable theories if you don’t first know

what and how to observe, if you don’t first

understand the fundamental nature of the

problem at hand, down to its most basic

elements? (The simplicity is deceptive, as

you will learn in the next two chapters.)

The scientific method begins with a

broad

base

knowledge,

understanding of the facts and contours of

the problem you are trying to tackle. In the

case of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, it’s

the mystery behind a murder in an

abandoned house on Lauriston Gardens. In

your case, it may be a decision whether or

not to change careers. Whatever the

specific issue, you must define and

formulate it in your mind as specifically

as possible—and then you must fill it in

with

past

experience

and

present

observation. (As Holmes admonishes

Lestrade and Gregson when the two

detectives fail to note a similarity between

the murder being investigated and an

earlier case, “There is nothing new under

the sun. It has all been done before.”)

Only then can you move to the

hypothesis-generation point. This is the

moment where the detective engages his

imagination, generating possible lines of

inquiry into the course of events, and not

just sticking to the most obvious

possibility—in A Study in Scarlet, for

instance, rache need not be Rachel cut

short, but could also signify the German

f o r revenge—or

where

you

might

brainstorm possible scenarios that may

arise from pursuing a new job direction.

But you don’t just start hypothesizing at

random: all the potential scenarios and

explanations come from that initial base of

knowledge and observation.

Only then do you test. What does your

hypothesis imply? At this point, Holmes

will investigate all lines of inquiry,

eliminating them one by one until the one

that remains, however improbable, must

be the truth. And you will run through

career change scenarios and try to play out

the implications to their logical, full

conclusion. That, too, is manageable, as

you will later learn.

But even then, you’re not done. Times

change. Circumstances change. That

original knowledge base must always be

updated. As our environment changes, we

must never forget to revise and retest out

hypotheses. The revolutionary can, if

we’re not careful, become the irrelevant.

The thoughtful can become unthinking

through our failure to keep engaging,

challenging, pushing.

That, in a nutshell, is the scientific

method:

understand

and

frame

the

problem;

observe;

hypothesize

(or

imagine); test and deduce; and repeat. To

follow Sherlock Holmes is to learn to

apply that same approach not just to

external clues, but to your every thought—

and then turn it around and apply it to the

every thought of every other person who

may be involved, step by painstaking step.

When Holmes first lays out the

theoretical

principles

behind

his

approach, he boils it down to one main

idea: “How much an observant man might

learn by an accurate and systematic

examination of all that came his way.”

And that “all” includes each and every

thought; in Holmes’s world, there is no

such thing as a thought that is taken at face

value. As he notes, “From a drop of

water, a logician could infer the

possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara

without having seen or heard of one or the

other.” In other words, given our existing

knowledge base, we can use observation

to deduce meaning from an otherwise

meaningless fact. For what kind of

scientist is that who lacks the ability to

imagine and hypothesize the new, the

unknown, the as-of-yet untestable?

This is the scientific method at its most

basic. Holmes goes a step further. He

applies the same principle to human

beings: a Holmesian disciple will, “on

meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance

to distinguish the history of the man and

the trade or profession to which he

belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may

seem, it sharpens the faculties of

observation, and teaches one where to

look and what to look for.” Each

observation, each exercise, each simple

inference drawn from a simple fact will

strengthen your ability to engage in ever-

more-complex machinations. It will lay

the groundwork for new habits of thinking

that will make such observation second

nature.

That is precisely what Holmes has

taught himself—and can now teach us—to

do. For, at its most basic, isn’t that the

detective’s appeal? Not only can he solve

the hardest of crimes, but he does so with

an approach that seems, well, elementary

when you get right down to it. This

approach is based in science, in specific

steps, in habits of thought that can be

learned, cultivated, and applied.

That all sounds good in theory. But how

do you even begin? It does seem like an

awfully big hassle to always think

scientifically, to always have to pay

attention and break things down and

observe and hypothesize and deduce and

everything in between. Well, it both is and

isn’t. On the one hand, most of us have a

long way to go. As we’ll see, our minds

aren’t meant to think like Holmes by

default. But on the other hand, new thought

habits can be learned and applied. Our

brains are remarkably adept at learning

new ways of thinking—and our neural

connections are remarkably flexible, even

into old age. By following Holmes’s

thinking in the following pages, we will

learn how to apply his methodology to our

everyday lives, to be present and mindful

and to treat each choice, each problem,

each situation with the care it deserves. At

first it will seem unnatural. But with time

and practice it will come to be as second

nature for us as it is for him.

Pitfalls of the Untrained Brain

One of the things that characterizes

Holmes’s thinking—and the scientific

ideal—is a natural skepticism and

inquisitiveness toward the world. Nothing

is taken at face value. Everything is

scrutinized and considered, and only then

accepted (or not, as the case may be).

Unfortunately, our minds are, in their

default state, averse to such an approach.

In order to think like Sherlock Holmes, we

first need to overcome a sort of natural

resistance that pervades the way we see

the world.

Most psychologists now agree that our

minds operate on a so-called two-system

basis. One system is fast, intuitive,

reactionary—a kind of constant fight-or-

flight vigilance of the mind. It doesn’t

require much conscious thought or effort

and functions as a sort of status quo auto

pilot. The other is slower, more

deliberative, more thorough, more logical

—but also much more cognitively costly.

It likes to sit things out as long as it can

and doesn’t step in unless it thinks it

absolutely necessary.

Because of the mental cost of that cool,

reflective system, we spend most of our

thinking time in the hot, reflexive system,

basically ensuring that our natural

observer state takes on the color of that

system: automatic, intuitive (and not

always rightly so), reactionary, quick to

judge. As a matter of course, we go. Only

when something really catches our

attention or forces us to stop or otherwise

jolts us do we begin to know, turning on

the more thoughtful, reflective, cool

sibling.

I’m going to give the systems monikers

of my own: the Watson system and the

Holmes system. You can guess which is

which. Think of the Watson system as our

naive selves, operating by the lazy thought

habits—the ones that come most naturally,

the so-called path of least resistance—that

we’ve spent our whole lives acquiring.

And think of the Holmes system as our

aspirational selves, the selves that we’ll

be once we’re done learning how to apply

his method of thinking to our everyday

lives—and in so doing break the habits of

our Watson system once and for all.

When we think as a matter of course,

our minds are preset to accept whatever it

is that comes to them. First we believe,

and only then do we question. Put

differently, it’s like our brains initially see

the world as a true/false exam where the

default answer is always true. And while

it takes no effort whatsoever to remain in

true mode, a switch of answer to false

requires vigilance, time, and energy.

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes

it this way: our brains must believe

something in order to process it, if only

for a split second. Imagine I tell you to

think of pink elephants. You obviously

know that pink elephants don’t actually

exist. But when you read the phrase, you

just for a moment had to picture a pink

elephant in your head. In order to realize

that it couldn’t exist, you had to believe

for a second that it did exist. We

understand and believe in the same instant.

Benedict de Spinoza was the first to

conceive of this necessity of acceptance

for comprehension, and, writing a hundred

years before Gilbert, William James

explained

the

principle

“All

propositions,

whether

attributive

existential, are believed through the very

fact of being conceived.” Only after the

conception do we effortfully engage in

disbelieving something—and, as Gilbert

points out, that part of the process can be

far from automatic.

In the case of the pink elephants the

disconfirming process is simple. It takes

next to no effort or time—although it still

does take your brain more effort to

process than it would if I said gray

elephant, since counterfactual information

requires

that

additional

step

verification and disconfirmation that true

information does not. But that’s not

always true: not everything is as glaring as

a pink elephant. The more complicated a

concept or idea, or the less obviously true

or false ( There are no poisonous snakes

in Maine. True or false? Go! But even that

can be factually verified. How about: The

death penalty is not as harsh a

punishment as life imprisonment. What

now?), the more effort is required. And it

doesn’t take much for the process to be

disrupted or to not occur altogether. If we

decide that the statement sounds plausible

enough as is ( sure; no poisonous snakes

in Maine; why not? ), we are more likely

than not to just let it go. Likewise, if we

are

busy,

stressed,

distracted,

otherwise depleted mentally, we may keep

something marked as true without ever

having taken the time to verify it—when

faced with multiple demands, our mental

capacity is simply too limited to be able

to handle everything at once, and the

verification process is one of the first

things to go. When that happens, we are

left with uncorrected beliefs, things that

we will later recall as true when they are,

in fact, false. (Are there poisonous snakes

in Maine? Yes, as a matter of fact there

are. But get asked in a year, and who

knows if you will remember that or the

opposite—especially if you were tired or

distracted when reading this paragraph.)

What’s more, not everything is as black

and white—or as pink and white, as the

case may be—as the elephant. And not

everything that our intuition says is black

and white is so in reality. It’s awfully easy

to get tripped up. In fact, not only do we

believe everything we hear, at least

initially, but even when we have been told

explicitly that a statement is false before

we hear it, we are likely to treat it as true.

For instance, in something known as the

correspondence bias (a concept we’ll

revisit in greater detail), we assume that

what a person says is what that person

actually believes—and we hold on to that

assumption even if we’ve been told

explicitly that it isn’t so; we’re even likely

to judge the speaker in its light. Think

back to the previous paragraph; do you

think that what I wrote about the death

penalty is my actual belief? You have no

basis on which to answer that question—I

haven’t given you my opinion—and yet,

chances are you’ve already answered it by

taking my statement as my opinion. More

disturbing still, even if we hear something

denied—for example, Joe has no links to

the

Mafia—we

may

end

misremembering the statement as lacking

the negator and end up believing that Joe

does have Mafia links—and even if we

don’t, we are much more likely to form a

negative opinion of Joe. We’re even apt to

recommend a longer prison sentence for

him if we play the role of jury. Our

tendency to confirm and to believe just a

little too easily and often has very real

consequences both for ourselves and for

others.

Holmes’s trick is to treat every thought,

every experience, and every perception

the way he would a pink elephant. In other

words, begin with a healthy dose of

skepticism instead of the credulity that is

your mind’s natural state of being. Don’t

just assume anything is the way it is. Think

of everything as being as absurd as an

animal that can’t possibly exist in nature.

It’s a difficult proposition, especially to

take on all at once—after all, it’s the same

thing as asking your brain to go from its

natural resting state to a mode of constant

physical activity, expending important

energy even where it would normally

yawn, say okay, and move on to the next

thing—but

not

impossible

one,

especially if you’ve got Sherlock Holmes

on your side. For he, perhaps better than

anyone else, can serve as a trusty

companion, an ever-present model for

how to accomplish what may look at first

glance like a herculean task.

By observing Holmes in action, we will

become better at observing our own

minds. “How the deuce did he know that I

had come from Afghanistan?” Watson asks

Stamford, the man who has introduced him

to Holmes for the first time.

Stamford

smiles

enigmatically

response.

“That’s

just

his

little

peculiarity,” he tells Watson. “A good

many people have wanted to know how he

finds things out.”

That answer only piques Watson’s

curiosity further. It’s a curiosity that can

only be satisfied over the course of long

and detailed observation—which he

promptly undertakes.

To Sherlock Holmes, the world has

become by default a pink elephant world.

It’s a world where every single input is

examined with the same care and healthy

skepticism as the most absurd of animals.

And by the end of this book, if you ask

yourself the simple question, What would

Sherlock Holmes do and think in this

situation? you will find that your own

world is on its way to being one, too. That

thoughts that you never before realized

existed are being stopped and questioned

before being allowed to infiltrate your

mind. That those same thoughts, properly

filtered, can no longer slyly influence your

behavior without your knowledge.

And just like a muscle that you never

knew you had—one that suddenly begins

to ache, then develop and bulk up as you

begin to use it more and more in a new

series of exercises—with practice your

mind will see that the constant observation

and never-ending scrutiny will become

easier. (In fact, as you’ll learn later in the

book, it really is like a muscle.) It will

become, as it is to Sherlock Holmes,

second nature. You will begin to intuit, to

deduce, to think as a matter of course, and

you will find that you no longer have to

give it much conscious effort.

Don’t for a second think it’s not doable.

Holmes may be fictional, but Joseph Bell

was very real. So, too, was Conan Doyle

(and George Edalji wasn’t the only

beneficiary of his approach; Sir Arthur

also worked to overturn the convictions of

the falsely imprisoned Oscar Slater).

And maybe Sherlock Holmes so

captures our minds for the very reason that

he makes it seem possible, effortless even,

to think in a way that would bring the

average person to exhaustion. He makes

the most rigorous scientific approach to

thinking seem attainable. Not for nothing

does Watson always exclaim, after

Holmes gives him an explanation of his

methods, that the thing couldn’t have been

any clearer. Unlike Watson, though, we

can learn to see the clarity before the fact.

The

Two

Ms:

Mindfulness

and

Motivation

It won’t be easy. As Holmes reminds us,

“Like all other arts, the Science of

Deduction and Analysis is one which can

only be acquired by long and patient study

nor is life long enough to allow any mortal

to attain the highest possible perfection in

it.” But it’s also more than mere fancy. In

essence, it comes down to one simple

formula: to move from a System Watson–

to a System Holmes–governed thinking

takes mindfulness plus motivation. (That,

and a lot of practice.) Mindfulness, in the

sense of constant presence of mind, the

attentiveness and hereness that is so

essential for real, active observation of

the world. Motivation, in the sense of

active engagement and desire.

When

such

decidedly

unremarkable things as misplacing our

keys or losing our glasses only to find

them on our head, System Watson is to

blame: we go on a sort of autopilot and

don’t note our actions as we make them.

It’s why we often forget what we were

doing if we’re interrupted, why we stand

in the middle of the kitchen wondering

why we’ve entered it. System Holmes

offers the type of retracing of steps that

requires attentive recall, so that we break

the autopilot and instead remember just

where and why we did what we did. We

aren’t motivated or mindful all the time,

and mostly it doesn’t matter. We do things

mindlessly to conserve our resources for

something more important than the

location of our keys.

But in order to break from that

autopiloted mode, we have to be

motivated to think in a mindful, present

fashion, to exert effort on what goes

through our heads instead of going with

the flow. To think like Sherlock Holmes,

we must want, actively, to think like him.

In fact, motivation is so essential that

researchers have often lamented the

difficulty of getting accurate performance

comparisons on cognitive tasks for older

and younger participants. Why? The older

adults are often far more motivated to

perform well. They try harder. They

engage more. They are more serious, more

present, more involved. To them, the

performance matters a great deal. It says

something about their mental capabilities

—and they are out to prove that they

haven’t lost the touch as they’ve aged. Not

so younger adults. There is no comparable

imperative. How, then, can you accurately

compare the two groups? It’s a question

that continues to plague research into

aging and cognitive function.

But that’s not the only domain where it

matters.

Motivated

subjects always

outperform. Students who are motivated

perform better on something as seemingly

immutable as the IQ test—on average, as

much as .064 standard deviations better,

in fact. Not only that, but motivation

predicts higher academic performance,

fewer criminal convictions, and better

employment outcomes. Children who have

a so-called “rage to master”—a term

coined by Ellen Winner to describe the

intrinsic motivation to master a specific

domain—are more likely to be successful

in any number of endeavors, from art to

science. If we are motivated to learn a

language, we are more likely to succeed in

our quest. Indeed, when we learn anything

new, we learn better if we are motivated

learners. Even our memory knows if

we’re motivated or not: we remember

better if we were motivated at the time the

memory was formed. It’s called motivated

encoding.

And then, of course, there is that final

piece of the puzzle: practice, practice,

practice. You have to supplement your

mindful motivation with brutal training,

thousands of hours of it. There is no way

around it. Think of the phenomenon of

expert knowledge: experts in all fields,

from master chess players to master

detectives, have superior memory in their

field of choice. Holmes’s knowledge of

crime is ever at his fingertips. A chess

player often holds hundreds of games,

with all of their moves, in his head, ready

for swift access. Psychologist K. Anders

Ericsson argues that experts even see the

world differently within their area of

expertise: they see things that are invisible

to a novice; they are able to discern

patterns at a glance that are anything but

obvious to an untrained eye; they see

details as part of a whole and know at

once what is crucial and what is

incidental.

Even Holmes could not have begun life

with System Holmes at the wheel. You

can be sure that in his fictional world he

was born, just as we are, with Watson at

the controls. He just hasn’t let himself stay

that way. He took System Watson and

taught it to operate by the rules of System

Holmes, imposing reflective thought

where there should rightly be reflexive

reaction.

For the most part, System Watson is the

habitual one. But if we are conscious of

its power, we can ensure that it is not in

control nearly as often as it otherwise

would be. As Holmes often notes, he has

made it a habit to engage his Holmes

system, every moment of every day. In so

doing, he has slowly trained his quick-to-

judge inner Watson to perform as his

public outer Holmes. Through sheer force

of habit and will, he has taught his instant

judgments to follow the train of thought of

a far more reflective approach. And

because this foundation is in place, it

takes a matter of seconds for him to make

his initial observations of Watson’s

character. That’s why Holmes calls it

intuition. Accurate intuition, the intuition

that Holmes possesses, is of necessity

based on training, hours and hours of it.

An expert may not always realize

consciously where it’s coming from, but it

comes from some habit, visible or not.

What Holmes has done is to clarify the

process, break down how hot can become

cool, reflexive become reflective. It’s

what Anders Ericsson calls expert

knowledge: an ability born from extended

and intense practice and not some innate

genius. It’s not that Holmes was born to be

the consulting detective to end all

consulting detectives. It’s that he has

practiced his mindful approach to the

world and has, over time, perfected his art

to the level at which we find it.

As their first case together draws to a

close, Dr. Watson compliments his new

companion

his

masterful

accomplishment: “You have brought

detection as near an exact science as it

ever will be brought in this world.” A

high compliment indeed. But in the

following pages, you will learn to do the

exact same thing for your every thought,

from its very inception—just as Arthur

Conan Doyle did in his defense of George

Edalji, and Joseph Bell in his patient

diagnoses.

Sherlock Holmes came of age at a time

when psychology was still in its infancy.

We are far better equipped than he could

have ever been. Let’s learn to put that

knowledge to good use.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“How the deuce did he know . . .” from A

Study in Scarlet, chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock

Holmes, p. 7.1

“Before turning to those moral and

mental aspects . . .” “How much an

observant man might learn . . .” “Like

all other arts, the Science of Deduction

and Analysis . . .” from A Study in

Scarlet, chapter 2: The Science of

Deduction, p. 15.

CHAPTER TWO

The Brain Attic: What Is It and

What’s in There?

One of the most widely held notions about

Sherlock Holmes has to do with his

supposed ignorance of Copernican theory.

“What the deuce is [the solar system] to

me?” he exclaims to Watson in A Study in

Scarlet. “You say that we go round the

sun. If we went round the moon it would

not make a pennyworth of difference to me

or to my work.” And now that he knows

that fact? “I shall do my best to forget it,”

he promises.

It’s fun to home in on that incongruity

between

the

superhuman-seeming

detective and a failure to grasp a fact so

rudimentary that even a child would know

it. And ignorance of the solar system is

quite an omission for someone who we

might hold up as the model of the

scientific method, is it not? Even the BBC

series Sherlock can’t help but use it as a

focal point of one of its episodes.

But two things about that perception

bear further mention. First, it isn’t, strictly

speaking, true. Witness Holmes’s repeated

references to astronomy in future stories—

in “The Musgrave Ritual,” he talks about

“allowances for personal equation, as the

astronomers would have it”; in “The

Greek Interpreter,” about the “obliquity of

the ecliptic”; in “The Adventure of the

Bruce-Partington Plans,” about “a planet

leaving its orbit.” Indeed, eventually

Holmes does use almost all of the

knowledge that he denies having at the

earliest stages of his friendship with Dr.

Watson. (And in true-to-canon form,

Sherlock the BBC series does end on a

note of scientific triumph: Holmes does

know astronomy after all, and that

knowledge saves the day—and the life of

a little boy.)

In fact, I would argue that he

exaggerates his ignorance precisely to

draw our attention to a second—and, I

think, much more important—point. His

supposed refusal to commit the solar

system to memory serves to illustrate an

analogy for the human mind that will

prove to be central to Holmes’s thinking

and to our ability to emulate his

methodology. As Holmes tells Watson,

moments after the Copernican incident, “I

consider that a man’s brain originally is

like a little empty attic, and you have to

stock it with such furniture as you

choose.”

When I first heard the term brain

attic—back in the days of firelight and the

old crimson hardcover—all I could

picture in my seven-year-old head was the

cover of the black-and-white Shel

Silverstein book that sat prominently on

my bookshelf, with its half-smiling,

lopsided face whose forehead was

distended to a wrinkled triangle, complete

with roof, chimney, and window with

open shutters. Behind the shutters, a tiny

face peeking out at the world. Is this what

Holmes meant? A small room with sloped

sides and a foreign creature with a funny

face waiting to pull the cord and turn the

light off or on?

As it turns out, I wasn’t far from wrong.

For Sherlock Holmes, a person’s brain

attic really is an incredibly concrete,

physical space. Maybe it has a chimney.

Maybe it doesn’t. But whatever it looks

like, it is a space in your head, specially

fashioned for storing the most disparate of

objects. And yes, there is certainly a cord

that you can pull to turn the light on or off

at will. As Holmes explains to Watson,

“A fool takes in all the lumber of every

sort that he comes across, so that the

knowledge which might be useful to him

gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up

with a lot of other things, so that he has a

difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now

the skillful workman is very careful

indeed as to what he takes into his brain-

attic.”

That comparison, as it turns out, is

remarkably accurate. Subsequent research

on memory formation, retention, and

retrieval has—as you’ll soon see—proven

itself to be highly amenable to the attic

analogy. In the chapters that follow, we

will trace the role of the brain attic from

the inception to the culmination of the

thought process, exploring how its

structure and content work at every point

—and what we can do to improve that

working on a regular basis.

The attic can be broken down, roughly

speaking, into two components: structure

and contents. The attic’s structure is how

our mind works: how it takes in

information. How it processes that

information. How it sorts it and stores it

for the future. How it may choose to

integrate it or not with contents that are

already in the attic space. Unlike a

physical attic, the structure of the brain

attic isn’t altogether fixed. It can expand,

albeit not indefinitely, or it can contract,

depending on how we use it (in other

words, our memory and processing can

become more or less effective). It can

change its mode of retrieval ( How do I

recover information I’ve stored? ). It can

change its storage system ( How do I

deposit information I’ve taken in: where

will it go? how will it be marked? how

will it be integrated? ). At the end, it will

have to remain within certain confines—

each attic, once again, is different and

subject to its unique constraints—but

within those confines, it can take on any

number of configurations, depending on

how we learn to approach it.

The attic’s contents, on the other hand,

are those things that we’ve taken in from

the world and that we’ve experienced in

our lives. Our memories. Our past. The

base of our knowledge, the information

we start with every time we face a

challenge. And just like a physical attic’s

contents can change over time, so too does

our mind attic continue to take in and

discard items until the very end. As our

thought process begins, the furniture of

memory combines with the structure of

internal habits and external circumstances

to determine which item will be retrieved

from storage at any given point. Guessing

at the contents of a person’s attic from his

outward appearance becomes one of

Sherlock’s surest ways of determining

who that person is and what he is capable

of.

As we’ve already seen, much of the

original intake is outside of our control:

just like we must picture a pink elephant

to realize one doesn’t exist, we can’t help

but become acquainted—if only for the

briefest of moments—with the workings

of the solar system or the writings of

Thomas Carlyle should Watson choose to

mention them to us. We can, however,

learn to master many aspects of our attic’s

structure, throwing out junk that got in by

mistake (as Holmes promises to forget

Copernicus at the earliest opportunity),

prioritizing those things we want to and

pushing back those that we don’t, learning

how to take the contours of our unique

attic into account so that they don’t unduly

influence us as they otherwise might.

While we may never become quite as

adept as the master at divining a man’s

innermost thoughts from his exterior, in

learning to understand the layout and

functionality of our own brain attic we

take the first step to becoming better at

exploiting its features to their maximum

potential—in other words, to learning

how to optimize our own thought process,

so that we start any given decision or

action as our best, most aware selves. Our

attic’s structure and contents aren’t there

because we have to think that way, but

because we’ve learned over time and with

repeat practice (often unknown, but

practice nevertheless) to think that way.

We’ve decided, on a certain level, that

mindful attention is just not worth the

effort. We’ve chosen efficiency over

depth. It may take just as long, but we can

learn to think differently.

The basic structure may be there for

good, but we can learn to alter its exact

linkages and building blocks—and that

alteration will actually rebuild the attic,

so to speak, rewiring our neural

connections as we change our habits of

thought. Just as with any renovation, some

of the major overhauls may take some

time. You can’t just rebuild an attic in a

day. But some minor changes will likely

begin to appear within days—and even

hours. And they will do so no matter how

old your attic is and how long it has been

since it’s gotten a proper cleaning. In

other words, our brains can learn new

skills quickly—and they can continue to

do so throughout our lives, not just when

we are younger. As for the contents: while

some of those, too, are there to stay, we

can be selective about what we keep in

the future—and can learn to organize the

attic so that those contents we do want are

easiest to access, and those we either

value less or want to avoid altogether

move further into the corners. We may not

come out with an altogether different attic,

but we can certainly come out with one

that more resembles Holmes’s.

Memory’s Furniture

The same day that Watson first learns of

his new friend’s theories on deduction—

all of that Niagara-from-a-drop-of-water

and whatnot—he is presented with a most

convincing demonstration of their power:

their application to a puzzling murder. As

the two men sit discussing Holmes’s

article, they are interrupted by a message

from Scotland Yard. Inspector Tobias

Gregson requests Holmes’s opinion on a

puzzler of a case. A man has been found

dead, and yet, “There had been no

robbery, nor is there any evidence as to

how the man met his death. There are

marks of blood in the room, but there is no

wound upon his person.” Gregson

continues his appeal: “We are at a loss as

to how he came into the empty house;

indeed, the whole affair is a puzzler.” And

without further ado, Holmes departs for

Lauriston Gardens, Watson at his side.

Is the case as singular as all that?

Gregson and his colleague, Inspector

Lestrade, seem to think so. “It beats

anything I have seen, and I am no

chicken,” offers Lestrade. Not a clue in

sight. Holmes, however, has an idea. “Of

course, this blood belongs to a second

individual—presumably the murderer, if

murder has been committed,” he tells the

two policemen. “It reminds me of the

circumstances attendant on the death of

Van Jansen, in Utrecht, in the year ’34. Do

you remember the case, Gregson?”

Gregson confesses that he does not.

“Read it up—you really should,” offers

Holmes. “There is nothing new under the

sun. It has all been done before.”

Why does Holmes remember Van

Jansen

while

Gregson

does

not?

Presumably, both men had at one point

been acquainted with the circumstances—

after all, Gregson has had to train

extensively for his current position—and

yet the one has retained them for his use,

while for the other they have evaporated

into nonexistence.

It all has to do with the nature of the

brain attic. Our default System Watson

attic is jumbled and largely mindless.

Gregson may have once known about Van

Jansen but has lacked the requisite

motivation and presence to retain his

knowledge. Why should he care about old

cases? Holmes, however, makes a

conscious, motivated choice to remember

cases past; one never knows when they

might come in handy. In his attic,

knowledge does not get lost. He has made

a deliberate decision that these details

matter. And that decision has, in turn,

affected how and what—and when—he

remembers.

Our memory is in large part the starting

point for how we think, how our

preferences form, and how we make

decisions. It is the attic’s content that

distinguishes

even

otherwise

identically structured mind from its

neighbor’s. What Holmes means when he

talks about stocking your attic with the

appropriate furniture is the need to

carefully choose which experiences,

which memories, which aspects of your

life you want to hold on to beyond the

moment when they occur. (He should

know: he would not have even existed as

we know him had Arthur Conan Doyle not

retrieved his experiences with Dr. Joseph

Bell from memory in creating his fictional

detective.) He means that for a police

inspector, it would be well to remember

past cases, even seemingly obscure ones:

aren’t they, in a sense, the most basic

knowledge of his profession?

In the earliest days of research, memory

was thought to be populated with so-

called engrams, memory traces that were

localized in specific parts of the brain. To

locate one such engram—for the memory

of a maze—psychologist Karl Lashley

taught rats to run through a labyrinth. He

then cut out various parts of their brain

tissue and put them right back into the

maze. Though the rats’ motor function

declined and some had to hobble or crawl

their way woozily through the twists and

turns, the animals never altogether forgot

their way, leading Lashley to conclude

that there was no single location that

stored a given memory. Rather, memory

was widely distributed in a connected

neural network—one that may look rather

familiar to Holmes.

Today, it is commonly accepted that

memory is divided into two systems, one

short- and one long-term, and while the

precise mechanisms of the systems remain

theoretical, an atticlike view—albeit a

very specific kind of attic—may not be far

from the truth. When we see something, it

is first encoded by the brain and then

stored in the hippocampus—think of it as

the attic’s first entry point, where you

place everything before you know whether

or not you will need to retrieve it. From

there, the stuff that you either actively

consider important or that your mind

somehow decides is worth storing, based

on past experience and your past

directives (i.e., what you normally

consider important), will be moved to a

specific box within the attic, into a

specific folder, in a specific compartment

in the cortex—the bulk of your attic’s

storage space, your long-term memory.

This is called consolidation. When you

need to recall a specific memory that has

been stored, your mind goes to the proper

file and pulls it out. Sometimes it pulls out

the file next to it, too, activating the

contents of the whole box or whatever

happens

nearby—associative

activation. Sometimes the file slips and by

the time you get it out into the light, its

contents have changed from when you first

placed them inside—only you may not be

aware of the change. In any case, you take

a look, and you add anything that may

seem newly relevant. Then you replace it

in its spot in its changed form. Those steps

are called retrieval and reconsolidation,

respectively.

The specifics aren’t nearly as important

as the broad idea. Some things get stored;

some are thrown out and never reach the

main attic. What’s stored is organized

according to some associative system—

your brain decides where a given memory

might fit—but if you think you’ll be

retrieving an exact replica of what you’ve

stored, you’re wrong. Contents shift,

change, and re-form with every shake of

the box where they are stored. Put in your

favorite book from childhood, and if

you’re not careful, the next time you

retrieve it there may be water damage to

the picture you so wanted to see. Throw a

few photo albums up there, and the

pictures may get mixed together so that the

images from one trip merge with those

from another one altogether. Reach for an

object more often, and it doesn’t gather

dust. It stays on top, fresh and ready for

your next touch (though who knows what it

may take with it on its next trip out).

Leave it untouched, and it retreats further

and further into a heap—but it can be

dislodged by a sudden movement in its

vicinity. Forget about something for long

enough, and by the time you go to look for

it, it may be lost beyond your reach—still

there, to be sure, but at the bottom of a box

in a dark corner where you aren’t likely to

ever again find it.

To cultivate our knowledge actively,

we need to realize that items are being

pushed into our attic space at every

opportunity. In our default state, we don’t

often pay attention to them unless some

aspect draws our attention—but that

doesn’t mean they haven’t found their way

into our attic all the same. They sneak in if

we’re not careful, if we just passively

take in information and don’t make a

conscious effort to control our attention

(something we’ll learn about a bit further

on)—especially if they are things that

somehow pique our attention naturally:

topics of general interest; things we can’t

help but notice; things that raise some

emotion in us; or things that capture us by

some aspect of novelty or note.

It is all too easy to let the world come

unfiltered into your attic space, populating

it with whatever inputs may come its way

or whatever naturally captures your

attention by virtue of its interest or

immediate relevance to you. When we’re

in our default System Watson mode, we

don’t “choose” which memories to store.

They just kind of store themselves—or

they don’t, as the case may be. Have you

ever found yourself reliving a memory

with a friend—that time you both ordered

the ice cream sundae instead of lunch and

then spent the afternoon walking around

the town center and people-watching by

the river—only to find that the friend has

no idea what you’re talking about? It must

have been someone else, he says. Not me.

I’m not a sundae type of guy. Only, you

know it was him. Conversely, have you

ever been on the receiving end of that

story,

having

someone

recount

experience or event or moment that you

simply have no recollection of? And you

can bet that that someone is just as certain

as you were that it happened just the way

he recalls.

But that, warns Holmes, is a dangerous

policy. Before you know it, your mind

will be filled with so much useless junk

that even the information that happened to

be useful is buried so deeply and is so

inaccessible that it might as well not even

be there. It’s important to keep one thing

in mind: we know only what we can

remember at any given point. In other

words, no amount of knowledge will save

us if we can’t recall it at the moment we

need it. It doesn’t matter if the modern

Holmes knows anything about astronomy

if he can’t remember the timing of the

asteroid that appears in a certain painting

at the crucial moment. A boy will die and

Benedict Cumberbatch will upset our

expectations. It doesn’t matter if Gregson

once knew of Van Jansen and all his

Utrecht adventures. If he can’t remember

them at Lauriston Gardens, they do him no

good whatsoever.

When we try to recall something, we

won’t be able to do so if there is too much

piled up in the way. Instead, competing

memories will vie for our attention. I may

try to remember that crucial asteroid and

think instead of an evening where I saw a

shooting star or what my astronomy

professor was wearing when she first

lectured to us about comets. It all depends

on how well organized my attic is—how I

encoded the memory to begin with, what

cues are prompting its retrieval now, how

methodical and organized my thought

process is from start to finish. I may have

stored something in my attic, but whether

or not I have done so accurately and in a

way that can be accessed in a timely

fashion is another question altogether. It’s

not as simple as getting one discrete item

out whenever I want it just because I once

stuffed it up there.

But that need not be the case.

Inevitably, junk will creep into the attic.

It’s impossible to be as perfectly vigilant

as Holmes makes himself out to be.

(You’ll learn later that he isn’t quite as

strict, either. Useless junk may end up

being flea market gold in the right set of

circumstances.) But it is possible to assert

more control over the memories that do

get encoded.

If Watson—or Gregson, as the case may

be—wanted to follow Holmes’s method,

he would do well to realize the motivated

nature of encoding: we remember more

when we are interested and motivated.

Chances are, Watson was quite capable of

retaining his medical training—and the

minutiae of his romantic escapades. These

were things that were relevant to him and

captured his attention. In other words, he

was motivated to remember.

Psychologist Karim Kassam calls it the

Scooter Libby effect: during his 2007

trial, Lewis “Scooter” Libby claimed no

memory of having mentioned the identity

of a certain CIA employee to any

reporters of government officials. The

jurors didn’t buy it. How could he not

remember

something

important?

Simple. It wasn’t nearly as important at

the time as it was in retrospect—and

where motivation matters most is at the

moment we are storing memories in our

attics to begin with, and not afterward.

The so-called Motivation to Remember

(MTR) is far more important at the point

of encoding—and no amount of MTR at

retrieval

will

efficient

the

information wasn’t properly stored to

begin with. As hard as it is to believe,

Libby may well have been telling the truth.

We can take advantage of MTR by

activating the same processes consciously

when we need them. When we really want

to remember something, we can make a

point of paying attention to it, of saying to

ourselves, This, I want to remember—

and, if possible, solidifying it as soon as

we can, whether it be by describing an

experience to someone else or to

ourselves, if no one else is available (in

essence,

rehearsing

help

consolidation). Manipulating information,

playing around with it and talking it

through, making it come alive through

stories and gestures, may be much more

effective in getting it to the attic when you

want it to get there than just trying to think

it over and over. In one study, for

instance,

students

who

explained

mathematical material after reading it

once did better on a later test than those

who repeated that material several times.

What’s more, the more cues we have, the

better the likelihood of successful

retrieval. Had Gregson originally focused

on all of the Utrecht details at the moment

he first learned of the case—sights,

smells, sounds, whatever else was in the

paper that day—and had he puzzled over

the case in various guises, he would be far

more likely to recall it now. Likewise,

had he linked it to his existing knowledge

base—in other words, instead of moving a

fresh box or folder into his attic, had he

integrated it into an existing, related one,

be it on the topic of bloody crime scenes

with bloodless bodies, or cases from

1834, or whatever else—the association

would later facilitate a prompt response to

Holmes’s

question.

Anything

distinguish it and make it somehow more

personal,

relatable,

and—crucially—

memorable.

Holmes

remembers

the

details that matter to him—and not those

that don’t. At any given moment, you only

think you know what you know. But what

you really know is what you can recall.

So what determines what we can and

can’t remember at a specific point in

time? How is the content of our attic

activated by its structure?

The Color of Bias: The Attic’s Default

Structure

It is autumn 1888, and Sherlock Holmes is

bored. For months, no case of note has

crossed his path. And so the detective

takes solace, to Dr. Watson’s great

dismay, in the 7 percent solution: cocaine.

According to Holmes, it stimulates and

clarifies his mind—a necessity when no

food for thought is otherwise available.

“Count the cost!” Watson tries to reason

with his flatmate. “Your brain may, as you

say, be roused and excited, but it is a

pathological and morbid process which

involves increased tissue-change and may

at least leave a permanent weakness. You

know, too, what a black reaction comes

upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth

the candle.”

Holmes remains unconvinced. “Give

me problems, give me work, give me the

most abstruse cryptogram, or the most

intricate analysis,” he says, “and I am in

my own proper atmosphere. I can

dispense then with artificial stimulant. But

I abhor the dull routine of existence.” And

none of Dr. Watson’s best medical

arguments will make a jot of difference (at

least not for now).

Luckily, however, in this particular

instance they don’t need to. A crisp knock

on the door, and the men’s landlady, Mrs.

Hudson, enters with an announcement: a

young lady by the name of Miss Mary

Morstan has arrived to see Sherlock

Holmes.

Watson

describes

Mary’s

entrance:

Miss Morstan entered the room with a

firm step and an outward composure of

manner. She was a blonde young lady,

small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in

the most perfect taste. There was,

however, a plainness and simplicity about

her costume which bore with it a

suggestion of limited means. The dress

was a sombre grayish beige, untrimmed

and unbraided, and she wore a small

turban of the same dull hue, relieved only

by a suspicion of white feather in the side.

Her face had neither regularity of feature

nor beauty of complexion, but her

expression was sweet and amiable, and

her large blue eyes were singularly

spiritual and sympathetic. In an experience

of women which extends over many

nations and three separate continents, I

have never looked upon a face which gave

a clearer promise of a refined and

sensitive nature. I could not but observe

that as she took the seat which Sherlock

Holmes placed for her, her lip trembled,

her hand quivered, and she showed every

sign of intense inward agitation.

Who might this lady be? And what

could she want with the detective? These

questions form the starting point of The

Sign of Four, an adventure that will take

Holmes and Watson to India and the

Andaman Islands, pygmies and men with

wooden legs. But before any of that there

is the lady herself: who she is, what she

represents, where she will lead. In a few

pages, we will examine the first encounter

between Mary, Holmes, and Watson and

contrast the two very different ways in

which the men react to their visitor. But

first, let’s take a step back to consider

what happens in our mind attic when we

first enter a situation—or, as in the case of

The Sign of Four, encounter a person.

How do those contents that we’ve just

examined actually become activated?

From the very first, our thinking is

governed

our

attic’s

so-called

structure: its habitual modes of thought

and operation, the way in which we’ve

learned, over time, to look at and evaluate

the world, the biases and heuristics that

shape our intuitive, immediate perception

of reality. Though, as we’ve just seen, the

memories and experiences stored in an

individual attic vary greatly from person

to person, the general patterns of

activation

and

retrieval

remain

remarkably similar, coloring our thought

process in a predictable, characteristic

fashion. And if these habitual patterns

point to one thing, it’s this: our minds love

nothing more than jumping to conclusions.

Imagine for a moment that you’re at a

party. You’re standing in a group of

friends

and

acquaintances,

chatting

happily away, drink in hand, when you

glimpse a stranger angling his way into the

conversation. By the time he has opened

his mouth—even before he has even quite

made it to the group’s periphery—you

have doubtless already formed any

number

preliminary

impressions,

creating

fairly

complete,

albeit

potentially inaccurate, picture of who this

stranger is as a person. How is Joe

Stranger dressed? Is he wearing a

baseball hat? You love (hate) baseball.

This must be a great (boring) guy. How

does he walk and hold himself? What

does he look like? Oh, is he starting to

bald? What a downer. Does he actually

think he can hang with someone as young

and hip as you? What does he seem like?

You’ve likely assessed how similar or

different he is from you—same gender?

race?

social

background?

economic

means?—and have even assigned him a

preliminary personality—shy? outgoing?

nervous? self-confident?—based on his

appearance and demeanor alone. Or,

maybe Joe Stranger is actually Jane

Stranger and her hair is dyed the same

shade of blue as your childhood best

friend dyed her hair right before you

stopped talking to each other, and you

always thought the hair was the first sign

of your impending break, and now all of a

sudden, all of these memories are clogging

your brain and coloring the way you see

this new person, innocent Jane. You don’t

even notice anything else.

As Joe or Jane start talking, you’ll fill

in the details, perhaps rearranging some,

amplifying others, even deleting a few

entirely. But you’ll hardly ever alter your

initial impression, the one that started to

form the second Joe or Jane walked your

way. And yet what is that impression

based on? Is it really anything of

substance? You

only

happened

remember your ex–best friend, for

instance, because of an errant streak of

hair.

When we see Joe or Jane, each question

we ask ourselves and each detail that

filters into our minds, floating, so to

speak, through the little attic window,

primes our minds by activating specific

associations. And those associations

cause us to form a judgment about

someone we have never even met, let

alone spoken to.

You may want to hold yourself above

such prejudices, but consider this. The

Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures

the distance between your conscious

attitudes—those you are aware of holding

—and your unconscious ones—those that

form the invisible framework of your attic,

beyond your immediate awareness. The

measure can test for implicit bias toward

any number of groups (though the most

common one tests racial biases) by

looking at reaction times for associations

between positive and negative attributes

and pictures of group representatives.

Sometimes the stereotypical positives are

represented by the same key: “European

American” and “good,” for instance, are

both associated with, say, the “I” key, and

“African American” and “bad” with the

“E” key. Sometimes they are represented

by different ones: now, the “I” is for

“African American” and “good,” while

“European American” has moved to the

“bad,”

“E”

key.

Your

speed

categorization

each

these

circumstances determines your implicit

bias. To take the racial example, if you

are faster to categorize when “European

American” and “good” share a key and

“African American” and “bad” share a

key, it is taken as evidence of an implicit

race bias.2

The findings are robust and replicated

extensively: even those individuals who

score the absolute lowest on self-reported

measures of stereotype attitudes (for

example, on a four-point scale ranging

from Strongly Female to Strongly Male,

do you most strongly associate career with

male or female?) often show a difference

in reaction time on the IAT that tells a

different story. On the race-related

attitudes IAT, about 68 percent of over 2.5

million participants show a biased

pattern. On age (i.e., those who prefer

young people over old): 80 percent. On

disability (i.e., those who favor people

without any disabilities): 76 percent. On

sexual orientation (i.e., those who favor

straight people over gay): 68 percent. On

weight (i.e., those who favor thin people

over fat): 69 percent. The list goes on and

on. And those biases, in turn, affect our

decision making. How we see the world

begin

with

will

impact

what

conclusions we reach, what evaluations

we form, and what choices we make at

any given point.

This is not to say that we will

necessarily act in a biased fashion; we are

perfectly capable of resisting our brains’

basic impulses. But it does mean that the

biases are there at a very fundamental

level. Protest as you may that it’s just not

you, but more likely than not, it is. Hardly

anyone is immune altogether.

Our brains are wired for quick

judgments, equipped with back roads and

shortcuts that simplify the task of taking in

and evaluating the countless inputs that our

environment throws at us every second.

It’s only natural. If we truly contemplated

every element, we’d be lost. We’d be

stuck. We’d never be able to move beyond

that first evaluative judgment. In fact, we

may not be able to make any judgment at

all. Our world would become far too

complex far too quickly. As William

James put it, “If we remembered

everything, we should on most occasions

be as ill off as if we remembered

nothing.”

Our way of looking at and thinking

about the world is tough to change and our

biases are remarkably sticky. But tough

and sticky doesn’t mean unchangeable and

immutable. Even the IAT, as it turns out,

can be bested—after interventions and

mental exercises that target the very biases

it tests, that is. For instance, if you show

individuals pictures of blacks enjoying a

picnic before you have them take the

racial IAT, the bias score decreases

significantly.

A Holmes and a Watson may both make

instantaneous judgments—but the shortcuts

their brains are using could not be more

different. Whereas Watson epitomizes the

default brain, the structure of our mind’s

connections in their usual, largely passive

state, Holmes shows what is possible:

how we can rewire that structure to

circumvent those instantaneous reactions

that prevent a more objective and thorough

judgment of our surroundings.

For instance, consider the use of the

IAT in a study of medical bias. First, each

doctor was shown a picture of a fifty-

year-old man. In some pictures, the man

was white. In some, he was black. The

physicians were then asked to imagine the

man in the picture as a patient who

presented with symptoms that resembled a

heart attack. How would they treat him?

Once they gave an answer, they took the

racial IAT.

In one regard, the results were typical.

Most doctors showed some degree of bias

on the IAT. But then, an interesting thing

happened: bias on the test did not

necessarily translate into bias in treating

the hypothetical patient. On average,

doctors were just as likely to say they

would prescribe the necessary drugs to

blacks as to whites—and oddly enough,

the more seemingly biased physicians

actually treated the two groups more

equally than the less biased ones.

What our brains do on the level of

instinct and how we act are not one and

the same. Does this mean that biases

disappeared, that their brains didn’t leap

to conclusions from implicit associations

that occurred at the most basic level of

cognition? Hardly. But it does mean that

the right motivation can counteract such

bias and render it beside the point in terms

of actual behavior. How our brains jump

to conclusions is not how we are destined

to act. Ultimately, our behavior is ours to

control—if only we want to do so.

What happened when you saw Joe

Stranger at the cocktail party is the exact

same thing that happens even to someone

as adept at observation as Mr. Sherlock

Holmes. But just like the doctors who

have learned over time to judge based on

certain symptoms and disregard others as

irrelevant, Holmes has learned to filter his

brain’s instincts into those that should and

those that should not play into his

assessment of an unknown individual.

What enables Holmes to do this? To

observe the process in action, let’s revisit

that initial encounter in The Sign of Four,

when Mary Morstan, the mysterious lady

caller, first makes her appearance. Do the

two men see Mary in the same light? Not

at all. The first thing Watson notices is the

lady’s appearance. She is, he remarks, a

rather

attractive

woman.

Irrelevant,

counters Holmes. “It is of the first

importance not to allow your judgment to

be biased by personal qualities,” he

explains. “A client is to me a mere unit, a

factor in a problem. The emotional

qualities

are

antagonistic

clear

reasoning. I assure you that the most

winning woman I ever knew was hanged

for poisoning three children for their

insurance-money, and the most repellent

man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist

who has spent nearly a quarter of a

million upon the London poor.”

But Watson won’t have it. “In this case,

however—” he interrupts.

Holmes shakes his head. “I never make

exceptions. An exception disproves the

rule.”

Holmes’s point is clear enough. It’s not

that you won’t experience emotion. Nor

are you likely to be able to suspend the

impressions

that

form

almost

automatically in your mind. (Of Miss

Morstan, he remarks, “I think she is one of

the most charming young ladies I ever

met”—as high a compliment from Holmes

as they come.) But you don’t have to let

those impressions get in the way of

objective reasoning. (“But love is an

emotional

thing,

and

whatever

emotional is opposed to that true cold

reason which I place above all things,”

Holmes

immediately

adds

his

acknowledgment of Mary’s charm.) You

can recognize their presence, and then

consciously cast them aside. You can

acknowledge that Jane reminds you of

your high school frenemy, and then move

past it. That emotional luggage doesn’t

matter nearly as much as you may think it

does. And never think that something is an

exception. It’s not.

But oh how difficult it can be to apply

either of these principles—the discounting

of emotion or the need to never make

exceptions, no matter how much you may

want to—in reality. Watson desperately

wants to believe the best about the woman

who so captivates him, and to attribute

anything unfavorable about her to less-

than-favorable

circumstances.

His

undisciplined mind proceeds to violate

each of Holmes’s rules for proper

reasoning and perception: from making an

exception, to allowing in emotion, to

failing altogether to attain that cold

impartiality that Holmes makes his mantra.

From the very start, Watson is

predisposed to think well of their guest.

After all, he is already in a relaxed, happy

mood, bantering in typical fashion with his

detective flatmate. And rightly or wrongly,

that mood will spill over into his

judgment. It’s called the affect heuristic:

how we feel is how we think. A happy

and relaxed state makes for a more

accepting and less guarded worldview.

Before Watson even knows that someone

is soon to arrive, he is already set to like

the visitor.

And once the visitor enters? It’s just

like that party. When we see a stranger,

our mind experiences a predictable

pattern of activation, which has been

predetermined by our past experiences

and our current goals—which includes our

motivation—and state of being. When

Miss Mary Morstan enters 221B Baker

Street, Watson sees, “a blonde young lady,

small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in

the most perfect taste. There was,

however, a plainness and simplicity about

her costume which bore with it a

suggestion of limited means.” Right away,

the image stirs up memories in his head of

other young, dainty blondes Watson has

known—but not frivolous ones, mind you;

ones who are plain and simple and

undemanding, who do not throw their

beauty in your face but smooth it over with

a dress that is somber beige, “untrimmed

and

unbraided.”

And

so,

Mary’s

expression becomes “sweet and amiable,

her large blue eyes were singularly

spiritual

and

sympathetic.”

Watson

concludes his opening paean with the

words, “In an experience of women which

extends over many nations and three

separate continents, I have never looked

upon a face which gave a clearer promise

of a refined and sensitive nature.”

Right away, the good doctor has jumped

from a color of hair and complexion and a

style of dress to a far more reaching

character judgment. Mary’s appearance

suggests simplicity; perhaps so. But

sweetness?

Amiability?

Spirituality?

Sympathy? Refinement and sensitivity?

Watson has no basis whatsoever for any

of these judgments. Mary has yet to say a

single word in his presence. All she has

done is enter the room. But already a host

of biases are at play, vying with one

another to create a complete picture of this

stranger.

In one moment, Watson has called on

his reputedly vast experience, on the

immense stores of his attic that are labeled

WOMEN I’VE KNOWN, to flesh out his new

acquaintance. While his knowledge of

women may indeed span three separate

continents, we have no reason to believe

t ha t his assessment here is accurate—

unless, of course, we are told that in the

past, Watson has always judged a

woman’s character successfully from first

glance. And somehow I doubt that’s the

case. Watson is conveniently forgetting

how long it took to get to know his past

companions—assuming he ever got to

know them at all. (Consider also that

Watson is a bachelor, just returned from

war, wounded, and largely friendless.

What would his chronic motivational state

likely be? Now, imagine he’d been

instead married, successful, the toast of

the town. Replay his evaluation of Mary

accordingly.)

This tendency is a common and

powerful one, known as the availability

heuristic: we use what is available to the

mind at any given point in time. And the

easier it is to recall, the more confident

we are in its applicability and truth. In one

of the classic demonstrations of the effect,

individuals who had read unfamiliar

names in the context of a passage later

judged those names as famous—based

simply on the ease with which they could

recall them—and were subsequently more

confident in the accuracy of their

judgments. To them, the ease of familiarity

was proof enough. They didn’t stop to

think that availability based on earlier

exposure could possibly be the culprit for

their feelings of effortlessness.

Over and over, experimenters have

demonstrated that when something in the

environment, be it an image or a person or

a word, serves as a prime, individuals are

better able to access related concepts—in

other words, those concepts have become

more available—and they are more likely

to use those concepts as confident

answers, whether or not they are accurate.

Mary’s looks have triggered a memory

cascade of associations in Watson’s brain,

which in turn creates a mental picture of

Mary that is composed of whatever

associations she happened to have

activated but does not necessarily

resemble the “real Mary.” The closer

Mary fits with the images that have been

called

up—the

representativeness

heuristic—the stronger the impression

will be, and the more confident Watson

will be in his objectivity.

Forget everything else that Watson may

or may not know. Additional information

is not welcome. Here’s one question the

gallant doctor isn’t likely to ask himself:

how many actual women does he meet

who end up being refined, sensitive,

spiritual, sympathetic, sweet, and amiable,

all at once? How typical is this type of

person if you consider the population at

large? Not very, I venture to guess—even

if we factor in the blond hair and blue

eyes, which are doubtless signs of

saintliness and all. And how many women

in total is he calling to mind when he sees

Mary? One? Two? One hundred? What is

the total sample size? Again, I’m willing

to bet it is not very large—and the sample

that has been selected is inherently a

biased one.

While we don’t know what precise

associations are triggered in the doctor’s

head when he first sees Miss Morstan, my

bet would be on the most recent ones (the

recency effect), the most salient ones (the

ones

that

are

most

colorful

and

memorable; all of those blue-eyed blondes

who ended up being uninteresting, drab,

and unimpressive? I doubt he is now

remembering them; they may as well have

never existed), and the most familiar ones

(the ones that his mind has returned to

most often—again, likely not the most

representative of the lot). And those have

biased his view of Mary from the onset.

Chances are, from this point forward, it

will take an earthquake, and perhaps even

more than that, to shake Watson from his

initial assessment.

His steadfastness will be all the

stronger because of the physical nature of

the initial trigger: faces are perhaps the

most powerful cue we have—and the most

likely to prompt associations and actions

that just won’t go away.

To see the power of the face in action,

look at these pictures.

1. Which face is the more attractive?

and 2. Which person is the more

competent?

If I were to flash these pictures at you

for as little as one-tenth of a second, your

opinion would already most likely agree

with the judgments of hundreds of others

to whom I’ve shown pictures of these two

individuals in the same way. But that’s not

all: those faces you just looked at aren’t

random. They are the faces of two rival

political candidates, who ran in the 2004

U.S. senate election in Wisconsin. And the

rating you gave for competence (an index

of both strength and trustworthiness) will

be highly predictive of the actual winner

(it’s the man on the left; did your

competence evaluation match up?). In

approximately 70 percent of cases,

competence ratings given in under a

second of exposure will predict the actual

results of political races. And that

predictability will hold in elections that

range from the United States to England,

from Finland to Mexico, and from

Germany to Australia. From the strength of

a chin and the trace of a smile, our brains

decide who will serve us best. (And look

at the result: Warren G. Harding, the most

perfect square-jawed president that ever

was.) We are wired to do just what we

shouldn’t: jump to conclusions based on

some subtle, subconscious cue that we’re

not even aware of—and the repercussions

extend to situations far more serious than

Watson’s trusting too much in a client’s

pretty face. Unprepared, he never stands a

chance at that “true cold reason” that

Holmes seems to hold in the tips of his

fingers.

Just

fleeting

impression

competence can form the basis of a

political vote, so Watson’s initial

overwhelmingly positive assessment of

Mary lays the foundation for further action

that reinforces that initial view. His

judgments from here on out will be

influenced strongly by the effects of

primacy—the persistent strength of first

impressions.

With his eyes shaded by a rosy glow,

Watson is now much more likely to fall

prey to the halo effect (if one element—

here, physical appearance—strikes you as

positive, you are likely to see the other

elements as positive as well, and

everything that doesn’t fit will easily—

and subconsciously—be reasoned away).

He will also be susceptible to the classic

correspondence bias: everything negative

about Mary will be seen as a result of

external circumstances—stress, strain,

bad luck, whatever it may be—and

everything positive of her character. She

will get credit for all that’s good, and the

environment will shoulder blame for all

that’s bad. Chance and luck? Not

important. The knowledge that we are, as

a general rule, extremely bad at making

any sort of prediction about the future, be

it for an event or a behavior? Likewise

irrelevant to his judgment. In fact, unlike

Holmes, he likely hasn’t even considered

that possibility—or evaluated his own

competence.

All the while, Watson will likely

remain completely unaware of the hoops

through which his mind is jumping to

maintain a coherent impression of Mary,

to form a narrative based on discrete

inputs that makes sense and tells an

intuitively appealing story. And in a self-

fulfilling prophecy of sorts, which could

potentially

have

rather

perverse

consequences, his own behavior could

prompt Mary to act in a way that seems to

confirm his initial impression of her. Act

toward Mary as if she were a beautiful

saint, and she will likely respond to him

with a saintly smile. Start off thinking that

what you see is right; end by getting just

what you’d expected. And all the while,

you remain blissfully unaware that you’ve

done anything other than remain perfectly

rational and objective. It’s a perfect

illusion of validity, and its impact is

incredibly difficult to shake, even in

circumstances where all logic is against it.

(As

example,

consider

that

interviewers tend to make up their minds

about a candidate within the first few

minutes—and sometimes less—of meeting

them. And if the candidate’s subsequent

behavior paints a different picture, they

are still unlikely to alter their opinion—no

matter how damning the evidence may be.)

Let’s imagine that you need to decide

on the suitability of a certain person—

let’s call her Amy—as a potential

teammate. Let me tell you a bit about Amy.

First, she is intelligent and industrious.

Stop right there. Chances are you are

already thinking, Okay, yes, great, she

would be a wonderful person to work

with, intelligent and industrious are both

things I’d love to see in a partner. But

what if I was about to continue the

statement with, “envious and stubborn”?

No longer as good, right? But your initial

bias will be remarkably powerful. You

will be more likely to discount the latter

characteristics and to weigh the former

more heavily—all because of your initial

intuition. Reverse the two, and the

opposite

happens;

amount

intelligence and industriousness can save

someone who you saw initially as envious

and stubborn.

consider

the

following

two

descriptions of an individual.

intelligent, skillful, industrious, warm,

determined, practical, cautious

intelligent, skillful, industrious, cold,

determined, practical, cautious

If you look at the two lists, you might

notice that they are identical, save for one

word: warm or cold. And yet, when study participants heard one of the two

descriptions and were then asked to pick

which of two traits best described the

person (in a list of eighteen pairs from

which they always had to choose one trait

from each pair), the final impression that

the two lists produced was markedly

different. Subjects were more likely to

find person one generous—and person

two the opposite. Yes, you might say, but

generosity is an inherent aspect of warmth.

Isn’t it normal to make that judgment?

Let’s assume that is the case. Yet

participants went a step further in their

judgment: they also rated person one in

consistently more positive terms than

person two, on traits that had nothing

whatsoever to do with warmth. Not only

did they find person one more sociable

and popular (fair enough), but they were

also far more likely to think him wise,

happy, good natured, humorous, humane,

good looking, altruistic, and imaginative.

That’s the difference a single word can

make: it can color your entire perception

of a person, even if every other

descriptive point remains the same. And

that first impression will last, just as

Watson’s captivation with Miss Morstan’s

hair, eyes, and dress will continue to

color his evaluation of her as a human

being and his perception of what she is

and is not capable of doing. We like being

consistent and we don’t like being wrong.

And so, our initial impressions tend to

hold an outsized impact, no matter the

evidence that may follow.

What about Holmes? Once Mary leaves

and Watson exclaims, “What a very

attractive woman!” Holmes’s response is

simple: “Is she? I did not observe.” And

thereafter follows his admonition to be

careful lest personal qualities overtake

your judgment.

Does Holmes mean, literally, that he

did not observe? Quite the contrary. He

observed all of the same physical details

as did Watson, and likely far more to

boot. What he didn’t do was make

Watson’s judgment: that she is a very

attractive woman. In that statement,

Watson

has

gone

from

objective

observation

subjective

opinion,

imbuing physical facts with emotional

qualities. That is precisely what Holmes

warns

against.

Holmes

may

even

acknowledge the objective nature of her

attractiveness (though if you’ll recall,

Watson begins by saying that Mary’s has

“neither regularity of feature nor beauty of

complexion”), but he diregards the

observation as irrelevant in almost the

same breath as he perceives it.

Holmes and Watson don’t just differ in

the stuff of their attics—in one attic, the

furniture acquired by a detective and self-

proclaimed loner, who loves music and

opera, pipe smoking and indoor target

practice, esoteric works on chemistry and

renaissance architecture; in the other, that

of a war surgeon and self-proclaimed

womanizer, who loves a hearty dinner and

a pleasant evening out—but in the way

their minds organize that furniture to begin

with. Holmes knows the biases of his attic

like the back of his hand, or the strings of

his violin. He knows that if he focuses on

a pleasant feeling, he will drop his guard.

He knows that if he lets an incidental

physical feature get to him, he will run the

risk of losing objectivity in the rest of his

observation. He knows that if he comes

too quickly to a judgment, he will miss

much of the evidence against it and pay

more attention to the elements that are in

its favor. And he knows how strong the

pull to act according to a prejudgment will

be.

And so he chooses to be selective with

those elements that he allows inside his

head to begin with. That means with both

the furniture that exists already and the

potential furniture that is vying to get past

the hippocampal gateway and make its

way into long-term storage. For we should

never forget that any experience, any

aspect of the world to which we bring our

attention is a future memory ready to be

made, a new piece of furniture, a new

picture to be added to the file, a new

element to fit in to our already crowded

attics. We can’t stop our minds from

forming basic judgments. We can’t control

every piece of information that we retain.

But we can know more about the filters

that generally guard our attic’s entrance

and use our motivation to attend more to

the things that matter for our goals—and

give less weight to those that don’t.

Holmes is not an automaton, as the hurt

Watson calls him when he fails to share

his enthusiasm for Mary. (He, too, will

one day call a woman remarkable—Irene

Adler. But only after she has bested him in a battle of wits, showing herself to be a

more formidable opponent, male or

female, than he has ever encountered.) He

simply understands that everything is part

of a package and could just as well stem

from character as from circumstance,

irrespective of valence—and he knows

that attic space is precious and that we

should think carefully about what we add

to the boxes that line our minds.

Let’s go back to Joe or Jane Stranger.

How might the encounter have played out

differently had we taken Holmes’s

approach as a guide? You see Joe’s

baseball hat or Jane’s blue streak, the

associations—positive or negative as they

may be—come tumbling out. You’re

feeling like this is the person you do or do

not want to spend some time getting to

know . . . but before our Stranger opens

his mouth, you take just a moment to step

back from yourself. Or rather, step more

into yourself. Realize that the judgments in

your head had to come from somewhere—

they always do—and take another look at

the person who is making his way toward

you. Objectively, is there anything on

which to base your sudden impression?

Does Joe have a scowl? Did Jane just

push someone out of the way? No? Then

your dislike is coming from somewhere

else. Maybe if you reflect for just a

second, you will realize that it is the

baseball hat or the blue streak. Maybe you

won’t. In either case, you will have

acknowledged, first off, that you have

already predisposed yourself to either like

or dislike someone you haven’t even met;

and second, that you have admitted that

you must correct your impression. Who

knows, it might have been right. But at

least if you reach it a second time, it will

be based on objective facts and will come

after you’ve given Joe or Jane a chance to

talk. Now you can use the conversation to

actually

observe—physical

details,

mannerisms, words. A wealth of evidence

that you will treat with the full knowledge

that you have already decided, on some

level and at some earlier point, to lend

more weight to some signs than to others,

which

you

will

try

reweigh

accordingly.

Maybe Jane is nothing like your friend.

Maybe even though you and Joe don’t

share the same love of baseball, he is

actually someone you’d want to get to

know. Or maybe you were right all along.

The end result isn’t as important as

whether or not you stopped to recognize

that no judgment—no matter how positive

or negative, how convincing or seemingly

untouchable—begins with an altogether

blank slate. Instead, by the time a

judgment reaches our awareness, it has

already been filtered thoroughly by the

interaction of our brain attics and the

environment. We can’t consciously force

ourselves to stop these judgments from

forming, but we can learn to understand

our attics, their quirks, tendencies, and

idiosyncrasies, and to try our best to set

the starting point back to a more neutral

one, be it in judging a person or observing

a situation or making a choice.

A Prime Environment: The Power of

the Incidental

In the case of Mary Morstan or Joe and

Jane Stranger, elements of physical

appearance activated our biases, and these

elements were an intrinsic part of the

situation. Sometimes, however, our biases

are activated by factors that are entirely

unrelated to what we are doing—and

these elements are sneaky little fellows.

Even though they may be completely

outside our awareness—in fact, often for

that very reason—and wholly irrelevant to

whatever it is we’re doing, they can easily

and profoundly affect our judgment.

At every step, the environment primes

us. In the “Adventure of the Copper

Beeches,” Watson and Holmes are aboard

a train to the country. As they pass

Aldershot, Watson glances out the

window at the passing houses.

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried

with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh

from the fogs of Baker Street.

But Holmes shook his head gravely.

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that

it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn

like mine that I must look at everything

with reference to my own special subject.

You look at these scattered houses, and

you are impressed by their beauty. I look

at them, and the only thought which comes

to me is a feeling of their isolation and of

the impunity with which crime may be

committed there.”

Holmes and Watson may indeed be

looking at the same houses, but what they

see is altogether different. Even if Watson

manages to acquire all of Holmes’s skill

in observation, that initial experience will

still necessarily differ. For, not only are

Watson’s memories and habits wholly

distinct from Holmes’s, but so, too, are the

environmental triggers that catch his eye

and set his mind thinking along a certain

road.

Long before Watson exclaims at the

beauty of the passing houses, his mind has

been primed by its environment to think in

a certain way and to notice certain things.

While he is still sitting silently in the train

car, he notes the appeal of the scenery, an

“ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked

with fleecy white clouds drifting from

west to east.” The sun is shining brightly,

but there’s “an exhilarating nip in the air,

which set an edge to a man’s energy.” And

there, in the middle of the new, bright

spring leaves, are the houses. Is it all that

surprising, then, that Watson sees his

world bathed in a pink, happy glow? The

pleasantness

his

immediate

surroundings is priming him to be in a

positive mindset.

But that mindset, as it happens, is

altogether extraneous in forming other

judgments. The houses would remain the

same even if Watson were sad and

depressed; only his perception of them

would likely shift. (Might they not then

appear lonely and gloomy?) In this

particular case, it little matters whether

Watson perceives the houses as friendly

or not. But what if, say, he were forming

his judgment as a prelude to approaching

one of them, be it to ask to use a phone or

to conduct a survey or to investigate a

crime? Suddenly, how safe the houses are

matters a great deal. Do you really want to

knock on a door by yourself if there’s a

chance that the occupants living behind

that door are sinister and apt to commit

crime with impunity? Your judgment of

the house had better be correct—and not

the result of a sunny day. Just as we need

to know that our internal attics affect our

judgment outside of our awareness, so,

too, must we be aware of the impact that

the external world has on those judgments.

Just because something isn’t in our attic

doesn’t mean that it can’t influence our

attic’s filters in very real ways.

There is no such thing as the

“objective” environment. There is only

our perception of it, a perception that

depends in part on habitual ways of

thinking (Watson’s disposition) and in

part on the immediate circumstances (the

sunny day). But it’s tough for us to realize

the extent of the influence that our attic’s

filters have on our interpretation of the

world. When it comes to giving in to the

ideal spring day, unprepared Watson is

hardly alone—and should hardly be

blamed for his reaction. Weather is an

extremely powerful prime, one that affects

us regularly even though we may have

little idea of its impact. On sunny days, to

take

one

example,

people

report

themselves to be happier and to have

higher overall life satisfaction than on

rainy days. And they have no awareness at

all of the connection—they genuinely

believe themselves to be more fulfilled as

individuals when they see the sun shining

in a light blue sky, not unlike the one that

Watson sees from his carriage window.

The effect goes beyond simple self-

report and plays out in decisions that

matter a great deal. On rainy days,

students looking at potential colleges pay

more attention to academics than they do

on sunny days—and for every standard

deviation increase in cloud cover on the

day of the college visit, a student is 9

percent more likely to actually enroll in

that college. When the weather turns gray,

financial traders are more likely to make

risk-averse decisions; enter the sun, risk-

seeking choice increases. The weather

does much more than set a pretty scene. It

directly impacts what we see, what we

focus on, and how we evaluate the world.

But do you really want to base a college

choice, a judgment of your overall

happiness (I’d be curious to see if more

divorces or breakups were initiated on

rainy days than on sunny days), or a

business decision on the state of the

atmosphere?

Holmes, on the other hand, is oblivious

to the weather—he has been engrossed in

his newspaper for the entire train ride. Or

rather, he isn’t entirely oblivious, but he

realizes the importance of focused

attention and chooses to ignore the day,

much as he had dismissed Mary’s

attractiveness with an “I haven’t noticed.”

Of course he notices. The question is

whether or not he then chooses to attend,

to pay attention—and let his attic’s

contents change in any way as a result.

Who knows how the sun would have

affected him had he not had a case on his

mind and allowed his awareness to

wander, but as it is, he focuses on entirely

different details and a wholly different

context.

Unlike

Watson,

understandably anxious and preoccupied.

After all, he has just been summoned by a

young woman who stated that she had

come to her wit’s end. He is brooding. He

is entirely consumed by the puzzle that he

is about to encounter. Is it any surprise

then that he sees in the houses a reminder

of just the situation that has been

preoccupying his mind? It may not be as

incidental a prime as the weather has been

for Watson, but it is a prime nevertheless.

But, you may (correctly) argue, hasn’t

Watson been exposed to the exact same

telegram by the troubled client? Indeed he

has. But for him that matter is far from

mind. That’s the thing about primes: the

way it primes you and the way it primes

me may not be the same. Recall the earlier

discussion of our internal attic structure,

our habitual biases and modes of thought.

Those habitual thought patterns have to

interact with the environment for the full

effect of subtle, preconscious influences

on our thought process to take hold; and it

is they that largely impact what we notice

and how that element then works its way

through our minds.

Imagine that I’ve presented you with

sets of five words and have asked you to

make four-word sentences out of each set.

The words may seem innocuous enough,

but hidden among them are the so-called

target stimuli: words like lonely, careful,

Florida, helpless, knits, and gullible. Do they remind you of anything? If I lump

them all together, they very well might

remind you of old age. But spread them

out over thirty sets of five-word

combinations, and the effect is far less

striking—so much less so, in fact, that not

a single participant who saw the sentences

—of a sample of sixty, in the two original

studies of thirty participants each—

realized that they had any thematic

coherence. But that lack of awareness

didn’t mean a lack of impact.

If you’re like one of the hundreds of

people on whom this particular priming

task has been used since it was originally

introduced in 1996, several things will

have happened. You will walk slower

now than you did before, and you may

even hunch just a little (both evidence of

the ideomotor effect of the prime—or its

influence on actual physical action).

You’ll perform worse on a series of

cognitive ability tasks. You’ll be slower

to respond to certain questions. You may

even feel somehow older and wearier than

you had previously. Why? You’ve just

been exposed to the Florida effect: a

series of age-related stereotypes that,

without your awareness, activated a series

of nodes and concepts in your brain that in

turn prompted you to think and act in a

certain fashion. It’s priming at its most

basic.

Which particular nodes were touched,

however, and how the activation spread

depends on your own attic and its specific

features. If, for instance, you are from a

culture that values highly the wisdom of

the elderly, while you would have still

likely slowed down your walk, you may

have become slightly faster at the same

cognitive tasks. If, on the other hand, you

are someone who holds a highly negative

attitude toward the elderly, you may have

experienced physical effects that were the

opposite of those exhibited by the others:

you may have walked more quickly and

stood up just a bit straighter—to prove

that you are unlike the target prime. And

that’s the point: the prime doesn’t exist in

a vacuum. Its effects differ. But although

individuals may respond differently, they

will nevertheless respond.

That, in essence, is why the same

telegram may mean something different for

Watson and for Holmes. For Holmes, it

triggers the expected pattern associated

with a mindset that is habitually set to

solve crimes. For Watson, it hardly

matters and is soon trumped by the pretty

sky and the chirping birds. And is that

really such a surprise? In general, I think

it’s safe to suppose that Watson sees the

world as a friendlier place than does

Holmes. He often expresses genuine

amazement at Holmes’s suspicions, awe at

many of his darker deductions. Where

Holmes easily sees sinister intent, Watson

notices a beautiful and sympathetic face.

Where Holmes brings to bear his

encyclopedic knowledge of past crime,

and at once applies the past to the present,

Watson has no such store to call upon and

must rely upon what he does know:

medicine, the war, and his brief sojourn

with the master detective. Add to that

Holmes’s tendency, when on an active

case and seeking to piece together its

details, to drift into the world of his own

mind, closing himself off to external

distractions that are irrelevant to the

subject at hand, as compared to Watson,

who is ever happy to note the beauty of a

spring day and the appeal of rolling hills,

and you have two attics that differ enough

in structure and content that they will

likely filter just about any input in quite

distinct fashion.

We must never forget to factor in the

habitual mindset. Every situation is a

combination of habitual and in-the-

moment goals and motivation—our attic’s

structure and its current state, so to speak.

The prime, be it a sunny day or an anxious

telegram or a list of words, may activate

our thoughts in a specific direction, but

what and how it activates depends on

what is inside our attic to begin with and

how our attic’s structure has been used

over time.

But here’s the good news: a prime stops

being a prime once we’re aware of its

existence. Those studies of weather and

mood? The effect disappeared if subjects

were first made explicitly aware of the

rainy day: if they were asked about the

weather prior to stating their happiness

level, the weather no longer had an

impact. In studies of the effect of the

environment on emotion, if a nonemotional

reason is given for a subject’s state, the

prime effect is likewise eliminated. For

instance, in one of the classic studies of

emotion, if you’re given a shot of

adrenaline and then you interact with

someone who is displaying strong emotion

(which could be either positive or

negative), you are likely to mirror that

emotion. However, if you are told the shot

you received will have physically

arousing effects, the mirroring will be

mitigated. Indeed, priming studies can be

notoriously difficult to replicate: bring any

attention at all to the priming mechanism,

and you’ll likely find the effect go down to

zero. When we are aware of the reason for

our action, it stops influencing us: we now

have something else to which to attribute

whatever emotions or thoughts may have

been activated, and so, we no longer think

that the impetus is coming from our own

minds, the result of our own volition.

Activating Our Brain’s Passivity

So, how does Holmes manage to extricate

himself from his attic’s instantaneous, pre-

attentional judgments? How does he

manage to dissociate himself from the

external influences that his environment

exerts on his mind at any given moment?

That very awareness and presence are the

key. Holmes has made the passive stage of

absorbing information like a leaky sponge

—some gets in, some goes in one hole and

right out the other, and the sponge has no

say or opinion on the process—into an

active process, the same type of

observation that we will soon discuss in

detail. And he has made that active

process the brain’s default setting.

At the most basic level, he realizes—as

now you do—how our thought process

begins and why it’s so important to pay

close attention right from the start. If I

were to stop you and explain every reason

for your impressions, you may not change

them (“But of course I’m still right!”), but

at least you will know where they came

from. And gradually, you may find

yourself catching your mind before it

leaps to a judgment—in which case you

will be far more likely to listen to its

wisdom.

Holmes takes nothing, not a single

impression, for granted. He does not

allow just any trigger that happens to catch

his eye to dictate what will or won’t make

it into his attic and how his attic’s contents

will or won’t be activated. He remains

constantly active and constantly vigilant,

lest a stray prime worm its way into the

walls of his pristine mind space. And

while that constant attention may be

exhausting, in situations that matter the

effort may be well worth it—and with

time, we may find that it is becoming less

and less effortful.

All it takes, in essence, is to ask

yourself the same questions that Holmes

poses as a matter of course. Is something

superfluous to the matter at hand

influencing my judgment at any given

point? (The answer will almost always be

yes.) If so, how do I adjust my perception

accordingly? What has influenced my

first impression—and has that first

impression in turn influenced others? It’s

not that Holmes is not susceptible to

priming; it’s that he knows its power all

too well. So where Watson at once passes

judgment on a woman or a country house,

Holmes

immediately

corrects

his

impression with a Yes, but . . . . His

message is simple: never forget that an

initial impression is only that, and take a

moment to reflect on what caused it and

what that may signify for your overall aim.

Our brains will do certain things as a

matter of course, whether or not we want

it to. We can’t change that. But we can

change whether or not we take that initial

judgment for granted—or probe it in

greater depth. And we should never forget

that potent combination of mindfulness and

motivation.

In other words, be skeptical of yourself

and of your own mind. Observe actively,

going beyond the passivity that is our

default state. Was something the result of

an actual objective behavior (before you

term Mary saintly, did you ever observe

her doing something that would lead you

to believe it?), or just a subjective

impression

(well,

she looked

incredibly nice)?

When I was in college, I helped run a

global model United Nations conference.

Each year we would travel to a different

city and invite university students from all

over to join in a simulation. My role was

committee chair: I prepared topics, ran

debates, and, at the end of the conferences,

awarded prizes to the students I felt had

performed

the

best.

Straightforward

enough. Except, that is, when it came to

the prizes.

My first year I noticed that Oxford and

Cambridge

went

home

with

disproportionate

number

speaker

awards. Were those students simply that

much better, or was there something else

going on? I suspected the latter. After all,

representatives from the best universities

in the world were taking part, and while

Oxford and Cambridge were certainly

exceptional schools, I didn’t know that

they would necessarily and consistently

have the best delegates. What was going

on? Were my fellow award givers

somehow, well, biased?

The following year I decided to see if I

could find out. I tried to watch my reaction

to each student as he spoke, noting my

impressions, the arguments that were

raised, how convincing the points were,

and how persuasively they were argued.

And here’s where I found something that

was rather alarming: to my ear, the Oxford

and Cambridge students sounded smarter.

Put two students next to each other, have

them say the exact same thing, and I would

like the one with the British accent more.

It made no sense whatsoever, but in my

mind that accent was clearly activating

some sort of stereotype that then biased

the rest of the judgment—until, as we

neared the end of the conference and the

time for prize decisions approached, I

was certain that my British delegates were

the best of the lot. It was not a pleasant

realization.

My next step was to actively resist it. I

tried to focus on content alone: what was

each student saying and how was he

saying it? Did it add to the discussion?

Did it raise points in need of raising? Did

it, on the other hand, simply reframe

someone else’s observation or fail to add

anything truly substantive?

I’d be lying if I said the process was

easy. Try as I might, I kept finding myself

ensnared by the intonation and accent, by

the cadence of sentences and not their

content. And here it gets truly scary: at the

end, I still had the urge to give my Oxford

delegate the prize for best speaker. She

really was the best, I found myself saying.

And aren’t I correcting too far in the

other direction if I fail to acknowledge

as much, in effect penalizing her just for

being British? I wasn’t the problem. My

awards would be well deserved even if

they did happen to go to an Oxford

student. It was everyone else who was

biased.

Except, my Oxford delegate wasn’t the

best. When I looked at my painstaking

notes, I found several students who had

consistently outperformed her. My notes

and my memory and impression were at

complete odds. In the end, I went with the

notes. But it was a struggle up until the

last moment. And even after, I couldn’t

quite kick the nagging feeling that the

Oxford girl had been robbed.

Our intuitions are powerful even when

entirely inaccurate. And so it is essential

to ask, when in the grip of a profound

intuition (this is a wonderful person; a

beautiful house; a worthy endeavor; a

gifted debater): on what is my intuition

based? And can I really trust it—or is it

just the result of the tricks of my mind? An

objective

external

check,

committee notes, is helpful, but it’s not

always possible. Sometimes we just need

to realize that even if we are certain we

aren’t biased in any way, that nothing

extraneous is affecting our judgments and

choices, chances are that we are not acting

in an entirely rational or objective

fashion.

that

realization—that

oftentimes it is best not to trust your own

judgment—lies the key to improving your

judgment to the point where it can in fact

be trusted. What’s more, if we are

motivated to be accurate, our initial

encoding may have less opportunity to

spiral out of control to begin with.

But even beyond the realization is the

constant practice of the thing. Accurate

intuition is really nothing more than

practice, of letting skill replace learned

heuristics. Just as we aren’t inattentive to

begin with, we aren’t born destined to act

in keeping with our faulty thought habits.

We just end up doing so because of repeat

exposure and practice—and a lack of the

same mindful attention that Holmes makes

sure to give to his every thought. We may

not realize that we have reinforced our

brains to think in a certain way, but that is

in fact what we have done. And that’s both

the bad news and the good news—if we

taught our brains, we can also unteach

them, or teach them differently. Any habit

is a habit that can be changed into another

habit. Over time, the skill can change the

heuristic. As Herbert Simon, one of the

founders of what we now call the field of

judgment and decision making, puts it,

“Intuition is nothing more and nothing less

than recognition.”

Holmes has thousands of hours of

practice on us. His habits have been

formed over countless opportunities,

twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year,

for every year since his early childhood.

It’s easy to become discouraged in his

presence—but it might, in the end, be

more productive to simply become

inspired instead. If he can do it, so can

we. It will just take time. Habits that have

been developed over such an extensive

period that they form the very fiber of our

minds don’t change easily.

Being aware is the first step. Holmes’s

awareness enables him to avoid many of

the faults that plague Watson, the

inspectors,

his

clients,

and

his

adversaries. But how does he go from

awareness to something more, something

actionable? That process begins with

observation: once we understand how our

brain attic works and where our thought

process originates, we are in a position to

direct our attention to the things that matter

—and away from the things that don’t.

And it is to that task of mindful

observation that we now turn.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“What the deuce is [the solar system] to

me?” “I consider that a man’s brain

originally is like an empty attic . . .”

from A Study in Scarlet, chapter 2: The

Science of Deduction, p. 15.

“Give me problems, give me work . . .”

from The Sign of Four, chapter 1: The

Science of Deduction, p. 5.

“Miss Morstan entered the room . . .”

“It is of the first importance not to allow

your judgment to be biased by personal

qualities.”

from The Sign of Four,

chapter 2: The Statement of the Case, p.

13.

“ ‘Are they not fresh and beautiful?’ I

cried . . .” from The Adventures of

Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the

Copper Beeches,” p. 292.

PART TWO

CHAPTER THREE

Stocking the Brain Attic: The

Power of Observation

It was Sunday night and time for my dad to

whip out the evening’s reading. Earlier in

the week we had finished The Count of

Monte Cristo—after a harrowing journey

that took several months to complete—and

the bar was set high indeed. And there, far

from the castles, fortresses, and treasures

of France, I found myself face-to-face

with a man who could look at a new

acquaintance for the first time and

proclaim with utter certainty, “You have

been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” And

Watson’s reply—“How on earth did you

know

that?”—was

exactly

how

immediately felt. How in the world did he

know that? The matter, it was clear to me,

went beyond simple observation of detail.

Or did it? When Watson wonders how

Holmes could have possibly known about

his wartime service, he posits that

someone told the detective beforehand.

It’s simply impossible that someone could

tell such a thing just from . . . looking.

“Nothing of the sort,” says Holmes. It is

entirely possible. He continues:

I knew you came from Afghanistan. From

long habit the train of thoughts ran so

swiftly through my mind that I arrived at

the conclusion without being conscious of

intermediate steps. There were such steps,

however. The train of reasoning ran,

“Here is a gentleman of a medical type,

but with the air of a military man. Clearly

an army doctor, then. He has just come

from the tropics, for his face is dark, and

that is not the natural tint of his skin, for

his wrists are fair. He has undergone

hardship and sickness, as his haggard face

says clearly. His left arm has been

injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural

manner. Where in the tropics could an

English army doctor have seen much

hardship and got his arm wounded?

Clearly in Afghanistan.” The whole train

of thought did not occupy a second. I then

remarked that you came from Afghanistan,

and you were astonished.

Sure enough, the starting point seems to

be observation, plain and simple. Holmes

looks at Watson and gleans at once details

of his physical appearance, his demeanor,

his manner. And out of those he forms a

picture of the man as a whole—just as the

real-life Joseph Bell had done in the

presence of the astonished Arthur Conan

Doyle.

But that’s not all. Observation with a

capital O—the way Holmes uses the word

when he gives his new companion a brief

history of his life with a single glance

— does

entail

than,

well,

observation (the lowercase kind). It’s not

just about the passive process of letting

objects enter into your visual field. It is

about knowing what and how to observe

and directing your attention accordingly:

what details do you focus on? What

details do you omit? And how do you take

in and capture those details that you do

choose to zoom in on? In other words,

how do you maximize your brain attic’s

potential? You don’t just throw any old

detail up there, if you remember Holmes’s

early admonitions; you want to keep it as

clean as possible. Everything we choose

to notice has the potential to become a

future furnishing of our attics—and what’s

more, its addition will mean a change in

the attic’s landscape that will affect, in

turn, each future addition. So we have to

choose wisely.

Choosing wisely means being selective.

It means not only looking but looking

properly, looking with real thought. It

means looking with the full knowledge

that what you note—and how you note it—

will form the basis of any future

deductions you might make. It’s about

seeing the full picture, noting the details

that matter, and understanding how to

contextualize those details within a

broader framework of thought.

Why does Holmes note the details he

does in Watson’s appearance—and why

did his real-life counterpart Bell choose

to observe what he did in the demeanor of

his new patient? (“You see gentlemen,”

the surgeon told his students, “the man

was a respectful man but did not remove

his hat. They do not in the army, but he

would have learned civilian ways had he

been long discharged. He had an air of

authority,” he continued, “and is obviously

Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is

elephantiasis, which is West Indian and

not British, and the Scottish regiments are

at present in that particular land.” And

how did he know which of the many

details

the

patient’s

physical

appearance were important? That came

from sheer practice, over many days and

years. Dr. Bell had seen so many patients,

heard so many life stories, made so many

diagnoses that at some point, it all became

natural—just as it did for Holmes. A

young, inexperienced Bell would have

hardly been capable of the same

perspicacity.)

Holmes’s explanation is preceded by

the two men’s discussion of the article

“The Book of Life” that Holmes had

written for the morning paper—the same

article I referred to earlier, which

explains how the possibility of an Atlantic

or a Niagara could emerge from a single

drop of water. After that aqueous start,

Holmes proceeds to expand the principle

to human interaction.

Before turning to those moral and mental

aspects of the matter which present the

greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin

by mastering more elementary problems.

Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn

at a glance to distinguish the history of the

man, and the trade or profession to which

he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise

may seem, it sharpens the faculties of

observation, and teaches one where to

look and what to look for. By a man’s

finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his

boots, by his trouser-knees, by the

callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by

his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each

of these things a man’s calling is plainly

revealed. That all united should fail to

enlighten the competent inquirer in any

case is almost inconceivable.

Let’s consider again how Holmes

approaches Watson’s stint in Afghanistan.

When he lists the elements that allowed

him to pinpoint the location of Watson’s

sojourn, he mentions, in one example of

many, a tan in London—something that is

clearly not representative of that climate

and so must have been acquired elsewhere

—as illustrating his having arrived from a

tropical location. His face, however, is

haggard. Clearly then, not a vacation, but

something that made him unwell. And his

bearing? An unnatural stiffness in one arm,

such a stiffness as could result from an

injury.

Tropics, sickness, injury: take them

together, as pieces of a greater picture,

and voilà. Afghanistan. Each observation

is taken in context and in tandem with the

others—not just as a stand-alone piece but

as something that contributes to an integral

whole. Holmes doesn’t just observe. As

he looks, he asks the right questions about

those observations, the questions that will

allow him to put it all together, to deduce

that ocean from the water drop. He need

not have known about Afghanistan per se

to know that Watson came from a war; he

may not have known what to call it then,

but he could have well come up with

something along the lines of, “You have

just come from the war, I perceive.” Not

as impressive sounding, to be sure, but

having the same intent.

As for profession: the category doctor

p r e c e d e s military

doctor—category

before subcategory, never the other way

around. And about that doctor: quite a

prosaic guess at a man’s profession for

someone who spends his life dealing with

the spectacular. But prosaic doesn’t mean

wrong. As you’ll note if you read

Holmes’s other explanations, rarely do his

guesses of professions jump—unless with

good reason—into the esoteric, sticking

instead to more common elements—and

ones that are firmly grounded in

observation and fact, not based on

overheard information or conjecture. A

doctor is clearly a much more common

profession than, say, a detective, and

Holmes would never forget that. Each

observation must be integrated into an

existing knowledge base. In fact, were

Holmes to meet himself, he would

c a te go r i c a l l y not

guess

his

own

profession. After all, he is the self-

acknowledged only “consulting detective”

in the world. Base rates—or the frequency

of something in a general population—

matter when it comes to asking the right

questions.

For now, we have Watson, the doctor

from Afghanistan. As the good doctor

himself says, it’s all quite simple once you

see the elements that led to the conclusion.

But how do we learn to get to that

conclusion on our own?

It all comes down to a single word:

attention.

Paying Attention Is Anything but

Elementary

When Holmes and Watson first meet,

Holmes at once correctly deduces

Watson’s history. But what of Watson’s

impressions? First, we know he pays little

attention to the hospital—where he is

heading to meet Holmes for the first time

—as he enters it. “It was familiar ground,”

he tells us, and he needs “no guiding.”

When he reaches the lab, there is

Holmes

himself.

Watson’s

first

impression is shock at his strength.

Holmes grips his hand “with a strength for

which [Watson] should hardly have given

him credit.” His second is surprise at

Holmes’s interest in the chemical test that

he demonstrates for the newcomers. His

third, the first actual observation of

Holmes physically: “I noticed that [his

hand] was all mottled over with similar

pieces of plaster, and discoloured with

strong

acids.”

The

first

two

are

impressions—or

preimpressions—more

than observations, much closer to the

instinctive, preconscious judgment of Joe

Stranger or Mary Morstan in the prior

chapter. (Why shouldn’t Holmes be

strong? It seems that Watson has jumped

the gun by assuming him to be somehow

akin to a medical student, and thus

someone who is not associated with great

physical feats. Why shouldn’t Holmes be

excited? Again, Watson has already

imputed his own views of what does and

does not qualify as interesting onto his

new acquaintance.) The third is an

observation in line with Holmes’s own

remarks on Watson, the observations that

lead him to his deduction of service in

Afghanistan—except that Watson only

makes it because Holmes draws his

attention to it by putting a Band-Aid on his

finger and remarking on that very fact. “I

have to be careful,” he explains. “I dabble

with poisons a good deal.” The only real

observation, as it turns out, is one that

Watson doesn’t actually make until it is

pointed out to him.

Why the lack of awareness, the

superficial

and

highly

subjective

assessment? Watson answers for us when

he enumerates his flaws to Holmes—after

all, shouldn’t prospective flatmates know

the worst about each other? “I am

extremely lazy,” he says. In four words,

the essence of the entire problem. As it

happens, Watson is far from alone. That

fault bedevils most of us—at least when it

comes to paying attention. In 1540, Hans

Ladenspelder, a copperplate engraver,

finished work on an engraving that was

meant to be part of a series of seven: a

female, reclining on one elbow on a

pillar, her eyes closed, her head resting on

her left hand. Peeking out over her right

shoulder, a donkey. The engraving’s title:

“Acedia.” The series: The Seven Deadly

Sins.

Acedia means, literally, not caring.

Sloth. A laziness of the mind that the

Oxford Dictionary defines as “spiritual or

mental sloth; apathy.” It’s what the

Benedictines called the noonday demon,

that spirit of lethargy that tempted many a

devoted monk to hours of idleness where

there should have rightly been spiritual

labor. And it’s what today might pass for

attention

deficit

disorder,

easy

distractibility, low blood sugar, or

whatever label we choose to put on that

nagging inability to focus on what we need

to get done.

Whether you think of it as a sin, a

temptation, a lazy habit of mind, or a

medical condition, the phenomenon begs

the same question: why is it so damn hard

to pay attention?

It’s not necessarily our fault. As

neurologist Marcus Raichle learned after

decades of looking at the brain, our minds

are wired to wander. Wandering is their

default. Whenever our thoughts are

suspended between specific, discrete,

goal-directed activities, the brain reverts

to a so-called baseline, “resting” state—

but don’t let the word fool you, because

the brain isn’t at rest at all. Instead, it

experiences tonic activity in what’s now

known as the DMN, the default mode

network: the posterior cingulate cortex,

the adjacent precuneus, and the medial

prefrontal cortex. This baseline activation

suggests that the brain is constantly

gathering information from both the

external world and our internal states, and

what’s more, that it is monitoring that

information for signs of something that is

worth its attention. And while such a state

of readiness could be useful from an

evolutionary standpoint, allowing us to

detect potential predators, to think

abstractly and make future plans, it also

signifies something else: our minds are

made to wander. That is their resting

state. Anything more requires an act of

conscious will.

The modern emphasis on multitasking

plays into our natural tendencies quite

well, often in frustrating ways. Every new

input, every new demand that we place on

our attention is like a possible predator:

Oooh, says the brain. Maybe I should pay

attention to that instead. And then along

comes something else. We can feed our

mind wandering ad infinitum. The result?

We pay attention to everything and nothing

as a matter of course. While our minds

might be made to wander, they are not

made to switch activities at anything

approaching

the

speed

modern

demands. We were supposed to remain

ever ready to engage, but not to engage

with multiple things at once, or even in

rapid succession.

Notice once more how Watson pays

attention—or not, as the case may be—

when he first meets Holmes. It’s not that

he doesn’t see anything. He notes

“countless bottles. Broad, low tables

were scattered about, which bristled with

retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps,

with their blue flickering flames.” All that

detail, but nothing that makes a difference

to the task at hand—his choice of future

flatmate.

Attention is a limited resource. Paying

attention to one thing necessarily comes at

the expense of another. Letting your eyes

get too taken in by all of the scientific

equipment in the laboratory prevents you

from noticing anything of significance

about the man in that same room. We

cannot allocate our attention to multiple

things at once and expect it to function at

the same level as it would were we to

focus on just one activity. Two tasks

cannot possibly be in the attentional

foreground at the same time. One will

inevitably end up being the focus, and the

other—or others—more akin to irrelevant

noise, something to be filtered out. Or

worse still, none will have the focus and

all will be, albeit slightly clearer, noise,

but degrees of noise all the same.

Think of it this way. I am going to

present you with a series of sentences. For

each sentence, I want you to do two

things: one, tell me if it is plausible or not

by writing a P for plausible or a N for not plausible by the sentence; and two,

memorize the final word of the sentence

(at the end of all of the sentences, you will

need to state the words in order). You can

take no more than five seconds per

sentence, which includes reading the

sentence, deciding if it’s plausible or not,

and memorizing the final word. (You can

set a timer that beeps at every five-second

interval, or find one online—or try to

approximate as best you can.) Looking

back at a sentence you’ve already

completed is cheating. Imagine that each

sentence vanishes once you’ve read it.

Ready?

She was worried about being too hot so

she took her new shawl.

She drove along the bumpy road with a

view to the sea.

When we add on to our house, we will

build a wooden duck.

The workers knew he was not happy when

they saw his smile.

The place is such a maze it is hard to find

the right hall.

The little girl looked at her toys then

played with her doll.

Now please write down the final word

of each sentence in order. Again, do not

try to cheat by referring back to the

sentences.

Done? You’ve just completed a

sentence-verification and span task. How

did you do? Fairly well at first, I’m

guessing—but it may not have been quite

as simple as you’d thought it would be.

The mandatory time limit can make it

tricky, as can the need to not only read but

understand each sentence so that you can

verify it: instead of focusing on the last

word, you have to process the meaning of

the sentence as a whole as well. The more

sentences there are, the more complex they

become, the trickier it is to tell if they are

plausible or not, and the less time I give

you per sentence, the less likely you are to

be able to keep the words in mind,

especially if you don’t have enough time

to rehearse.

However many words you can manage

to recall, I can tell you several things.

First, if I were to have you look at each

sentence

computer

screen—

especially at those times when it was the

most difficult for you (i.e., when the

sentences were more complex or when

you were nearing the end of a list), so that

you were keeping more final words in

mind at the same time—you would have

very likely missed any other letters or

images that may have flashed on the

screen while you were counting: your eyes

would have looked directly at them, and

yet your brain would have been so

preoccupied with reading, processing, and

memorizing in a steady pattern that you

would have failed to grasp them entirely.

And your brain would have been right to

ignore them—it would have distracted you

too much to take active note, especially

when you were in the middle of your

given task.

Consider the policeman in A Study in

Scarlet who misses the criminal because

he’s too busy looking at the activity in the

house. When Holmes asks him whether the

street was empty, Rance (the policeman in

question) says, “Well, it was, as far as

anybody that could be of any good goes.”

And yet the criminal was right in front of

his eyes. Only, he didn’t know how to

look. Instead of a suspect, he saw a drunk

man—and failed to note any incongruities

or coincidences that might have told him

otherwise, so busy was he trying to focus

on his “real” job of looking at the crime

scene.

The phenomenon is often termed

attentional blindness, a process whereby a

focus on one element in a scene causes

other elements to disappear; I myself like

to call it attentive inattention. The concept

was pioneered by Ulric Neisser, the father

of cognitive psychology. Neisser noticed

how he could look out a window at

twilight and either see the external world

or focus on the reflection of the room in

the glass. But he couldn’t actively pay

attention to both. Twilight or reflection

had to give. He termed the concept

selective looking.

Later, in the laboratory, he observed

that individuals who watched two

superimposed videos in which people

engaged

distinct

activities—for

instance, in one video they were playing

cards, and in the other, basketball—could

easily follow the action in either of the

films but would miss entirely any

surprising event that happened in the

other. If, for example, they were watching

the basketball game, they would not notice

if the cardplayers suddenly stopped

playing cards and instead stood up to

shake hands. It was just like selective

listening—a phenomenon discovered in

the 1950s, in which people listening to a

conversation with one ear would miss

entirely something that was said in their

other ear—except, on an apparently much

broader scale, since it now applied to

multiple senses, not just to a single one.

And ever since that initial discovery, it

has been demonstrated over and over,

with visuals as egregious as people in

gorilla suits, clowns on unicycles, and

even, in a real-life case, a dead deer in the

road escaping altogether the notice of

people who were staring directly at them.

Scary, isn’t it? It should be. We are

capable of wiping out entire chunks of our

visual field without knowingly doing so.

Holmes admonished Watson for seeing but

not observing. He could have gone a step

further: sometimes we don’t even see.

We don’t even need to be actively

engaged in a cognitively demanding task

to let the world pass us by without so

much as a realization of what we’re

missing. For instance, when we are in a

foul mood, we quite literally see less than

when we are happy. Our visual cortex

actually takes in less information from the

outside world. We could look at the exact

same scene twice, once on a day that has

been going well and once on a day that

hasn’t, and we would notice less—and

our brains would take in less—on the

gloomy day.

We can’t actually be aware unless we

pay attention. No exceptions. Yes,

awareness may require only minimal

attention, but it does require some

attention.

Nothing

happens

quite

automatically. We can’t be aware of

something if we don’t attend to it.

Let’s go back to the sentence-

verification task for a moment. Not only

will you have missed the proverbial

twilight for focusing too intently at the

reflection in the window, but the harder

you were thinking, the more dilated your

pupils will have become. I could probably

tell your mental effort—as well as your

memory load, your ease with the task,

your rate of calculation, and even the

neural activity of your locus coeruleus

(the only source in the brain of the

neurotransmitter norepinephrine and an

area implicated in memory retrieval, a

variety

anxiety

syndromes,

and

selective attentional processing), which

will also tell me whether you are likely to

keep going or to give up—just by looking

at the size of your pupils.

But there is one encouraging thing: the

importance—and

effectiveness—of

training,

brute

practice,

overwhelmingly clear. If you were to do

the sentence verification regularly—as

some subjects did in fact do—your pupils

would gradually get smaller; your recall

would get more natural; and, miracle of

all miracles, you’d notice those same

letters or images or whatnot that you’d

missed before. You’d probably even ask

yourself, how in the world did I not see

this earlier? What was previously taxing

will have become more natural, more

habitual, more effortless; in other words,

easier. What used to be the purview of the

Holmes system would have sneaked into

the Watson system. And all it will have

taken is a little bit of practice, a small

dose of habit formation. Your brain can be

one quick study if it wants to be.

The trick is to duplicate that same

process, to let your brain study and learn

and make effortless what was once

effortful, in something that lacks the

discrete nature of a cognitive task like the

sentence verification, in something that is

so basic that we do it constantly, without

giving it much thought or attention: the task

of looking and thinking.

Daniel Kahneman argues repeatedly

that System 1—our Watson system—is

hard to train. It likes what it likes, it trusts

what it trusts, and that’s that. His solution?

Make System 2—Holmes—do the work

by taking System 1 forcibly out of the

equation. For instance, use a checklist of

characteristics when hiring a candidate for

a job instead of relying on your

impression, an impression that, as you’ll

recall, is formed within the first five

minutes or less of meeting someone. Write

a checklist of steps to follow when making

a diagnosis of a problem, be it a sick

patient, a broken car, writer’s block, or

whatever it is you face in your daily life,

instead of trying to do it by so-called

instinct. Checklists, formulas, structured

procedures: those are your best bet—at

least, according to Kahneman.

The Holmes solution? Habit, habit,

habit. That, and motivation. Become an

expert of sorts at those types of decisions

or observation that you want to excel at

making. Reading people’s professions,

following their trains of thought, inferring

their emotions and thinking from their

demeanor? Fine. But just as fine are things

that go beyond the detective’s purview,

like learning to tell the quality of food

from a glance or the proper chess move

from a board or your opponent’s intention

in baseball, poker, or a business meeting

from a gesture. If you learn first how to be

selective

accurately,

order

accomplish precisely what it is you want

to accomplish, you will be able to limit

the damage that System Watson can do by

preemptively teaching it to not muck it up.

The important thing is the proper,

selective training—the presence of mind

—coupled with the desire and the

motivation to master your thought process.

No one says it’s easy. When it comes

right down to it, there is no such thing as

free attention; it all has to come from

somewhere. And every time we place an

additional demand on our attentional

resources—be it by listening to music

while walking, checking our email while

working, or following five media streams

at once—we limit the awareness that

surrounds any one aspect and our ability

to deal with it in an engaged, mindful, and

productive manner.

What’s more, we wear ourselves out.

Not only is attention limited, but it is a

finite resource. We can drain it down only

so much before it needs a reboot.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister uses the

analogy of a muscle to talk about self-

control—an analogy that is just as

appropriate when it comes to attention:

just as a muscle, our capacity for self-

control has only so many exertions in it

and will get tired with too much use. You

need to replenish a muscle—actually,

physically replenish it, with glucose and a

rest period; Baumeister is not talking

about metaphorical energy—though a

psych-you-up speech never hurt—to

remain

peak

form.

Otherwise,

performance will flag. Yes, the muscle

will get bigger with use (you’ll improve

your self-control or attentional ability and

be able to exercise it for longer and longer

periods and at more complicated tasks),

but its growth, too, is limited. Unless you

take steroids—the exercise equivalent of a

Ritalin or Adderall for superhuman

attention—you will reach your limit, and

even steroids take you only so far. And

failure to use it? It will shrink right back

to its pre-exercise size.

Improving Our Natural Attentional

Abilities

Picture this. Sherlock Holmes and Dr.

Watson are visiting New York (not so far-

fetched—their

creator

spent

some

memorable time in the city) and decide to

go to the top of the Empire State Building.

When they arrive at the observation deck,

they are accosted by a quirky stranger who

proposes a contest: which of them will be

the first to spot an airplane in flight? They

can use any of the viewing machines—in

fact, the stranger even gives them each a

stack of quarters—and look wherever

they’d like. The only consideration is who

sees the plane first. How do the two go

about the task?

It may seem like an easy thing to do: an

airplane is a pretty large bird, and the

Empire State Building is a pretty tall

house, with a pretty commanding 360-

degree view. But if you want to be first,

it’s not as simple as standing still and

looking up (or over). What if the plane is

somewhere else? What if you can’t see it

from where you’re standing? What if it’s

behind you? What if you could have been

the first to spot one that was farther away

if only you’d used your quarters on a

viewing machine instead of standing there

like an idiot with only your naked eyes?

There are a lot of what-ifs—if you want to

emerge victorious, that is—but they can be

made manageable what-ifs, if you view

them as nothing more than a few strategy

choices.

Let’s first imagine how Watson would

go about the task. Watson, as we know, is

energetic. He is quick to act and quick to

move. And he’s also quite competitive

with Holmes—more than once, he tries to

show that he, too, can play the detective

game; there’s nothing he likes more than

thinking he can beat Holmes on his own

turf. I’m willing to bet that he’ll do

something like the following. He won’t

waste a single moment in thought (Time’s

a ticking! Better move quickly). He’ll try

to cover as much ground as possible (It

could come from anywhere! And I don’t

want to be the idiot who’s left behind,

that’s for sure!) and will thus likely plop

coins into as many machines as he can find

and then run between them, scanning the

horizon in between sprints. He may even

experience a few false alarms (It’s a

plane! Oh, no, it’s a bird) in his desire to

spot something—and when he does, he’ll

genuinely think that he’s seeing a plane.

And in between the running and the false

spotting, he’ll quickly run out of breath.

This is horrid, he’ll think. I’m exhausted.

And anyway, what’s the point? It’s a

stupid airplane. Let’s hope for his sake

that a real plane comes quickly.

What of Holmes? I propose that he’d

first orient himself, doing some quick

calculation on the location of the airports

and thus the most likely direction of a

plane. He would even, perhaps, factor in

such elements as the relative likelihood of

seeing a plane that’s taking off or landing

given the time of day and the likeliest

approach or takeoff paths, depending on

the answer to the former consideration. He

would then position himself so as to focus

in on the area of greatest probability,

perhaps throwing a coin in a machine for

good measure and giving it a quick once-

over to make sure he isn’t missing

anything. He would know when a bird

was just a bird, or a passing shadow just a

low-hanging cloud. He wouldn’t rush. He

would look, and he would even listen, to

see if a telltale noise might help direct his

attention to a looming jet. He might even

smell and feel the air for changing wind or

a whiff of gasoline. All the while, he’d be

rubbing together his famous long-fingered

hands, thinking, Soon; it will come soon.

And I know precisely where it will

appear.

Who would win? There’s an element of

chance involved, of course, and either

man could get lucky. But play the game

enough times, and I’d be willing to bet that

Holmes would come out on top. While his

strategy may at first glance seem slower,

not nearly as decisive, and certainly not as

inclusive as Watson’s, at the end it would

prove to be the superior of the two.

Our brains aren’t stupid. Just as we

remain remarkably efficient and effective

for a remarkable percentage of the time

despite our cognitive biases, so, too, our

Watsonian attentional abilities are as they

are for a reason. We don’t notice

everything because noticing everything—

each sound, each smell, each sight, each

touch—would make us crazy (in fact, a

lack of filtering ability is the hallmark of

many psychiatric conditions). And Watson

had a point back there: searching for that

airplane? Perhaps not the best use of his

time.

You see, the problem isn’t a lack of

attention so much as a lack of mindfulness

and direction. In the usual course of

things, our brains pick and choose where

focus

without

much

conscious

forethought on our part. What we need to

learn instead is how to tell our brains

what and how to filter, instead of letting

them be lazy and decide for us, based on

what they think would make for the path of

least resistance.

Standing on top of the Empire State

Building, watching quietly for airplanes,

Sherlock Holmes has illustrated the four

elements most likely to allow us to do just

that: selectivity, objectivity, inclusivity,

and engagement.

1. Be Selective

Picture the following scene. A man passes

by a bakery on his way to the office. The

sweet smell of cinnamon follows him

down the street. He pauses. He hesitates.

He looks in the window. The beautiful

glaze. The warm, buttery rolls. The rosy

doughnuts, kissed with a touch of sugar.

He goes in. He asks for a cinnamon roll.

I’ll go on my diet tomorrow, he says. You

only live once. And besides, today is an

exception. It’s brutally cold and I have a

tough meeting in just an hour.

Now rewind and replay. A man passes

by a bakery on his way to the office. He

smells cinnamon. I don’t much care for

cinnamon, now that I think about it, he

says. I far prefer nutmeg, and there isn’t

any here that I can smell. He pauses. He

hesitates. He looks in the window. The

oily, sugary glaze that has likely caused

more heart attacks and blocked arteries

than you can count. The dripping rolls,

drenched in butter—actually, it’s probably

margarine, and everyone knows you can’t

make good rolls with that. The burned

doughnuts that will sit like lumps in your

stomach and make you wonder why you

ever ate them to begin with. Just as I

thought, he says. Nothing here for me. He

walks on, hurrying to his morning meeting.

Maybe I’ll have time to get coffee before,

he thinks.

What has changed between scenario

one and scenario two? Nothing visible.

The sensory information has remained

identical. But somehow our hypothetical

man’s mindset has shifted—and that shift

has, quite literally, affected how he

experiences reality. It has changed how he

is processing information, what he is

paying attention to, and how his

surroundings interact with his mind.

It’s entirely possible. Our vision is

highly selective as is—the retina normally

captures about ten billion bits per second

of visual information, but only ten

thousand bits actually make it to the first

layer of the visual cortex, and, to top it

off, only 10 percent of the area’s synapses

dedicated

incoming

visual

information at all. Or, to put it differently,

our brains are bombarded by something

like eleven million pieces of data—that is,

items in our surroundings that come at all

of our senses—at once. Of that, we are

able to consciously process only about

forty. What that basically means is that we

“see” precious little of what’s around us,

and what we think of as objective seeing

would better be termed selective filtering

—and our state of mind, our mood, our

thoughts at any given moment, our

motivation, and our goals can make it even

more picky than it normally is.

It’s the essence of the cocktail party

effect, when we note our name out of the

din of a room. Or of our tendency to notice

the very things we are thinking about or

have just learned at any given moment:

pregnant women noticing other pregnant

women everywhere; people noting the

dreams that then seem to come true (and

forgetting all of the others); seeing the

number 11 everywhere after 9/11. Nothing

in the environment actually changes—

there aren’t suddenly more pregnant

women or prescient dreams or instances

of a particular number—only your state

does. That’s why we are so prone to the

feeling of coincidence: we forget all those

times we were wrong or nothing happened

and remember only the moments that

matched—because those are the ones we

paid attention to in the first place. As one

Wall Street guru cynically observed, the

key to being seen as a visionary is to

always make your predictions in opposing

pairs. People will remember those that

came true and promptly forget those that

didn’t.

Our minds are set the way they are for a

reason. It’s exhausting to have the Holmes

system running on full all the time—and

not very productive at that. There’s a

reason we’re prone to filter out so much

of our environment: to the brain, it’s

noise. If we tried to take it all in, we

wouldn’t last very long. Remember what

Holmes said about your brain attic? It’s

precious real estate. Tread carefully and

use it wisely. In other words, be selective

about your attention.

At first glance, this may seem

counterintuitive: after all, aren’t we trying

to pay attention to more, not less? Yes, but

the crucial distinction is between quantity

and quality. We want to learn to pay

a tte nti on better, to become superior

observers, but we can’t hope to achieve

this if we thoughtlessly pay attention to

everything. That’s self-defeating. What we

need to do is allocate our attention

mindfully. And mindset is the beginning of

that selectivity.

Holmes knows this better than anyone.

True, he can note in an instant the details

of Watson’s attire and demeanor, the

furnishings of a room down to the most

minute element. But he is just as likely to

not notice the weather outside or the fact

that Watson has had time to leave the

apartment and return to it. It is not

uncommon for Watson to point out that a

storm is raging outside, only to have

Holmes look up and say that he hadn’t

noticed—and in Sherlock, you will often

find Holmes speaking to a blank wall long

after Watson has retired, or left the

apartment altogether.

Whatever the situation, answering the

question of what, specifically, you want to

accomplish will put you well on your way

to knowing how to maximize your limited

attentional resources. It will help direct

your mind, prime it, so to speak, with the

goals and thoughts that are actually

important—and help put those that aren’t

into the background. Does your brain

notice the sweet smell or the grease on the

napkin? Does it focus on Watson’s tan or

the weather outside?

Holmes doesn’t theorize before he has

the data, it’s true. But he does form a

precise plan of attack: he defines his

objectives and the necessary elements for

achieving them. So in The Hound of the

Baskervilles, when Dr. Mortimer enters

the sitting room, Holmes already knows

what he wants to gain from the situation.

His last words to Watson before the

gentleman’s entrance are, “What does Dr.

James Mortimer, the man of science, ask

of Sherlock Holmes, the specialist in

crime?” Holmes hasn’t yet met the man in

question, but already he knows what his

observational goal will be. He has

defined the situation before it even began

(and has managed to examine the doctor’s

walking stick to boot).

When the doctor does appear, Holmes

sets at once to ascertain the purpose of his

visit, asking about every detail of the

potential case, the people involved, the

circumstances. He learns the history of the

Baskerville legend, the Baskerville house,

the Baskerville family. He inquires to the

neighbors,

the

occupants

the

Baskerville estate, the doctor himself,

insofar as he relates to the family. He even

sends for a map of the area, so that he can

gather the full range of elements, even

those that may have been omitted in the

interview. Absolute attention to every

element that bears on his original goal: to

solve that which Dr. James Mortimer asks

of Sherlock Holmes.

As to the rest of the world in between

the doctor’s visit and the evening, it has

ceased to exist. As Holmes tells Watson at

the end of the day, “My body has remained

in this armchair and has, I regret to

observe, consumed in my absence two

large pots of coffee and an incredible

amount of tobacco. After you left I sent

down to Stamford’s for the Ordnance map

of this portion of the moor, and my spirit

has hovered over it all day. I flatter myself

that I could find my way about.”

Holmes has visited Devonshire in

spirit. What his body did, he does not

know. He isn’t even being entirely

facetious. Chances are he really wasn’t

aware of what he was drinking or smoking

—or even that the air in the room has

become so unbreathable that Watson is

forced to open all of the windows the

moment he returns. Even Watson’s

excursion into the outside world is part of

Holmes’s attentional plan: he expressly

asks his flatmate to leave the apartment so

as not to distract him with needless inputs.

So, noticing everything? Far from it,

despite the popular conception of the

detective’s

abilities.

But

noticing

everything that matters to the purpose at

hand. And therein lies the key difference.

(As Holmes notes in “Silver Blaze” when

he finds a piece of evidence that the

inspector had overlooked, “I only saw it

because I was looking for it.” Had he not

had an a priori reason for the search, he

never would have noticed it—and it

wouldn’t have really mattered, not for

him, at least.) Holmes doesn’t waste his

time on just anything. He allocates his

attention strategically.

So, too, we must determine our

objective in order to know what we’re

looking for—and where we’re looking for

it. We already do this naturally in

situations where our brains know, without

our having to tell them, that something is

important. Remember that party in chapter

two, the one with that girl with the blue

streak in her hair and that guy whose name

you can’t be bothered to remember? Well,

picture yourself back in that group,

chatting away. Look around and you’ll

notice many groups just like yours, spread

all around the room. And just like yours,

they are all chatting away. Talk, talk, talk,

talk, talk. It’s exhausting if you stop to

think about it, all this talking going on

nonstop. That’s why you ignore it. It

becomes background noise. Your brain

knows how to take the environment and

tune out most of it, according to your

general goals and needs (specifically,

dorsal and ventral regions in the parietal

and frontal cortex become involved in

both

goal-directed—parietal—and

stimulus-driven—frontal—attentional

control). At the party, it’s focusing on the

conversation you are having and treating

the rest of the words—some of which may

be at the exact same volume—as

meaningless chatter.

And all of a sudden one conversation

comes into clear focus. It’s not chatter

anymore. You can hear every word. You

turn your head. You snap to attention.

What just happened? Someone said your

name, or something that sounded like your

name. That was enough to signal to your

brain to perk up and focus. Here was

something that had relevance to you; pay

attention. It’s what’s known as the classic

cocktail party effect: one mention of your

name, and neural systems that were sailing

along snap into action. You don’t even

have to do any work.

Most things don’t have such nicely

built-in flags to alert you to their

significance. You need to teach your mind

to perk up, as if it were hearing your

name, but absent that oh-so-clear stimulus.

You need, in Holmes’s words, to know

what you are looking for in order to see it.

In the case of the man walking past the

bakery, it’s simple enough. Discrete goal:

not to eat the baked goods. Discrete

elements to focus on: the sweets

themselves (find the negative in their

appearance), the smells (why not focus on

the exhaust smell from the street instead of

the sweet baking? or burnt coffee?), and

the overall environment (think forward to

the meeting, to the wedding and the

tuxedo, instead of zoning in on the current

stimuli). I’m not saying that it’s actually

easy to do—but at least the top-down

processing that needs to happen is clear.

But what about making a decision,

solving a problem at work, or something

even more amorphous? It works the same

way. When psychologist Peter Gollwitzer

tried to determine how to enable people to

set goals and engage in goal-directed

behavior as effectively as possible, he

found that several things helped improve

focus and performance: (1) thinking

ahead, or viewing the situation as just one

moment on a larger, longer timeline and

being able to identify it as just one point to

get past in order to reach a better future

point; (2) being specific and setting

specific goals, or defining your end point

as discretely as possible and pooling your

attentional resources as specifically as

you

can;

(3)

setting

if/then

contingencies, or thinking through a

situation and understanding what you will

do if certain features arise (i.e., if I catch

my mind wandering, then I will close my

eyes, count to ten, and refocus); (4)

writing everything down instead of just

thinking it in your head, so that you

maximize your potential and know in

advance that you won’t have to try to re-

create anything from scratch; and (5)

thinking of both repercussions—what

would happen should you fail—and of

positive angles, the rewards if you

succeed.

Selectivity—mindful, thoughtful, smart

selectivity—is the key first step to

learning how to pay attention and make the

most of your limited resources. Start

small; start manageable; start focused.

System Watson may take years to become

more like System Holmes, and even then it

may never get there completely, but by

being mindfully focused, it can sure get

closer. Help out the Watson system by

giving it some of the Holmes system’s

tools. On it’s own, it’s got nothing.

One caveat, however: you can set goals

to help you filter the world, but be careful

lest you use these goals as blinders. Your

goals, your priorities, your answer to the

“what I want to accomplish” question

must be flexible enough to adapt to

changing circumstances. If the available

information changes, so should you. Don’t

be afraid to deviate from a preset plan

when it serves the greater objective. That,

too, is part of the observational process.

Let your inner Holmes show your inner

Watson where to look. And don’t be like

Inspector Alec MacDonald, or Mac, as

Holmes calls him. Listen to what Holmes

suggests, be it a change of course or a

walk outside when you’d rather not.

2. Be Objective

In “The Adventure of the Priory School,”

a valuable pupil goes missing from a

boarding school. Also vanished is the

school’s German master. How could such

a calamity occur in a place of such honor

and prestige, termed “without exception,

the best and most select preparatory

school in England”? Dr. Thorneycroft

Huxtable, the school’s founder and

principal, is flummoxed in the extreme. By

the time he makes it from the north of

England to London, to consult with Mr.

Holmes, he is so overwrought that he

proceeds at once to collapse, “prostrate

and insensible,” upon the bearskin hearth

rug of 221B Baker Street.

Not one but two people missing—and

the pupil, the son of the Duke of

Holdernesse, a former cabinet minister

and one of the wealthiest men in England.

It must certainly be the case, Huxtable

tells Holmes, that Heidegger, the German

master, was somehow an accomplice to

the disappearance. His bicycle is missing

from the bicycle shed and his room bears

signs of a hasty exit. A kidnapper? A

kidnapper’s accomplice? Huxtable can’t

be sure, but the man can hardly be

blameless. It would be too much to chalk

the double disappearance off to something

as simple as coincidence.

A police investigation is initiated at

once, and when a young man and boy are

seen together on an early train at a

neighboring station, it seems that the

policemen have done their duty admirably.

The investigation is duly called off. Quite

to Huxtable’s chagrin, however, it soon

becomes clear that the couple in question

altogether

unrelated

the

disappearance. And so, three days after

the mysterious events, the principal has

come to consult Mr. Holmes. Not a

moment too soon, says the detective—and

perhaps, several moments too late.

Precious time has been lost. Will the

fugitives be found before even greater

tragedy occurs?

What makes up a situation like this?

Answering that question is not as easy as

stating a series of facts—missing boy,

missing instructor, missing bike, and the

like—or even delineating each one of the

accompanying details—state of the boy’s

room, state of the instructor’s room,

clothing, windows, plants, etcetera. It also

entails understanding something very

specific: a situation (in its broadest sense,

be it mental, physical, or something as un-

situation-like as an empty room) is

inherently dynamic. And you, by the very

action of entering into it, shift it from what

it was before your arrival to something

altogether different.

It’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle

in action: the fact of observing changes the

thing being observed. Even an empty room

is no longer the same once you’re inside.

You cannot proceed as if it hadn’t

changed. This may sound like common

sense, but it is actually much harder to

understand in practice than it seems in

theory.

Take, for instance, a commonly studied

phenomenon known as the white coat

effect. Maybe you have an ache or a cough

that you want to check out. Maybe you are

simply overdue for your next physical.

You sigh, pick up the phone, and make an

appointment with your doctor. The next

day you make your way to his office. You

sit in the waiting room. Your name is

called. You go in for your appointment.

It’s safe to assume that the you that is

walking in to get the checkup is the same

you that placed the call, right? Wrong.

Study after study has shown that for many

people, the mere fact of entering a

doctor’s office and seeing the physician—

hence, the white coat—is enough to

significantly alter vital signs. Pulse, blood

pressure, even reactions and blood work

can all change simply because you are

seeing a doctor. You may not even feel

particularly anxious or stressed. All the

same, your readings and results will have

changed. The situation has shifted through

mere presence and observation.

Recall Dr. Huxtable’s view of the

events surrounding the disappearance:

there is a fugitive (the boy), an

accomplice (the tutor), and a bike stolen

for purposes of flight or deceit. Nothing

more, nothing less. What the principal

reports to Holmes is fact (or so he

believes).

But is it really? It’s psychologist Daniel

Gilbert’s theory about believing what we

see taken a step further: we believe what

w e want to see and what our mind attic

decides to see, encode that belief instead

of the facts in our brains, and then think

that we saw an objective fact when really

what we remember seeing is only our

limited perception at the time. We forget

to separate the factual situation from our

subjective interpretation of it. (One need

only look at the inaccuracy of expert

witness testimonies to see how bad we

are at assessing and remembering.)

Because the school’s principal at once

suspected a kidnapping, he has noticed

and reported the very details that support

his initial idea—and hasn’t taken the time

to get the full story in the least. And yet, he

has no clue that he is doing it. As far as

he’s concerned, he remains entirely

objective. As the philosopher Francis

Bacon put it, “The human understanding

when it has once adopted an opinion

(either as being the received opinion or as

being agreeable to itself) draws all things

else to support and agree with it.” True

objectivity can never be achieved—even

the scientific objectivity of Holmes isn’t

ever

complete—but

need

understand just how far we stray in order

to approximate a holistic view of any

given situation.

Setting your goals beforehand will help

you direct your precious attentional

resources properly. It should not be an

excuse to reinterpret objective facts to

mesh with what you want or expect to see.

Observation and deduction are two

separate, distinct steps—in fact, they don’t

even come one right after the other. Think

back

for

moment

Watson’s

Afghanistan sojourn. Holmes stuck to

objective,

tangible

facts

his

observations. There was no extrapolation

at first; that happened only after. And he

always asked how those facts could fit

together. Understanding a situation in its

fullness requires several steps, but the

first and most fundamental is to realize

that observation and deduction are not the

same. To remain as objective as you

possibly can.

mother

was

quite

young—

unbelievably young, by today’s standards;

average by those of 1970s Russia—when

she gave birth to my older sister. My

sister was quite young when she gave

birth to my niece. I cannot even begin to

list the number of times that people—from

complete

strangers

mothers

classmates and even waiters in restaurants

—have thought they were seeing one thing

and acted according to that thought, when

in reality they were seeing something

entirely different. My mother has been

taken for my sister’s sister. These days,

she is routinely taken for my niece’s

mother. Not grave errors on the

observer’s part, to be sure, but errors

nonetheless—and errors which have, in

many cases, gone on to affect both their

behavior and their subsequent judgments

and reactions. It’s not just a question of

mixing up generations. It’s also a question

of applying modern American values to

the behavior of women in Soviet Russia—

an entirely different world. In American

lingo, Mom was a teenage mother. In

Russia, she was married and not even the

first among her friends to have a child. It

was just the way things were done.

You think; you judge; and you don’t

think twice about what you’ve just done.

Hardly ever, in describing a person, an

object, a scene, a situation, an interaction

do we see it as just a valueless, objective

entity. And hardly ever do we consider the

distinction—since, of course, it hardly

ever matters. But it’s the rare mind that

has trained itself to separate the objective

fact from the immediate, subconscious,

and automatic subjective interpretation

that follows.

The first thing Holmes does when he

enters a scene is to gain a sense of what

has been going on. Who has touched what,

what has come from where, what is there

that shouldn’t be, and what isn’t there that

should be. He remains capable of extreme

objectivity even in the face of extreme

circumstances. He remembers his goal,

but he uses it to filter and not to inform.

Watson, on the other hand, is not so

careful.

Consider again the missing boy and the

German

schoolmaster.

Unlike

Dr.

Huxtable, Holmes understands that a

situation is colored by his interpretation.

And so, unlike the headmaster, he

entertains the possibility that the so-called

facts are not what they seem. The

principal is severely limited in his search

by one crucial detail: he—along with

everyone else—is looking for a fugitive

and an accomplice. But what if Herr

Heidegger is nothing of the sort? What if

he isn’t fleeing but doing something else

entirely? The missing boy’s father

supposes he might be helping the lad flee

to his mother in France. The principal, that

he might be conducting him to another

location. The police, that they have

escaped on a train. But not a single person

save Holmes realizes that the story is

merely that. They are not to look for a

fleeing

schoolmaster,

wherever

the

destination

may

be,

but

for

the

schoolmaster (no modifier necessary) and

the boy, and not necessarily in the same

place. Everyone interprets the missing

man as somehow involved in the

disappearance, be it as accomplice or

instigator. No one stops to consider that

the only available evidence points to

nothing beside the fact that he’s missing.

No one, that is, except for Sherlock

Holmes. He realizes that he is looking for

a missing boy. He is also looking for a

missing schoolmaster. That is all. He lets

any additional facts emerge as and when

they may. In this more evenhanded

approach, he chances upon a fact that has

completely passed by the school director

and the police: that the schoolmaster

hasn’t fled with the boy at all and is

instead lying dead nearby, “a tall man,

full-bearded, with spectacles, one glass of

which had been knocked out. The cause of

his death was a frightful blow upon the

head, which had crushed in part of his

skull.”

To find the body, Holmes doesn’t

discover any new clues; he just knows to

look at what is there in an objective light,

without preconception or preformed

theories. He enumerates the steps that led

to his discovery to Watson:

“Let us continue our reconstruction. He

meets his death five miles from the school

—not by a bullet, mark you, which even a

lad might conceivably discharge, but by a

savage blow dealt by a vigorous arm. The

lad, then, had a companion in his flight.

And the flight was a swift one, since it

took five miles before an expert cyclist

could overtake them. Yet we surveyed the

ground round the scene of the tragedy.

What do we find? A few cattle tracks,

nothing more. I took a wide sweep round,

and there is no path within fifty yards.

Another cyclist could have had nothing to

do with the actual murder, nor were there

any human foot-marks.”

“Holmes,” I cried, “this is impossible.”

“Admirable!” he said. “A most

illuminating remark. It is impossible as I

state it, and therefore I must in some

respect have stated it wrong. Yet you saw

for yourself. Can you suggest any

fallacy?”

Watson cannot. Instead, he suggests that

they give up altogether. “I am at my wit’s

end,” he says.

“Tut, tut,” scolds Holmes. “We have

solved some worse problems. At least we

have plenty of material, if we can only use

it.”

In this brief exchange, Holmes has

shown that all of the headmaster’s theories

were misguided. There were at least three

people, not at most two. The German

instructor was trying to save the boy, not

hurt him or flee with him (the most likely

scenario, given his now-dead state and the

fact that he followed the initial tire tracks

and had to overtake the fleeing boy;

clearly, he could be neither kidnapper nor

accomplice). The bike was a means of

pursuit, not stolen property for some

sinister motive. And what’s more, there

must have been another bike present to aid

the escape of the boy and unidentified

other or others. Holmes hasn’t done

anything spectacular; he has just allowed

the evidence to speak. And he has

followed it without allowing himself to

skew the facts to conform with the

situation. In short, he has behaved with the

coolness and reflection of System Holmes,

while Huxtable’s conclusions show every

marking of the hot, reflexive, leap-before-

you-look school of System Watson.

To observe, you must learn to separate

situation from interpretation, yourself from

what you’re seeing. System Watson wants

to run away into the world of the

subjective, the hypothetical, the deductive.

Into the world that would make the most

sense to you. System Holmes knows to

hold back the reins.

A helpful exercise is to describe the

situation from the beginning, either out

loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who

isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much

like Holmes talks his theories through out

loud to Watson. When Holmes states his

observations in this way, gaps and

inconsistencies that weren’t apparent

before come to the surface.

It’s an exercise not unlike reading your

own work out loud to catch any errors in

grammar, logic, or style. Just like your

observations are so entwined with your

thoughts and perception that you may find

it difficult, if not impossible, to

disentangle the objective reality from its

subjective materialization in your mind,

when you work on an essay or a story or a

paper, or anything else really, you become

so intimately acquainted with your own

writing that you are liable to skip over

mistakes and to read what the words

should say instead of what they do say.

The act of speaking forces you to slow

down and catch those errors that are

invisible to your eyes. Your ear notes

them when your eye does not. And while it

may seem a waste of time and effort to

reread mindfully and attentively, out loud,

it hardly ever fails to yield a mistake or

flaw that you would have otherwise

missed.

It’s easy to succumb to Watson’s

conflating logic, to Huxtable’s certainty in

what he says. But every time you find

yourself making a judgment immediately

upon observing—in fact, even if you don’t

think you are, and even if everything

seems to make perfect sense—train

yourself to stop and repeat: It is

impossible as I state it, and therefore I

must in some respect have stated it

wrong. Then go back and restate it from

the beginning and in a different fashion

than you did the first time around. Out

loud instead of silently. In writing instead

of in your head. It will save you from

many errors in perception.

3. Be Inclusive

Let’s go back for a moment to The Hound

of the Baskervilles. In the early chapters

of the story, Henry Baskerville, the heir to

the Baskerville estate, reports that his

boot has gone missing. But not just one

boot. Henry finds that the missing boot has

miraculously reappeared the day after its

disappearance—only to discover that a

boot from another pair has vanished in its

stead. To Henry this is annoying but

nothing more. To Sherlock Holmes it is a

key element in a case that threatens to

devolve into a paranormal, voodoo-

theory-generating free-for-all. What to

others is a mere curiosity to Holmes is

one of the more instructive points in the

case: the “hound” they are dealing with is

an actual animal, not a phantasm. An

animal who relies on his sense of smell in

a fundamental fashion. As Holmes later

tells Watson, the exchange of one stolen

boot for another was “a most instructive

incident, since it proved conclusively to

my mind that we were dealing with a real

hound, as no other supposition could

explain this anxiety to obtain an old boot

and this indifference to a new one.”

But that’s not all. Apart from the

vanishing boot, there is the issue of a more

obvious warning. While consulting with

Holmes in London, Henry has received

anonymous notes that urge him to stay

away from Baskerville Hall. Once again,

to everyone but Holmes these notes are

nothing more than what they seem. For

Holmes they form the second part of the

key to the case. As he tells Watson:

“It may possibly recur to your memory that

when I examined the paper upon which the

printed words were fastened I made a

close inspection for the water-mark. In

doing so I held it within a few inches of

my eyes, and was conscious of a faint

smell of the scent known as white

jessamine.

There

are

seventy-five

perfumes, which it is very necessary that a

criminal expert should be able to

distinguish from each other, and cases

have more than once within my own

experience depended upon their prompt

recognition. The scent suggested the

presence of a lady, and already my

thoughts began to turn toward the

Stapletons. Thus I had made certain of the

hound, and had guessed at the criminal

before we ever went to the west country.”

There it is a second time: smell.

Holmes doesn’t just read the note and look

at it. He also smells it. And in the scent,

not in the words or the appearance, is

where he finds the clue that helps him

identify the possible criminal. Absent

smell, two central clues of the case would

remain unidentified—and so they do to

everyone but the detective. I am not

suggesting you go out and memorize

seventy-five perfumes. But you should

never neglect your sense of smell—or

indeed any of your other senses—because

they certainly won’t neglect you.

Consider a scenario where you’re

buying a car. You go to the dealer and

look at all the shining specimens sitting

out on the lot. How do you decide which

model is the right one for you? If I ask you

that question right now, you will likely tell

me that you’d weigh any number of

factors, from cost to safety, appearance to

comfort, mileage to gas use. Then you’ll

pick the vehicle that best matches your

criteria.

But the reality of the situation is far

more complex. Imagine, for instance, that

at the moment you’re in the lot, a man

walks by with a mug of steaming hot

chocolate. You might not even remember

that he passed, but the smell triggers

memories of your grandfather: he used to

make you hot chocolate when you spent

time together. It was your little ritual. And

before you know it, you’re leaving the lot

with a car like the one your grandfather

drove—and have conveniently forgotten

(or altogether failed to note) its less-than-

stellar safety rating. And you very likely

don’t even know why exactly you made

the choice you did. You’re not wrong per

se, but your selective remembering might

mean a choice that you’ll later regret.

Now imagine a different scenario. This

time there’s a pervasive smell of gasoline:

the lot is across the street from a gas

station. And you remember your mother

warning you to be careful around gas, that

it could catch fire, that you could get hurt.

Now you’re focused on safety. You’ll

likely be leaving the lot with a car that is

quite different from your grandfather’s.

And again, you may not know why.

Up to now, I’ve been talking about

attention as a visual phenomenon. And it

is, for the most part. But it is also much

more. Remember how in the hypothetical

foray to the top of the Empire State

Building,

our

hypothetical

Holmes

listened and smelled for planes, as strange

as it seemed? Attention is about every one

of your senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste,

touch. It is about taking in as much as we

possibly can, through all of the avenues

available to us. It is about learning not to

leave anything out—anything, that is, that

is relevant to the goals that you’ve set.

And it is about realizing that all of our

senses affect us—and will affect us

whether or not we are aware of the

impact.

To observe fully, to be truly attentive,

we must be inclusive and not let anything

slide by—and we must learn how our

attention may shift without our awareness,

guided by a sense that we’d thought

invisible. That jasmine? Holmes smelled

the letter deliberately. In so doing, he was

able to observe the presence of a female

influence, and a particular female at that.

If Watson had picked up the letter, we can

be sure he would have done no such thing.

But his nose may very well have grasped

the scent even without his awareness.

What then?

When we smell, we remember. In fact,

research has shown that the memories

associated with smell are the most

powerful, vivid, and emotional of all our

recollections. And what we smell affects

what we remember, how we subsequently

feel, and what we might be inclined to

think as a result. But smell is often

referred to as the invisible sense: we

regularly

experience

without

consciously registering it. A smell enters

our nose, travels to our olfactory bulb, and

makes

its

way

directly

our

hippocampus, our amygdala (an emotion-

processing center), and our olfactory

cortex (which not only deals with smells

but is involved in complex memory,

learning, and decision-making tasks),

triggering a host of thoughts, feelings, and

recollections—yet more likely than not,

we note neither smell nor memory.

What if Watson, in all of his multiple-

continent-spanning womanizing, happened

to have dated a woman who wore a

jasmine perfume? Let’s imagine the

relationship a happy one. All of a sudden

he may have found himself seeing with

added clarity (remember, happy moods

equal wider sight), but he may also have

failed to note select details because of a

certain rosy glow to the whole thing.

Maybe the letter isn’t so sinister. Maybe

Henry isn’t in all that much danger. Maybe

it would be better to go have a drink and

meet some lovely ladies—after all, ladies

are lovely, aren’t they? And off we go.

And if the relationship had been

violent, brutish, and short? Tunnel vision

would have set in (bad mood, limited

sight), and along with it a brushing aside

of most of the elements of note. Why

should that matter? Why should I work

harder? I am tired; my senses are

overloaded; and I deserve a break. And

why is Henry bothering us anyway with

this nonsense? Paranormal dog, my foot.

I’ve about had it.

When we are being inclusive, we never

forget that all of our senses are constantly

in play. We don’t let them drive our

emotions and decisions. Instead, we

actively enlist their help—as Holmes does

with both boot and letter—and learn to

control them instead.

In either of the Watson scenarios above,

all of the doctor’s actions, from the

moment of smelling the jasmine, will have

been affected. And while the precise

direction of the effect is unknowable, one

thing is certain. Not only would he have

failed to be inclusive in his attention, but

his attention will have been hijacked by

the eponymous System Watson into a

subjectivity that will be all the more

limited for its unconscious nature.

It may seem like I’m exaggerating, but I

assure

you,

sensory

influences—

especially olfactory ones—are a powerful

lot. And if we aren’t aware of them

altogether, as so often happens, they can

threaten to take over the carefully

cultivated goals and objectivity that we’ve

been working on.

Smell may be the most glaring culprit,

but it is far from alone. When we see a

person, we are likely to experience the

activation of any number of stereotypes

associated with that person—though we

won’t realize it. When we touch something

warm or cold, we may become likewise

warm or cold in our disposition; and if we

are touched by someone in a reassuring

way, we may suddenly find ourselves

taking more risk or being more confident

than we otherwise would. When we hold

something heavy, we are more likely to

judge something (or someone) to be

weightier and more serious. None of this

has anything to do with observation and

attention per se, except that it can throw us

off a carefully cultivated path without our

awareness. And that is a dangerous thing

indeed.

We don’t have to be a Holmes and

learn to tell apart hundreds of smells from

a single whiff in order to let our senses

work for us, to allow our awareness to

give us a fuller picture of a scene that we

would otherwise have. A scented note?

You don’t need to know the smell to

realize that it is there—and that it might be

a potential clue. If you hadn’t paid

attention to the fragrance, you would have

missed the clue’s presence altogether—

but you may have had your objectivity

undermined nevertheless without even

being aware of what has taken place. A

mi s s i ng boot? Another missing boot?

Maybe it’s about a quality other than the

boot’s appearance—after all, it’s the old

and ugly one that eventually disappeared

for good. You don’t need to know much to

realize that there may be another sensory

clue here that would again be missed if

you had forgotten about your other senses.

In both cases, a failure to use all senses

equals a scene not seen to its full

potential, attention that has not been

allocated properly, and subconscious cues

that color the attention that is allocated in

a way that may not be optimal.

If we actively engage each of our

senses, we acknowledge that the world is

multidimensional. Things are happening

through our eyes, our nose, our ears, our

skin. Each of those senses should rightly

tell us something. And if it doesn’t, that

should also tell us something: that a sense

is missing. That something lacks smell, or

is silent, or is otherwise absent. In other

words, the conscious use of each sense

can go beyond illuminating the present

part of scene and show instead that part of

a situation that is often forgotten: that

which isn’t there, which is not present in

the environment where by every rightful

metric it should be. And absence can be

just as important and just as telling as

presence.

Consider the case of Silver Blaze, that

famous missing racehorse that no one can

track down. When Holmes has had a

chance to examine the premises, Inspector

Gregson, who has failed to find something

as seemingly impossible to miss as a

horse, asks, “Is there any point to which

you would wish to draw my attention?”

Why yes, Holmes responds, “To the

curious incident of the dog in the night-

time.” But, protests the inspector, “The

dog did nothing in the night-time.” To

which Holmes delivers the punch line:

“That was the curious incident.”

For Holmes, the absence of barking is

the turning point of the case: the dog must

have known the intruder. Otherwise he

would have made a fuss.

For us, the absence of barking is

something that is all too easy to forget. All

too often, we don’t even dismiss things

that aren’t there; we don’t remark on them

to begin with—especially if the thing

happens to be a sound, again a sense that

is not as natural a part of attention and

observation as sight. But often these

missing elements are just as telling and

just as important—and would make just as

much difference to our thinking—as their

present counterparts.

We need not be dealing with a detective

case for absent information to play an

important role in our thought process.

Take, for example, a decision to buy a cell

phone. I’m going to show you two options,

and I would like you to tell me which of

them you would rather purchase.

Phone A

Phone B

802.11

Wi-fi: 802.11 b/g

b/g

Talk time: 12 hrs

16 hrs

Standby time: 12.5 days

14.5 days

Memory: 16.0 GB

32.0 GB

Cost: $100

$150

Did you make a decision? Before you

read on, jot down either Phone A or Phone

B. Now I’m going to describe the phones

one more time. No information has been

changed, but some has been added.

Phone A

Phone B

802.11

Wi-fi: 802.11 b/g

b/g

Talk time: 12 hrs

16 hrs

Standby time: 12.5 days

14.5 days

Memory: 16.0 GB

32.0 GB

Cost: $100

$150

Weight: 135g

300g

Which

phone

would

you

rather

purchase now? Again, write down your

answer. I’m now going to present the

options a third time, again adding one new

element.

Phone

Phone A

802.11

Wi-fi: 802.11 b/g

b/g

Talk time: 12 hrs

16 hrs

14.5

Standby time: 12.5 days

days

32.0

Memory: 16.0 GB

Cost: $100

$150

Weight: 135g

300g

1.4

Radiation (SAR): 0.79 W/kg

W/kg

Now, which of the two would you

prefer?

Chances are, somewhere between the

second and third lists of data, you

switched your allegiance from Phone B to

Phone A. And yet the two phones didn’t

change in the least. All that did was the

information that you were aware of. This

is known as omission neglect. We fail to

note what we do not perceive up front,

and we fail to inquire further or to take the

missing pieces into account as we make

our decision. Some information is always

available, but some is always silent—and

it will remain silent unless we actively

stir it up. And here I used only visual

information. As we move from two to

three dimensions, from a list to the real

world, each sense comes into play and

becomes fair game. The potential for

neglecting

the

omitted

increases

correspondingly—but

does

the

potential for gleaning more about a

situation, if we engage actively and strive

for inclusion.

Now let’s go back to that curious dog.

He could have barked or not. He didn’t.

One way to look at that is to say, as the

inspector does, he did nothing at all. But

another is to say, as Holmes does, that the

dog actively chose not to bark. The result

of the two lines of reasoning is identical:

a silent dog. But the implications are

diametrically opposed: passively doing

nothing, or actively doing something.

Nonchoices are choices, too. And they

are very telling choices at that. Each

nonaction denotes a parallel action; each

nonchoice, a parallel choice; each

absence, a presence. Take the well-known

default effect: more often than not, we

stick to default options and don’t expend

the energy to change, even if another

option is in fact better for us. We don’t

choose to contribute to a retirement fund

—even if our company will match the

contributions—unless the default is set up

for contributing. We don’t become organ

donors unless we are by default

considered donors. And the list goes on.

It’s simply easier to do nothing. But that

doesn’t mean we’ve actually not done

anything. We have. We’ve chosen, in a

way, to remain silent.

To pay Attention means to pay attention

to it all, to engage actively, to use all of

our senses, to take in everything around

us, including those things that don’t appear

when they rightly should. It means asking

questions and making sure we get

answers. (Before I even go to buy that car

or cell phone, I should ask: what are the

features I care about most? And then I

should be sure that I am paying attention to

those features—and not to something else

entirely.) It means realizing that the world

is three-dimensional and multi-sensory

and that, like it or not, we will be

influenced by our environment, so our best

bet is to take control of that influence by

paying

attention

everything

that

surrounds us. We may not be able to

emerge with the entire situation in hand,

and we may end up making a choice that,

upon further reflection, is not the right one

after all. But it won’t be for lack of trying.

All we can do is observe to the best of our

abilities and never assume anything,

including that absence is the same as

nothing.

4. Be Engaged

Even

Sherlock

Holmes

makes

the

occasional mistake. But normally these

are mistakes of misestimation—of a

person, in the case of Irene Adler; a

horse’s ability to stay hidden in “Silver

Blaze”; a man’s ability to stay the same in

“The Case of the Crooked Lip.” It is rare

indeed that the mistake is a more

fundamental one: a failure of engagement.

Indeed, it is only on one occasion, as far

as I’m aware, that the great detective is

negligent in embodying that final element

of attentiveness, an active, present interest

and involvement, an engagement in what

he is doing—and it almost costs him his

suspect’s life.

The incident takes place toward the end

of “The Stock Broker’s Clerk.” In the

story, the clerk of the title, Hall Pycroft, is

offered a position as the business manager

the

Franco-Midland

Hardware

Company by a certain Mr. Arthur Pinner.

Pycroft has never heard of the firm and is

slated to begin work the following week

at a respected stockbrokerage—but the

pay is simply too good to pass up. And so

he agrees to begin work the next day. His

suspicions are aroused, however, when

his new employer, Mr. Pinner’s brother

Harry, looks suspiciously like Mr. Arthur.

What’s more, he finds that his so-called

office employs no other man and doesn’t

even have a sign on the wall to alert

potential visitors of its existence. To top it

off, Pycroft’s task is nothing like that of a

clerk: he is to copy listings out of a thick

phone book. When, a week later, he sees

that Mr. Harry has the same gold tooth as

did Mr. Arthur, he can stand the

strangeness no more and so sets the

problem before Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes and Watson proceed to

accompany Hall Pycroft to the Midlands,

to the office of his employer. Holmes

thinks he knows just what has gone on, and

the plan is to visit the man on the pretense

of looking for work, and then confront him

as Holmes is wont to do. Every detail is

in place. Every aspect of the situation is

clear to the detective. It’s not like those

cases where he actually needs the criminal

to fill in major blanks. He knows what to

expect. The only thing he requires is the

man himself.

But when the trio enters the offices, Mr.

Pinner’s demeanor is not at all as

expected. Watson describes the scene.

At the single table sat the man whom we

had seen in the street, with his evening

paper spread out in front of him, and as he

looked up at us it seemed to me that I had

never looked upon a face which bore such

marks of grief, and of something beyond

grief—of a horror such as comes to few

men in a lifetime. His brow glistened with

perspiration, his cheeks were of the dull,

dead white of a fish’s belly, and his eyes

were wild and staring. He looked at his

clerk as though he failed to recognize him,

and I could see by the astonishment

depicted upon our conductor’s face that

this was by no means the usual appearance

of his employer.

But what happens next is even more

unexpected—and

threatens

foil

Holmes’s plans entirely. Mr. Pinner

attempts to commit suicide.

Holmes is at a loss. This he had not

anticipated. Everything up to then is “clear

enough, but what is not so clear is why at

the sight of us the rogue should instantly

walk out of the room and hang himself,”

he says.

The answer comes soon enough. The

man is revived by the good Dr. Watson

and provides it himself: the paper. He had

been reading a newspaper—or rather,

something quite specific in that paper,

something that has caused him to lose his

emotional equilibrium entirely—when he

was interrupted by Sherlock and company.

Holmes reacts to the news with

uncharacteristic vigor. “‘The paper! Of

course!’ yelled Holmes in a paroxysm of

excitement. ‘Idiot that I was! I thought so

much of our visit that the paper never

entered my head for an instant.’”

The moment the paper is mentioned,

Holmes knows at once what it means and

why it had the effect that it did. But why

did he fail to note it in the first place,

committing an error that even Watson

would have hung his head in shame at

making? How did the System Holmes

machine become . . . a System Watson?

Simple. Holmes says it himself: he had

lost interest in the case. In his mind, it was

already solved, down to the last detail—

the visit, of which he thought so much that

he decided it would be fine to disengage

from everything else. And that’s a mistake

he doesn’t normally make.

Holmes knows better than anyone else

how important engagement is for proper

observation and thought. Your mind needs

to be active, to be involved in what it’s

doing. Otherwise, it will get sloppy—and

let pass a crucial detail that almost gets

the object of your observation killed.

Motivation matters. Stop being motivated,

and performance will drop off, no matter

how well you’ve been doing up until the

end—even if you’ve successfully done

everything you should have been doing up

to now, the moment motivation and

involvement flag, you slip up.

When we are engaged in what we are

doing, all sorts of things happen. We

persist longer at difficult problems—and

become more likely to solve them. We

experience something that psychologist

Tory Higgins refers to as flow, a presence

of mind that not only allows us to extract

more from whatever it is we are doing but

also makes us feel better and happier: we

derive actual, measurable hedonic value

from

the

strength

our

active

involvement in and attention to an activity,

even if the activity is as boring as sorting

through stacks of mail. If we have a reason

to do it, a reason that engages us and

makes us involved, we will both do it

better and feel happier as a result. The

principle holds true even if we have to

expand significant mental effort—say, in

solving difficult puzzles. Despite the

exertion, we will still feel happier, more

satisfied, and more in the zone, so to

speak.

What’s more, engagement and flow tend

to prompt a virtuous cycle of sorts: we

become more motivated and aroused

overall, and, consequently, more likely to

be productive and create something of

value. We even become less likely to

commit some of the most fundamental

errors of observation (such as mistaking a

person’s outward appearance for factual

detail of his personality) that can threaten

to throw off even the best-laid plans of the

aspiring Holmesian observer. In other

words, engagement stimulates System

Holmes. It makes it more likely that

System Holmes will step up, look over

System Watson’s shoulder, place a

reassuring hand on it, and say, just as it’s

about to leap into action, Hold off a

minute. I think we should look at this

more closely before we act.

To see what I mean, let’s go back for a

moment to Holmes—specifically, to his

reaction to Watson’s overly superficial

(and unengaged) judgment of their client in

“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.”

In the story, Dr. Watson demonstrates a

typical System Watson approach to

observation: judging too quickly from

initial impressions and failing to correct

for the specific circumstances involved.

Though in this particular case the

judgment happens to be about a person—

and as it applies to people, it has a

specific name: the correspondence bias, a

concept we’ve already encountered—the

process it illustrates goes far beyond

person perception.

After

Holmes

enumerates

the

difficulties of the case and stresses the

importance of moving quickly, Watson

remarks, “Surely the man’s appearance

would go far with any jury?” Not so fast,

says Holmes. “That is a dangerous

argument, my dear Watson. You remember

that terrible murderer, Bert Stevens, who

wanted us to get him off in ’87? Was there

ever a more mild-mannered, Sunday

school young man?” Watson has to agree

that it is, in fact, so. Many times, people

are not what they may initially be judged

to be.

Person perception happens to be an

easy illustration of the engagement

process in action. As we go through the

following steps, realize that they apply to

anything, not just to people, and that we

are using people merely to help us

visualize

much

general

phenomenon.

The process of person perception is a

deceptively straightforward one. First, we

categorize. What is the individual doing?

How is he acting? How does he appear?

In Watson’s case, this means thinking back

to John Hector McFarlane’s initial

entrance to 221B. He knows at once (by

Holmes’s prompting) that their visitor is a

solicitor

and

Freemason—two

respectable occupations if ever there were

any in nineteenth-century London. He then

notes some further details.

He was flaxen-haired and handsome, in a

washed-out

negative

fashion,

with

frightened blue eyes, and a clean-shaven

face, with a weak, sensitive mouth. His

age may have been about twenty-seven,

his dress and bearing that of a gentleman.

From the pocket of his light summer

overcoat protruded the bundle of endorsed

papers which proclaimed his profession.

(Now imagine this process happening

in the exact same way for an object or

location or whatever else. Take something

as basic as an apple. Describe it: how

does it look? Where is it? Is it doing

anything? Even sitting in a bowl is an

action.)

After we categorize, we characterize.

Now that we know what he’s doing or

how he seems, what does that imply? Are

there

some

underlying

traits

characteristics that are likely to have

given rise to my initial impression or

observation? This is precisely what

Watson does when he tells Holmes,

“Surely the man’s appearance would go

far with any jury.” He has taken the earlier

observations, loaded as they might be—

handsome, sensitive, gentlemanly bearing,

papers proclaiming his profession as a

solicitor—and decided that taken together,

they imply trustworthiness. A solid,

straightforward nature that no jury could

doubt. (Think you can’t characterize an

apple? How about inferring healthiness as

intrinsic characteristic because the

apple happens to be a fruit, and one that

appears to have great nutritional value

given your earlier observations?)

Finally, we correct: Is there something

that may have caused the action other

than my initial assessment (in the

characterization phase)? Do I need to

adjust my initial impressions in either

direction, augmenting some elements or

discounting others? That sounds easy

enough: take Watson’s judgment of

trustworthiness, or your judgment of

healthiness, and see if it needs to be

adjusted.

Except, there’s one major problem:

while the first two parts of the process are

nearly automatic, the last is far less so—

and often never happens at all. Consider

that in the case of John McFarlane, it is

not Watson who corrects his impression.

He takes it for what it is and is about to

move on. Instead, it is the ever-engaged

Holmes who points out that Watson’s

reasoning “is a dangerous argument.”

McFarlane may or may not be able to rely

on his appearance to go far with any jury.

It all depends on the jury—and on the

other arguments of the case. Appearance

alone can be deceptive. What can you

really

tell

about

McFarlane’s

trustworthiness from simply looking at

him? Back to that apple: can you really

know it is healthy by examining its

exterior? What if this particular apple is

not only not organic, but has come from an

orchard that is known to use illegal

pesticides—and has not been properly

washed or handled since? Appearances

can deceive even here. Because you

already have a schema of an apple set in

your mind, you may deem it too time

consuming and unnecessary to go any

further.

Why do we so often fail at this final

stage of perception? The answer lies in

that very element we were discussing:

engagement.

Perception comes in two flavors,

passive and active, and the distinction is

not the one you might think. In this case,

System Watson is the active one, System

Holmes,

the

passive.

passive

perceivers, we just observe. And by that I

mean that we do not do anything else. We

are not, in other words, multitasking.

Holmes the passive observer focuses all

of his faculties on the subject of

observation, in this case, John Hector

McFarlane. He listens, as is his habit,

“with closed eyes and fingertips together.”

The word passive can be misleading, in

that there is nothing passive about his

concentrated perception. What is passive

is his attitude to the rest of the world. He

will not be distracted by any other task.

As passive observers, we are not doing

anything else; we are focused on

observing. A better term in my mind

would be engaged passivity: a state that is

the epitome of engagement but happens to

be focused on only one thing, or person, as

the case may be.

In most situations, however, we don’t

have the benefit of simply observing (and

even when we do, we don’t often choose

to do so). When we are in a social

environment,

which

defines

most

situations, we can’t just stand back and

watch. Instead, we are in a state of de

facto multitasking, trying to navigate the

complexities of social interaction at the

same time as we make attributional

judgments, be it about people, things, or

environments. Active perception doesn’t

mean active in the sense of present and

engaged. Active perception means that the

perceiver is, literally, active: doing many

things at once. Active perception is

System Watson trying to run all over the

place and not miss a thing. It is the Watson

who not only examines his visitor, but

worries

about

the

doorbell,

the

newspaper, when lunch will be served,

how Holmes is feeling, all in the same

moment. A better term here would be

disengaged activity: a state where you

seem to be active and productive, but are

actually doing nothing to its fullest

potential, spreading thin your attentional

resources.

What separates Holmes from Watson,

the passive observer from the active one,

engaged

passivity

from

disengaged

activity, is precisely the descriptor I’ve

used in both cases: engagement. Flow.

Motivation. Interest. Call it what you may.

That thing that keeps Holmes focused

exclusively on his visitor, that enraptures

him and prevents his mind from wandering

anywhere but to the object at hand.

In a set of classic studies, a group of

Harvard

researchers

set

out

demonstrate

that

active

perceivers

categorize and characterize on a near-

subconscious level, automatically and

without much thought, but then fail to

implement the final step of correction—

even when they have all of the information

to do so—and so end up with an

impression of someone that does not take

into account all of the variables of the

interaction. Like Watson, they remember

only that a jury would like a man’s

appearance; unlike Holmes, they fail to

take into account those factors that might

make that appearance a deceptive one—or

those circumstances under which a jury

would dismiss any appearance, no matter

how trustworthy, as false (like additional

evidence so weighty it renders all

subjective aspects of the case largely

irrelevant).

In the first study, the researchers tested

whether individuals who were cognitively

“busy,” or multitasking in the way that we

often are when we juggle numerous

elements of a situation, would be able to

correct initial impressions by making the

necessary

adjustment. A

group

participants was asked to watch a series

of seven video clips in which a woman

was having a conversation with a stranger.

The clips did not have sound, ostensibly

to protect the privacy of those speaking,

but did include subtitles at the bottom of

each clip that told participants the topic of

conversation. In five of the seven videos,

the woman behaved in an anxious fashion,

while in the other two she remained calm.

While everyone watched the exact same

videos, two elements differed: the

subtitles and the task that the participants

were expected to perform. In one

condition, the five anxious clips were

paired with anxiety-provoking topics,

such as sex life, while in the other, all

seven clips were paired with neutral

topics like world travel (in other words,

the five clips of anxious behavior would

seem incongruous given the relaxing

subject). And within each of these

conditions, half of the participants were

told that they would be rating the woman

in the video on some personality

dimensions, while the other half was

expected to both rate personality and be

able to recall the seven topics of

conversation in order.

What the researchers found came as no

shock to them, but it did shake up the way

person perception—the way we view

other people—had always been seen.

While those individuals who had to focus

only on the woman adjusted for the

situation, rating her as dispositionally

more anxious in the neutral topic condition

and as less anxious in the anxiety-inducing

topic condition, those who had to recall

the conversation topics completely failed

to take those topics into account in their

judgment of the woman’s anxiety. They

had all of the information they needed to

make the judgment, but they never thought

to use it. So even though they knew that the

situation would make anyone anxious in

theory, in practice they simply decided that the woman was a generally anxious

person. What’s more, they predicted that

she would continue to be anxious in future

scenarios, regardless of how anxiety-

provoking those scenarios were. And the

better they recalled the topics of

conversation, the more extremely off their

predictions were. In other words, the

busier their brains were, the less they

adjusted

after

forming

initial

impression.

The news here is both good and bad.

First, the obviously bad: in most

situations, under most circumstances, we

are active observers, and as such, more

likely than not to make the error of

unconsciously, automatically categorizing

and characterizing, and then failing to

correct that initial impression. And so we

go by appearances; we forget to be subtle;

we forget how easily a person can be

influenced at any given point by myriad

forces, internal and external. Incidentally,

this works whether or not you tend, as

most Westerners do, to infer stable traits

over passing states, or, as many Eastern

cultures do, to infer states over traits;

whatever direction you err in, you will

fail to adjust.

But there’s good news. Study after

study shows that individuals who are

motivated correct more naturally—and

more correctly, so to speak—than those

who are not. In other words, we have to

both realize that we tend to form

autopilot-like judgments and then fail to

adjust them, and we have to want,

actively, to be more accurate. In one

study, psychologist Douglas Krull used the

same initial setup as the Harvard anxiety

research—but gave some participants an

additional goal: estimate the amount of

anxiety caused by the interview questions.

Those who regarded the situation were far

less likely to decide that the woman was

simply an anxious person—even when

they were busy with the cognitive

rehearsal task.

Or, let’s take another commonly used

paradigm: the political statement that is

assigned to a subject rather than

deliberately

chosen.

Take

capital

punishment (since we’ve mentioned that

same issue in the past, and it fits nicely

into Holmes’s criminal world; it’s also

often used in these experimental settings).

Now, you might have one of three, broadly

speaking, attitudes toward the death

penalty: you might be for it, you might be

against it, or you might not particularly

care, or not really know, or have never

really given it much thought. If I were to

give you a brief article with arguments

that support capital punishment, how

would you respond to it?

The answer is, it depends. If you don’t

particularly know or care one way or the

other—if you are more disinterested or

disengaged—you are more likely than not

to take the article at something like face

value. If you have no real reason to doubt

the source and it seems logical enough,

you are likely to let it persuade you. You

will categorize and characterize, but there

will be little need for correction.

Correction takes effort, and you have no

personal reason to exert any. Contrast this

with your reaction if you are a passionate

opponent/proponent of the death penalty.

In either case, you will pay attention at the

mere mention of the theme of the article.

You will read it much more carefully, and

you will expend the effort necessary for

correction. The correction may not be the

same if you agree as if you disagree—in

fact, you may even overcorrect if you

oppose the article’s points, going too far

in the opposite direction—but whatever

the case, you will engage much more

actively, and you will exert the mental

effort that is necessary to challenge your

initial impressions. Because it matters to

you to get it right.

(I chose a political issue on purpose, to

illustrate that the context need not be

related to people, but just think what a

difference in perception there would be if

you met for the first time a random person

versus someone you knew was going to be

interviewing or somehow evaluating you

shortly. In which case are you more likely

to be careful about your impressions, lest

you be wrong? In which will you expend

more effort to correct and recalibrate?)

When

you

feel

strong

personal

engagement with something, you will feel

it is worth that extra push. And if you are

engaged in the process itself—in the idea

of observing more carefully, being more

attentive and alert—you will be that much

more likely to challenge yourself to

accuracy. Of course, you need to be aware

of the process to begin with—but now you

are. And if you realize that you should

engage but don’t feel up to it?

Psychologist Arie Kruglanski has spent

his career studying a phenomenon known

as the Need for Closure: a desire of the

mind to come to some definitive

knowledge of an issue. Beyond exploring

how individuals differ in that need,

Kruglanski has demonstrated that we can

manipulate it in order to be more attentive

and engaged—and to make sure we

complete the correction stage in our

judgments.

This can be accomplished in several

ways. Most effectively, if we are made to

feel accountable in our judgments, we will

spend more time looking at angles and

possibilities before making up our minds

—and so will expend the correctional

effort on any initial impressions, to make

sure they are accurate. Our minds won’t

“close” (or, as Kruglanski calls it,

“freeze”) in their search until we are

fairly sure we’ve done all we can. While

there isn’t always an experimenter there to

hold us accountable, we can do it for

ourselves by setting up each important

judgment or observation as a challenge.

How accurate can I be? How well can I

do? Can I improve my ability to pay

attention over the last time? Such

challenges not only engage us in the task

of observation and make it more

intrinsically interesting, but they also

make us less likely to jump to conclusions

and issue judgments without a lot of prior

thought.

The active observer is hampered

because he is trying to do too many things

at once. If he is in a social psychology

experiment and forced to remember seven

topics in order, or a string of digits, or any

number of things that psychologists like to

use to ensure cognitive busyness, he is

basically doomed. Why? Because the

experiments

are

forcibly

preventing

engagement. You cannot engage—unless

you have eidetic memory or have read up

on your memory palace skills—if you are

trying desperately to remember unrelated

information (actually, even if it’s related

information; the point is, your resources

are engaged elsewhere).

But I have news for you: our life is not

a social psychology experiment. We are

never required to be active observers. No

one is asking us to recall, in exact order, a

conversation or to make a speech of which

we hadn’t been aware previously. No one

is forcing us to limit our engagement. The

only ones that do that is us, ourselves. Be

it because we’ve lost interest, as Holmes

did with Mr. Pycroft’s case, or because

we’re too busy thinking about a jury trial

in the future to focus on the man in the

present, like Watson, when we disengage

from a person or a situation it is our

prerogative. We can just as well not do it.

When we want to engage, believe me,

we can. And not only will we then make

fewer mistakes of perception, but we will

become the types of focused, observant

people that we may have thought we were

incapable of becoming. Even children

who have been diagnosed with ADHD can

fi nd themselves able to focus on certain

things that grab them, that activate and

engage their minds. Like video games.

Time after time, video games have proven

able to bring out the attentional resources

in people that they never suspected they

had. And what’s more, the kind of

sustained

attention

and

newfound

appreciation of detail that emerges from

the process of engagement can then

transfer to other domains, beyond the

screen. Cognitive neuroscientists Daphné

Bavelier and C. Shawn Green, for

instance, have found repeatedly that so-

called “action” video games—games

characterized

high

speed,

high

perceptual

and

motor

load,

upredictability,

and

the

need

for

peripheral processing—enhance visual

attention, low-level vision, processing

speed, attentional, cognitive, and social

control, and a number of other faculties

across domains as varied as the piloting

of unmanned drones and laparoscopic

surgery. The brain can actually change and

learn to sustain attention in a more

prolonged fashion—and all because of

moments of engagement in something that

actually mattered.

We began the chapter with mind

wandering, and that is where we will end

it. Mind wandering is anathema to

engagement. Be it mind wandering from

lack of stimulation, mind wandering from

multitasking (basically, most of modern

existence), or mind wandering because of

a forced laboratory paradigm, it cannot

coexist with engagement. And so, it cannot

coexist with mindful attention, the

Attention that we need for Observation.

And yet we constantly make the active

choice to disengage. We listen to our

headphones as we walk, run, take the

subway. We check our phones when we

are having dinner with our friends and

family. We think of the next meeting while

we are in the current one. In short, we

occupy

our

minds

with

self-made

memorization topics or distracting strings

of numbers. The Daniel Gilberts of the

world don’t need to do it for us. In fact,

Dan Gilbert himself tracked a group of

over 2,200 adults in their regular days

through iPhone alerts, asking them to

report on how they were feeling, what

they were doing, and whether or not they

were thinking of something other than the

activity they had been involved in when

they received the alert. And you know

what he found? Not only do people think

about something other than what they’re

doing about as often as they think about

what they are doing—46.9 percent of the

time, to be exact—but what they are

actually doing doesn’t seem to make a

difference; minds wander about equally no

matter how seemingly interesting and

engaging or boring and dull the activity.

An observant mind, an attentive mind,

is a present mind. It is a mind that isn’t

wandering. It is a mind that is actively

engaged in whatever it is that it happens to

be doing. And it is a mind that allows

System Holmes to step up, instead of

letting System Watson run around like

crazy, trying to do it all and see it all.

I know a psychology professor who

turns off her email and Internet access for

two hours every day, to focus exclusively

on her writing. I think there’s much to

learn from that self-enforced discipline

and distance. It’s certainly an approach I

wish I took more often than I do. Consider

the results of a recent nature intervention

by a neuroscientist who wanted to

demonstrate what could happen if people

took three days to be completely wireless

in the wild: creativity, clarity in thought, a

reboot of sorts of the brain. We can’t all

afford a three-day wilderness excursion,

but maybe, just maybe, we can afford a

few hours here and there where we can

make a conscious choice: focus.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“I noticed that [his hand] was all

mottled over . . .” “You have been in

Afghanistan, I perceive.” from A Study in

Scarlet, chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes,

p. 7.

“I knew you came from Afghanistan.”

“Before turning to those moral and

mental aspects . . .” from A Study in

Scarlet, chapter 2: The Science of

Deduction, p. 15.

“What does Dr. James Mortimer, the

man of science, ask of Sherlock Holmes,

the specialist in crime?”

from The

Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 1: Mr.

Sherlock Holmes, p. 5.

“My body has remained in this

armchair . . .” from The Hound of the

Baskervilles, chapter 3: The Problem, p.

22.

“Let us continue our reconstruction.”

fr o m The Return of Sherlock Holmes,

“The Adventure of the Priory School,” p.

932.

“It may possibly recur to your memory

that when I examined the paper upon

which the printed words were fastened . .

.” from The Hound of the Baskervilles,

chapter 15: A Retrospection, p. 156.

“Is there any point to which you would

wish to draw my attention?” from The

Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “Silver

Blaze,” p. 1.

“At the single table sat the man whom

we had seen in the street . . .” from The

Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “The

Stockbroker’s Clerk,” p. 51.

“Surely the man’s appearance would

go far with any jury?” from The Return

of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of

the Norwood Builder,” p. 829.

CHAPTER FOUR

Exploring the Brain Attic: The

Value of Creativity and

Imagination

young

solicitor,

John

Hector

McFarlane, wakes up one morning to find

his life upended: overnight he has become

the single most likely suspect in the

murder of a local builder. He barely has

time to reach Sherlock Holmes to tell his

story before he is swept off to Scotland

Yard, so damning is the evidence against

him.

As he explains to Holmes before he is

whisked away, he had first met the victim,

a certain Jonas Oldacre, only the prior

afternoon. The man had arrived at

McFarlane’s offices and asked him to

copy and witness his will—and to Mr.

McFarlane’s surprise, that will left him

all of the builder’s property. He was

childless and alone, explained Oldacre.

And once upon a time, he had known

McFarlane’s parents well. He wanted to

commemorate the friendship with the

inheritance—but, he urged, McFarlane

was not to breathe a word of the

transaction to his family until the

following day. It was to be a surprise.

That evening the builder asked the

solicitor to join him for dinner, so that

they might afterward go over some

important documents in connection with

the estate. McFarlane obliged. And that, it

seems, was that. Until, that is, the

following morning’s papers described

Oldacre’s death—and the burning of his

body in the timber yard at the back of his

house. The most likely suspect: young

John Hector McFarlane, who not only

stood to inherit the dead man’s estate, but

had also left his walking stick (bloodied)

at the scene of the crime.

McFarlane is summarily arrested by

Inspector Lestrade, leaving Holmes with

his strange tale. And though the arrest

seems to make sense—the inheritance, the

stick,

the

nighttime

visit,

all

the

indications that point to McFarlane’s guilt

—Holmes can’t help but feel that

something is off. “I know it’s all wrong,”

Holmes tells Watson. “I feel it in my

bones.”

Holmes’s bones, however, are in this

instance going against the preponderance

of evidence. As far as Scotland Yard is

concerned, the case is as close to airtight

as they come. All that remains is to put the

final touches on the police report. When

Holmes insists that all is not yet clear,

Inspector Lestrade begs to differ. “Not

clear? Well, if that isn’t clear, what could

be clear?” he interjects.

“Here is a young man who learns suddenly

that, if a certain older man dies, he will

succeed to a fortune. What does he do? He

says nothing to anyone, but he arranges

that he shall go out on some pretext to see

his client that night. He waits until the only

other person in the house is in bed, and

then in the solitude of a man’s room he

murders him, burns his body in the wood-

pile, and departs to a neighbouring hotel.”

As if that weren’t enough, there’s more:

“The blood-stains in the room and also on

the stick are very slight. It is probable that

he imagined his crime to be a bloodless

one, and hoped that if the body were

consumed it would hide all traces of the

method of his death—traces which, for

some reason, must have pointed to him. Is

not all this obvious?”

Holmes remains unconvinced. He tells

the inspector:

“It strikes me, my good Lestrade, as being

just a trifle too obvious. You do not add

imagination to your other great qualities,

but if you could for one moment put

yourself in the place of this young man,

would you choose the very night after the

will had been made to commit your

crime? Would it not seem dangerous to

you to make so very close a relation

between the two incidents? Again, would

you choose an occasion when you are

known to be in the house, when a servant

has let you in? And, finally, would you

take the great pains to conceal the body,

and yet leave your own stick as a sign that

you were the criminal? Confess, Lestrade,

that all this is very unlikely.”

But Lestrade just shrugs his shoulders.

What does imagination have to do with it?

Observation and deduction, sure: these are

the lynchpins of detective work. But

imagination? Isn’t that just a flimsy retreat

of the less hard-minded and scientific

professions, those artistic dalliers who

couldn’t be further from Scotland Yard?

Lestrade doesn’t understand just how

wrong he is—and just how central a role

imagination plays, not just to the

successful inspector or detective but to

any person who would hold himself as a

successful thinker. If he were to listen to

Holmes for more than clues as to a

suspect’s identity or a case’s line of

inquiry, he would find that he might have

less need of turning to him in the future.

For, if imagination does not enter into the

picture—and do so before any deduction

takes place—all of those observations, all

of that understanding of the prior chapters

will have little value indeed.

Imagination is the essential next step of

the thought process. It uses the building

blocks of all of the observations that

you’ve collected to create the material that

can then serve as a solid base for future

deduction, be it as to the events of that

fateful Norwood evening when Jonas

Oldacre met his death or the solution to a

pesky problem that has been gnawing at

you at home or at work. If you think that

you can skip it, that it is something

unscientific and frivolous, you’ll find

yourself having wasted much effort only to

arrive at a conclusion that, as clear and

obvious as it may seem to you, could not

be further from the truth.

What is imagination, and why is it so

important? Why, of all things to mention to

Lestrade, does Holmes focus on this

particular feature, and what is it doing in

something as strict-sounding as the

scientific method of the mind?

Lestrade isn’t the first to turn his nose

up at the thought of imagination playing a

role in good old scientific reason, nor is

Holmes alone in his insistence to the

contrary. One of the greatest scientific

thinkers of the twentieth century, Nobel-

winning physicist Richard Feynman,

frequently voiced his surprise at the lack

of appreciation for what he thought was a

central quality in both thinking and

science. “It is surprising that people do

not believe that there is imagination in

science,” he once told an audience. Not

only is that view patently false, but “it is a

very interesting kind of imagination,

unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty

is in trying to imagine something that you

have never seen, that is consistent in every

detail with what has already been seen,

and that is different from what has been

thought of; furthermore, it must be definite

and not a vague proposition. That is

indeed difficult.”

It’s tough to find a better summation and

definition of the role of imagination in the

scientific process of thought. Imagination

takes the stuff of observation and

experience and recombines them into

something new. In so doing, it sets the

stage for deduction, the sifting through of

imaginative alternatives to decide: out of

all of the possibilities you’ve imagined,

which is the definite one that best explains

all of the facts?

In imagining, you bring into being

something hypothetical, something that

may or may not exist in actuality but that

you have actively created in your own

mind. As such, what you imagine “is

different from what has been thought of.”

It’s not a restatement of the facts, nor is it

a simple line from A to B that can be

drawn without much thought. It is your

own synthesis and creation. Think of

imagination as a kind of essential mental

space in your attic, where you have the

freedom to work with various contents but

don’t yet have to commit to any storage or

organizational system, where you can shift

and combine and recombine and mess

around at will and not be afraid of

disturbing the main attic’s order or

cleanliness in any way.

That space is essential in the sense of

there not being a functional attic without

it: you can’t have a storage space that is

filled to the brim with boxes. How would

you ever come inside? Where would you

pull out the boxes to find what you need?

How would you even see what boxes

were available and where they might be

found? You need space. You need light.

You need to be able to access your attic’s

contents, to walk inside and look around

and see what is what.

And within that space, there is freedom.

You can temporarily place there all of the

observations

you’ve

gathered.

You

haven’t yet filed them away or placed

them in your attic’s permanent storage.

Instead, you lay them all out, where you

can see them, and then you play around.

What patterns emerge? Can something

from permanent storage be added to make

a different picture, something that makes

sense? You stand in that open space and

you examine what you’ve gathered. You

pull out different elements, try out

different combinations, see what works

and what doesn’t, what feels right and

what doesn’t. And you come away with a

creation that is unlike the facts or

observations that have fed into it. It has its

roots in them, true, but it is its own unique

thing,

which

exists

only

that

hypothetical state of your mind and may or

may not be real or even true.

But that creation isn’t coming out of the

blue. It is grounded in reality. It is

drawing upon all those observations

you’ve gathered up to that point,

“consistent in every detail with what has

already been seen.” It is, in other words,

growing organically out of those contents

that you’ve gathered into your attic through

the process of observation, mixed with

those ingredients that have always been

there, your knowledge base and your

understanding of the world. Feynman

phrases it thus: “Imagination in a tight

straightjacket.” To him, the straightjacket

is the laws of physics. To Holmes, it is

essentially the same thing: that base of

knowledge and observation that you’ve

acquired to the present time. Never is it

simply a flight of fancy; you can’t think of

imagination in this context as identical to

the creativity of a fiction writer or an

artist. It can’t be. First, for the simple

reason that it is grounded in the factual

reality that you’ve built up, and second,

because it “must be definite and not a

vague proposition.” Your imaginings have

to be concrete. They have to be detailed.

They don’t exist in reality, but their

substance must be such that they could

theoretically jump from your head straight

into the world with little adjustment. Per

Feynman, they are in a straightjacket—or,

in Holmes’s terms, they are confined and

determined by your unique brain attic.

Your imaginings must use it as their base

and they must play by its rules—and those

rules include the observations you’ve so

diligently gathered. “The game is,”

continues Feynman, “to try to figure out

what we know, what’s possible? It

requires an analysis back, a checking to

see whether it fits, it’s allowed according

to what is known.”

And in that statement lies the final piece

of the definition. Yes, imagination must

come from a basis in real, hard

knowledge, from the concreteness and

specificity of your attic. And yes, it serves

a greater purpose: a setup for deduction,

be it of a scientific truth, a solution to a

murder, or a decision or problem in your

own life that is far removed from both.

And in all these instances, it must deal

with certain constraints. But it is also free.

It is fun. It is, in other words, a game. It is

the most playful part of a serious

endeavor. Not for nothing does Holmes

utter the famed refrain “The game is

afoot,” in the opening lines of “The

Adventure of the Abbey Grange.” That

simple phrase conveys not only his

passion and excitement but his approach

to the art of detection and, more generally,

of thought: it is a serious thing indeed, but

it never loses the element of play. That

element is necessary. Without it, no

serious endeavor stands a chance.

We tend to think of creativity as an all-

or-nothing,

you-have-it-or-you-don’t

characteristic of the mind. But that

couldn’t be further from the truth.

Creativity can be taught. It is just like

another muscle—attention, self-control—

that can be exercised and grow stronger

with use, training, focus, and motivation.

In fact, studies have shown that creativity

is fluid and that training enables people to

become more creative: if you think your

imagination can grow with practice, you

will become better at imaginative

pursuits. (There, again, is that persistent

need for motivation.) Believing you can

be as creative as the best of them and

learning creativity’s essential components

is crucial to improving your overall

ability to think, decide, and act in a way

that would more befit a Holmes than a

Watson (or a Lestrade).

Here we explore that mind space, that

stage for synthesis, recombination, and

insight. That deceptively lighthearted

arena that will allow Holmes to solve the

case of the Norwood builder—for solve it

he will; and as you’ll see, Lestrade’s

confidence in the obvious will prove both

misguided and short-lived.

Learning to Overcome Imaginative

Doubt

Picture the following. You are led into a

room with a table. On the table are three

items: a box of tacks, a book of matches,

and a candle. You are told that you have

only one assignment: attach the candle to

the wall. You can take as much time as

you need. How do you proceed?

If you are like over 75 percent of the

participants in the now-classic study by

the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker,

you would likely try one of two routes.

You might try to tack the candle onto the

wall—but you’ll quickly find that method

to be futile. Or you might try to light the

candle and use the dripping wax to attach

it to the wall, foregoing the box of tacks

entirely (after all, you might think, it could

be a distracter!). Again, you’d fail. The

wax is not strong enough to hold the

candle,

and

your

contraption

will

collapse. What now?

For the real solution you need some

imagination. No one sees it at once. Some

people find it after only a minute or two of

thought. Others see it after faltering

through several unsuccessful attempts.

And others fail to solve it without some

outside help. Here’s the answer. Take the

tacks out of the box, tack the box to the

wall, and light the candle. Soften the

bottom of the candle with a match, so that

the wax begins to drip into the box, and

place the candle inside the box, on top of

the soft pillow of wax. Secure. Run out of

the room before the candle burns low

enough to set the box on fire. Voilà.

Why don’t so many people see that

alternative? They forget that between

observation and deduction there lies an

important mental moment. They take the

hot System Watson route—action, action,

action—underestimating the crucial need

for the exact opposite: a moment of quiet

reflection. And so they understandably go

at once for the most natural or most

obvious solutions. The majority of people

in this situation do not see that something

obvious—a box of tacks—might actually

be something less obvious: a box and

tacks.

This is known as functional fixedness.

We tend to see objects the way they are

presented, as serving a specific function

that is already assigned. The box and tacks

go together as a box of tacks. The box

holds the tacks; it does not have another

function. To go past that and actually

break the object into two component parts,

to realize that the box and matches are two

different things, takes an imaginative leap

(Duncker, coming from the Gestalt school,

was studying precisely this question, of

our tendency to see the whole over the

parts).

Indeed, in follow-ups to Duncker’s

original study, one experiment showed

that if the objects were presented

separately, with the tacks sitting beside

the box, the percentage of people who

solved the problem rose dramatically.

Ditto with a simple linguistic tweak: if

participants were primed, prior to

encountering the candle problem, with a

series of words connected with and

instead of of, as in, “a box and tacks,”

they were much more likely to see the

solution. And even if the words were just

underlined separately, as five items

(candle, book of matches, and box of

tacks), participants were also much more

likely to solve the problem.

But the original problem requires some

thought, a shift away from the obvious

without any external help. It’s not as

simple as looking at everything you’ve

observed and right away acting or trying

to deduce the most likely scenario that

would satisfy your objective. Those

people who were able to solve it knew the

importance of not acting, the value of

letting their minds take the situation in and

give it some internal, quiet thought. In

short,

they

realized

that

between

observation and deduction lies the crucial,

irreplaceable step of imagination.

It’s easy to see Sherlock Holmes as a

hard, cold reasoning machine: the epitome

of calculating logic. But that view of

Holmes the Logical Automaton couldn’t

be further from the truth. Quite the

contrary. What makes Holmes who he is,

what places him above detectives,

inspectors, and civilians alike, is his

willingness to engage in the nonlinear,

embrace the hypothetical, entertain the

conjecture; it’s his capacity for creative

thought and imaginative reflection.

Why then do we tend to miss this softer,

almost artistic side and focus instead on

the detective’s computer-like powers of

rational calculation? Simply put, that view

is both easier and safer. It is a line of

thinking that is well ingrained into our

psychology. We have been trained to do it

from an early age. As Albert Einstein put

it, “Certainly we should take care not to

make the intellect our god; it has, of

course,

powerful

muscles,

but

personality. It cannot lead, it can only

serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice

of a leader.” We live in a society that

glorifies the computer model, that idolizes

the inhuman Holmes, who can take in

countless data points as a matter of

course, analyze them with startling

precision, and spit out a solution. A

society that gives short shrift to the power

something

unquantifiable

imagination and focuses instead on the

power of the intellect.

But wait, you might think, that’s

completely bogus. We also thrive on the

idea of innovation and creativity. We are

living in the age of the entrepreneur, of the

man of ideas, of Steve Jobs and the “Think

Different” motto. Well, yes and no. That

is, we value creativity on the surface, but

in our heart of hearts, imagination can

scare us like crazy.

As a general rule, we dislike

uncertainty. It makes us uneasy. A certain

world is a much friendlier place. And so

we work hard to reduce whatever

uncertainty we can, often by making

habitual, practical choices, which protect

the status quo. You know the saying,

“Better the devil you know”? That about

sums it up.

Creativity, on the other hand, requires

novelty. Imagination is all about new

possibilities, eventualities that don’t exist,

counterfactuals,

recombination

elements in new ways. It is about the

untested. And the untested is uncertain. It

is frightening—even if we aren’t aware of

just how much it frightens us personally. It

is also potentially embarrassing (after all,

there’s never a guarantee of success). Why

do you think Conan Doyle’s inspectors are

always so loath to depart from standard

protocol, to do anything that might in the

least endanger their investigation or delay

even

instant?

Holmes’s

imagination frightens them.

Consider

common

paradox:

organizations, institutions, and individual

decision makers often reject creative

ideas even as they state openly that

creativity is an important and sometimes

central goal. Why? New research suggests

that we may hold an unconscious bias

against creative ideas much like we do in

cases of racism or phobias.

Remember the Implicit Association

Test from chapter two? In a series of

studies, Jennifer Mueller and colleagues

decided to modify it for something that

had never appeared in need of testing:

creativity. Participants had to complete

the same good/bad category pairing as in

the standard IAT, only this time with two

words that expressed an attitude that was

either practical ( functional, constructive,

or useful) or creative ( novel, inventive, or

original). The result indicated that even

those people who had explicitly ranked

creativity as high on their list of positive

attributes showed an implicit bias against

it relative to practicality under conditions

of uncertainty. And what’s more, they also

rated an idea that had been pretested as

creative (for example, a running shoe that

uses

nanotechnology to adjust fabric

thickness to cool the foot and reduce

blisters) as less creative than their more

certain counterparts. So not only were

they implicitly biased, but they exhibited a

failure to see creativity for what it was

when directly faced with it.

True, that effect was seen only in

uncertain conditions—but doesn’t that

describe

most

decision-making

environments? It certainly applies to

detective work. And corporations. And

science. And business. And basically

anything else you can think of.

Great thinkers have gotten over that

hump, that fear of the void. Einstein had

failures. So did Abraham Lincoln,

probably one of the few men to go to war

a captain and return a private—and to file

twice for bankruptcy before assuming the

presidency. So did Walt Disney, getting

fired from a newspaper for “lack of

imagination” (the creativity paradox, if

ever there was one, in full force). So did

Thomas Edison, inventing over one

thousand failed specimens before he came

up with a lightbulb that worked. And so

did Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler,

anyone? Man with the twisted lip? Or how

about that Yellow Face, to which we’ll

soon return in greater detail?).

What distinguishes them isn’t a lack of

failure but a lack of fear of failure, an

openness that is the hallmark of the

creative mind. They may have had that

same anticreative bias as most of us at one

point in their lives, but one way or

another, they managed to squelch it into

submission. Sherlock Holmes has one

element that a computer lacks, and it is

that very element that both makes him

what he is and undercuts the image of the

detective as nothing more than logician

par excellence: imagination.

Who hasn’t dismissed a problem

because no obvious answer presented

itself at once? And which of us hasn’t

made a wrong decision or taken a wrong

turn because we never stopped to think

that clear and obvious might be a trifle too

obvious? Who hasn’t persisted in a less-

than-ideal setup just because that’s the

way things were always done—and

though better ways may exist, they would

depart too much from the tried and true?

Better the devil you know.

Our fear of uncertainty keeps us in

check when we’d do better to accompany

Holmes on one of his imaginative

wanderings and play out scenarios that

may exist—for the time being, at least—

only in our heads. Einstein, for one, had

nothing but intuition to go on when he

proposed his grand theory of general

relativity. When George Sylvester Viereck

asked him, in 1929, whether his

discoveries were the result of intuition or

inspiration, Einstein replied, “I’m enough

of an artist to draw freely on my

imagination, which I think is more

important than knowledge. Knowledge is

limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

Absent imagination, the great scientist

would have been stuck in the certainty of

the linear and the easily accessible.

What’s more, many problems don’t

even have an obvious answer to turn to. In

the case of our Norwood mystery,

Lestrade had a ready-made story and

suspect. But what if that didn’t exist?

What if there was no linear narrative, and

the only way to get to the answer was by

circuitous and hypothetical meanderings

of the mind? (One such case appears in

The Valley of Fear , when the victim isn’t

at all who he seems to be—and neither is

the house. A lack of imagination in that

instance equals a lack of solution.) And in

a world far removed from detectives and

inspectors and builders, what if there’s no

obvious job path or better romantic

prospect or choice that would make us

happier? What if the answer instead

requires digging and some creative self-

exploration? Not many would change a

known devil for an unknown one—and

fewer still would exchange it for none at

all.

Without imagination we would never be

able to reach the heights of thought that we

are capable of; we’d be doomed, at the

very best, to become very good at

spewing back details and facts—but we’d

find it difficult to use those facts in any

way that could meaningfully improve our

judgment and decision making. We’d have

an attic stacked with beautifully organized

boxes, folders, and materials. And we

wouldn’t know where to begin to go

through them all. Instead, we’d have to

thumb through the stacks over and over,

maybe finding the right approach, maybe

not. And if the right element wasn’t there

for the taking but had to actually come

from two, or even three, different files?

Good luck to us.

Let’s go back for a moment to the case

of the Norwood builder. Why is it that,

lacking imagination, Lestrade can’t come

near solving the mystery and, indeed,

comes close to sentencing an innocent

man? What does imagination provide here

that straightforward analysis does not?

Both the inspector and the detective have

access to identical information. Holmes

doesn’t have some secret knowledge that

would enable him to see something that

Lestrade does not—or at least any

knowledge that Lestrade, too, couldn’t

easily apply in much the same fashion. But

not only do the two men choose to use

different

elements

their

shared

knowledge; they then interpret what they

do know in altogether different lights.

Lestrade follows the straightforward

approach,

and

Sherlock

imaginative one that the inspector does not

even conceive to be possible.

At the beginning of the investigation,

Holmes and Lestrade start from the exact

same point, as John Hector McFarlane

gives the entirety of his statement in their

joint presence. In fact, it’s Lestrade who

has an edge of a sort. He has already been

to the scene of the crime, while Holmes is

only now hearing of it for the first time.

And yet, right away, their approaches

diverge. When Lestrade, prior to arresting

McFarlane and leading him away, asks

Holmes whether he has any further

questions, Holmes replies, “Not until I

have been to Blackheath.” Blackheath?

But the murder took place in Norwood.

“You mean Norwood,” Lestrade corrects

the detective. “Oh, yes, no doubt that is

what I must have meant,” replies Holmes,

and proceeds, of course, to Blackheath,

the

home

the

unfortunate

Mr.

McFarlane’s parents.

“And why not Norwood?” asks Watson,

just as Lestrade had wondered before him.

“Because,” replies Holmes, “we have

in this case one singular incident coming

close to the heels of another singular

incident. The police are making the

mistake of concentrating their attention

upon the second, because it happens to be

the one which is actually criminal.” Strike

one, as you’ll see in a moment, against

Lestrade’s

overly

straightforward

approach.

Holmes is disappointed in his trip. “I

tried one or two leads,” he tells Watson

upon his return, “but could get at nothing

which would help our hypothesis, and

several points which would make against

it. I gave it up at last, and off I went to

Norwood.” But, as we’ll soon see, the

time wasn’t wasted—nor does Holmes

think it was. For, you never know how the

most straightforward-seeming events will

unfold once you use that attic space of

imagination to its fullest potential. And

you never know just what piece of

information will make a nonsensical

puzzle all of a sudden make sense.

Still, the case does not seem to be

heading toward a successful resolution.

As Holmes tells Watson, “Unless some

lucky chance comes our way I fear that the

Norwood Disappearance Case will not

figure in that chronicle of our successes

which I foresee that a patient public will

sooner or later have to endure.”

And then, from the most unlikely of

places, that very lucky chance appears.

Lestrade

calls

“important

fresh

evidence” that definitively establishes

McFarlane’s guilt. Holmes is stricken—

until he realizes just what that fresh

evidence

is:

McFarlane’s

bloody

fingerprint on the hallway wall. What to

Lestrade is proof positive of guilt to

Holmes

the

very

epitome

McFarlane’s innocence. And what’s more,

it confirms a suspicion that has, to that

point, been nothing more than a nagging

feeling, an “intuition,” as Holmes calls it,

that there has been no crime to begin with.

Jonas Oldacre is, as a matter of fact, alive

and well.

How can that be? How can the exact

same piece of information serve, for the

inspector, to condemn a man and, for

Holmes, to free him—and to cast doubt on

the nature of the entire crime? It all comes

down to imagination.

Let’s go through it step-by-step. First

off, there’s Holmes’s initial response to

the story: not to rush immediately to the

scene of the supposed crime but rather to

acquaint himself with all possible angles,

which may or may not prove useful. And

so, a trip to Blackheath, to those very

parents who are supposed to have known

Jonas Oldacre when young and who, of

course, know McFarlane. While this may

not seem to be particularly imaginative, it

does entail a more open-minded and less

linear approach than the one espoused by

Lestrade: straight to the scene of the

crime, and the scene of the crime only.

Lestrade has, in a way, closed off all

alternate possibilities from the get-go.

Why bother to look if everything you need

is right in one place?

Much of imagination is about making

connections that are not entirely obvious,

between elements that may appear

disparate at first. When I was younger, my

parents gave me a toy of sorts: a wooden

pole with a hole in the middle and a ring

at the base. Through the hole was threaded

a thick string, with two wooden circles on

either end. The point of the toy was to get

the ring off the pole. It seemed like a piece

of cake at first—until I realized that the

string with its circles prevented the ring

from coming off the obvious way, over the

top of the pole. I tried force. And more

force. And speed. Maybe I could trick it? I

tried to get the string and circles to

somehow detach. The ring to slide over

the circles that it hadn’t slid over in the

past. Nothing worked. None of the

solutions that seemed most promising

were actually solutions at all. Instead, to

remove the ring, you had to take a path so

circuitous that it took me hours of trying—

with days in between—to finally have the

patience to reach it. For you had to, in a

sense, stop trying to take the ring off. I’d always begun with that ring, thinking that

it had to be the right way to go. After all,

wasn’t the whole point to remove it? It

wasn’t until I forgot the ring and took a

step back to look at the overall picture and

to explore its possibilities that I came

upon the solution.

I, too, had to go to Blackheath before I

could figure out what was going on in

Norwood. Unlike Lestrade, I had a strict

guide: I would know when I had solved

the puzzle correctly. And so I didn’t need

Holmes’s nudging. I realized I was wrong

because I would know without a doubt

when I was right. But most problems

aren’t so clear-cut. There’s no stubborn

ring that gives you only two answers, right

and wrong. Instead, there’s a whole mass

of misleading turns and false resolutions.

And absent Holmes’s reminder, you may

be tempted to keep tugging at that ring to

get it off—and think that it has been

removed when all you’ve really done is

lodged it farther up the pole.

So, Holmes goes to Blackheath. But

that’s not the end to his willingness to

engage in the imaginative. In order to

approach the case of the Norwood builder

as the detective does—and accomplish

what he accomplishes—you need to begin

from a place of open-minded possibility.

You cannot equate the most obvious

course of events with the only possible

course of events. If you do so, you run the

risk of never even thinking of any number

of possibilities that may end up being the

real answer. And, more likely than not,

you will fall prey to that nasty

confirmation bias that we’ve seen in play

in previous chapters.

In this instance, not only does Holmes

hold very real the chance that McFarlane

is innocent, but he maintains and plays out

a number of hypothetical scenarios that

exist only in his mind, whereby each piece

of evidence, including the central one of

the very death of the builder, is not what it

appears to be. In order to realize the true

course of events, Holmes must first

imagine the possibility of that course of

events. Otherwise he’d be like Lestrade,

left saying, “I don’t know whether you

think that McFarlane came out of jail in

the dead of the night in order to strengthen

the evidence against himself,” and

following up that seemingly rhetorical

statement with, “I am a practical man, Mr.

Holmes, and when I have got my evidence

I come to my conclusions.”

Lestrade’s rhetorical certainty is so

misplaced precisely because he is a

practical man who goes straight from

evidence to conclusions. He forgets that

crucial step in between, that space that

gives you time to reflect, to think of other

possibilities, to consider what may have

occurred, and to follow those hypothetical

lines out inside your mind, instead of

being forced to use only what is in front of

you. (But never underestimate the crucial

importance of that observational stage that

has come before, the filling up of the

staging area with pieces of information for

your use: Holmes can come to his

conclusions about the thumbprint only

because he knows that he did not miss it

before. “I know that that mark was not

there when I examined the hall yesterday,”

he tells Watson. He trusts in his

observations, in his attention, in the

essential soundness of his attic and its

contents both. Lestrade, lacking his

training and ruled as he is by System

Watson, knows no such certainty.)

A lack of imagination can thus lead to

faulty action (the arrest or suspicion of the

wrong man) and to the lack of proper

action (looking for the actual culprit). If

only the most obvious solution is sought,

the correct one may never be found at all.

Reason without imagination is akin to

System Watson at the controls. It seems to

make sense and it’s what we want to do,

but it’s too impulsive and quick. You

cannot possibly assess and see the whole

picture—even if the solution ends up

being rather prosaic—if you don’t take a

step back to let imagination have its say.

Consider this counterexample to the

conduct of Lestrade. In “The Adventure of

Wisteria Lodge,” Holmes pays one of his

rare compliments to Inspector Baynes:

“You will rise high in your profession.

You have instinct and intuition.” What

does Baynes do differently from his

Scotland Yard counterparts to earn such

praise? He anticipates human nature

instead of dismissing it, arresting the

wrong man on purpose with the goal of

lulling the real criminal into false

complacency. (The wrong man, of course,

has a preponderance of evidence against

him, more than enough for an arrest, and to

a Lestrade would seem to be the right

man. In fact, Holmes initially mistakes

Baynes’s arrest as nothing more than a

Lestrade-like blunder.) And in this

anticipation lies one of the main virtues of

an imaginative approach: going beyond

simple logic in interpreting facts and

instead using that same logic to create

hypothetical alternatives. A Lestrade

would never think to do something so

nonlinear. Why in the world expend the

energy to arrest someone if that someone

is not who should be arrested according to

the law? Lacking imagination, he can think

only in a straight line.

In 1968, the high jump was a well-

established sport. You would run, you

would jump, and you would make your

way over a pole in one of several ways. In

older days you’d likely use the scissors,

scissoring out your legs as you glided

over, but by the sixties you’d probably be

using the straddle or the belly roll, facing

down and basically rolling over the bar.

Whichever style you used, one thing was

certain: you’d be facing forward when you

made your jump. Imagine trying to jump

backward. That would be ridiculous.

Dick Fosbury, however, didn’t think so.

To him, jumping backward seemed like

the way to go. All through high school,

he’d been developing a backward-facing

style, and now, in college, it was taking

him higher than it ever had. He wasn’t

sure why he did it, but if he thought about

it, he would say that his inspiration came

from the East: from Confucius and Lao

Tzu. He didn’t care what anyone else was

doing. He just jumped with the feeling of

the thing. People joked and laughed.

Fosbury looked just as ridiculous as they

thought he would (and his inspirations

sounded a bit ridiculous, too. When asked

about his approach, he told Sports

Illustrated, “I don’t even think about the

high jump. It’s positive thinking. I just let

it happen”). Certainly, no one expected

him to make the U.S. Olympics team—let

alone win the Olympics. But win he did,

setting American and Olympic records

with his 7-foot-4.25-inch (2.24-meter)

jump, only 1.5 inches short of the world

record.

With his unprecedented technique,

dubbed the Fosbury Flop, Fosbury did

what many other more traditional athletes

had never managed to accomplish: he

revolutionized, in a very real way, an

entire sport. Even after his win,

expectations were that he would remain a

lone bird, jumping in his esoteric style

while the rest of the world looked on. But

since 1978 no world record has been set

by anyone other than a flopper; and by

1980, thirteen of sixteen Olympic finalists

were flopping across the bar. To this day,

the flop remains the dominant high jump

style. The straddle looks old and

cumbersome in comparison. Why hadn’t

anyone thought of replacing it earlier?

Of course, everything seems intuitive in

retrospect. But what seems perfectly clear

now was completely inventive and

unprecedented at the time. No one thought

you could possibly jump backward. It

seemed absurd. And Fosbury himself? He

wasn’t even a particularly talented

jumper. As his coach, Berny Wagner, put

it, “I have a discus thrower who can jump-

reach higher than Dick.” It was all in the

approach. Indeed, Fosbury’s height pales

in comparison to the current record—8

feet (2.45 meters), held by Javier

Sotomayor—and

his

accomplishment

doesn’t even break the top twenty. But the

sport has never been the same.

Imagination allows us to see things that

aren’t so, be it a dead man who is actually

alive, a way of jumping that, while

backward, couldn’t be more forward

looking, or a box of tacks that can also be

a simple box. It lets us see what might

have been and what might be even in the

absence of firm evidence. When all of the

details are in front of you, how do you

arrange them? How do you know which

are important? Simple logic gets you part

of the way there, it’s true, but it can’t do it

alone—and it can’t do it without some

breathing space.

In our resistance to creativity, we are

Lestrades. But here’s the good news: our

inner Holmes isn’t too far away. Our

implicit bias may be strong but it’s not

immutable, and it doesn’t need to affect

our thinking as much as it does.

Look at the following picture:

Try to connect these dots with three

lines, without lifting your pencil from the

paper or retracing any of the lines you

draw. You must also end the drawing

where you began it. You can take up to

three minutes.

Have you finished? If you haven’t, fear

not; you’re far from being alone. In fact,

you’re

percent

study

participants who were given the problem

to solve. If you have, how long did it take

you?

Consider this: if I had turned on a

lightbulb in your line of sight while you

were working on the problem, you would

have been more likely to solve it if you

hadn’t solved it already—a full 44 percent

of people who saw a lit lightbulb solved

the puzzle, as contrasted with the 22

percent in the original condition (the one

that you just experienced)—and you

would have solved it faster than you might

have otherwise. The bulb will have

activated insight-related concepts in your

mind, and in so doing will have primed

your mind to think in a more creative

fashion than it would as a matter of

course. It is an example of priming in

action. Because we associate the lightbulb

with creativity and insight, we are more

likely to persist at difficult problems and

to think in a creative, nonlinear fashion

when we see it turn on. All of the concepts

that are stored in our attic next to the idea

of “lightbulb moment” or “insight” or

“eureka” become activated, and that

activation in turn helps us become more

creative in our own approaches.

By the way, here’s the solution to the

dot problem.

Our natural mindset may well be

holding us back, but a simple prime is

enough to cue it in a very different

direction indeed. And it need not be a

lightbulb. Works of art on the walls do the

trick, too. The color blue. Pictures of

famous creative thinkers. Happy faces.

Happy music. (In fact, almost all positive

cues.) Plants and flowers and scenes of

nature. All of these tend to boost our

creativity with or without our awareness.

That’s cause for celebration.

Whatever the stimulus, as soon as your

mind begins to reflect on the idea, you

become more likely to embody that very

idea. There are even studies that show that

wearing a white coat will make you more

likely to think in scientific terms and be

better at solving problems—the coat

likely activates the concept of researchers

and doctors, and you begin to take on the

characteristics you associate with those

people.

But short of lighting bulbs in our blue

room with portraits of Einstein and Jobs

on the walls while listening to happy

music, wearing a white coat, and watering

our beautiful roses, how can we best make

our way to Holmes’s capacity for

imaginative thinking?

The Importance of Distance

One of the most important ways to

facilitate imaginative thinking, to make

sure that we don’t move, like Lestrade,

straight from evidence to conclusion, is

through distance, in multiple senses of the

word. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-

Partington Plans,” a case that comes quite

late in the Holmes-Watson partnership,

Watson observes:

One

the

most

remarkable

characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was

his power of throwing his brain out of

action and switching all his thoughts on to

lighter things whenever he had convinced

himself that he could no longer work to

advantage. I remember that during the

whole of that memorable day he lost

himself in a monograph which he had

undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of

Lassus. For my own part I had none of this

power of detachment, and the day, in

consequence appeared to be interminable.

Forcing your mind to take a step back is

tough

thing

do.

seems

counterintuitive to walk away from a

problem that you want to solve. But in

reality, the characteristic is not so

remarkable either for Holmes or for

individuals who are deep thinkers. The

fact that it is remarkable for Watson (and

that he self-admittedly lacks the skill)

goes a long way to explaining why he so

often fails when Holmes succeeds.

Psychologist Yaacov Trope argues that

psychological distance may be one of the

single most important steps you can take to

improve thinking and decision making. It

can come in many forms: temporal, or

distance in time (both future and past);

spatial, or distance in space (how

physically close or far you are from

something); social, or distance between

people (how someone else sees it); and

hypothetical, or distance from reality

(how things might have happened). But

whatever the form, all of these distances

have something in common: they all

require you to transcend the immediate

moment in your mind. They all require you

to take a step back.

Trope posits that the further we move in

distance, the more general and abstract

our perspective and our interpretation

become; and the further we move from our

own perspective, the wider the picture we

are able to consider. Conversely, as we

move closer once more, our thoughts

become more concrete, more specific,

more practical—and the closer we remain

to our egocentric view, the smaller and

more limited the picture that confronts us.

Our level of construal influences, in turn,

how we evaluate a situation and how we

ultimately choose to interact with it. It

affects our decisions and our ability to

solve problems. It even changes how our

brains process information on a neural

level (specifically, it tends to engage our

prefrontal cortex and medial temporal

lobe; more on that later).

In essence, psychological distance

accomplishes one major thing: it engages

System Holmes. It forces quiet reflection.

Distancing has been shown to improve

cognitive

performance,

from

actual

problem solving to the ability to exercise

self-control.

Children

who

use

psychological distancing techniques (for

example, visualizing marshmallows as

puffy clouds, a technique we’ll discuss

more in the next section) are better able to

delay gratification and hold out for a

larger later reward. Adults who are told

to take a step back and imagine a situation

from a more general perspective make

better judgments and evaluations, and

have better self-assessments and lower

emotional reactivity. Individuals who

employ distancing in typical problem-

solving scenarios emerge ahead of their

more immersed counterparts. And those

who take a distanced view of political

questions tend to emerge with evaluations

that are better able to stand the test of

time.

You can think of the exercise as a large,

complicated puzzle; the box has been lost,

so you don’t know what exactly you’re

putting together, and pieces from other

similar puzzles have gotten mixed in over

the years, so you’re not even sure which

pieces belong. To solve the puzzle, you

must first have a sense of the picture as a

whole. Some pieces will jump out right

away: the corners, the edges, the colors

and patterns that obviously go together.

And before you know it, you have a

clearer sense of where the puzzle is

heading and where and how the remaining

pieces should fit. But you’ll never solve it

if you don’t take the time to lay the pieces

out properly, identify those telling starter

moves, and try to form an image in your

mind of the complete picture. Trying to

force individual pieces at random will

take forever, cause needless frustration,

and perhaps lead to your never being able

to solve the thing at all.

You need to learn to let the two

elements, the concrete, specific pieces

(their details and colors, what they tell

you, and what they suggest) and the broad,

overall picture (the general impression

that gives you a sense of the tableau as a

whole), work together to help you put the

puzzle together. Both are essential. The

pieces have been gathered already through

close observation; seeing how they fit can

be accomplished only by the distance of

imagination. It can be any of Trope’s

distances—temporal, spatial, social, or

hypothetical—but distance it must be.

When I was little, I used to love yes-or-

no riddle games. One person holds the

answer to a simple riddle (one of my

favorites as a child: Joe and Mandy are

lying on the floor, dead; around them are

broken glass, a pool of water, and a

baseball. What happened?); the rest try to

guess the solution by asking questions that

require only a yes or no answer. I could

play these for hours and forced many a

hapless companion to share the somewhat

strange pastime.

Back then I didn’t see the riddles as

much more than a fun way to pass the time

and test my detective prowess—and part

of the reason I loved them was because

they made me feel up to the task. Only

now do I understand fully how ingenious

that forced-question method really is: it

forces you to separate observation from

deduction, whether you want to or not. In a

way, the riddles have a built-in road map

for how to get to the solution:

incrementally, taking frequent breaks to let

your imagination consolidate and re-form

what it has learned. You can’t just barrel

on through. You observe, you learn, and

you take the time to consider the

possibilities, look at the angles, try to

place the elements in their proper context,

see if you might have come to a mistaken

conclusion at an earlier point. The yes-or-

no riddle forces imaginative distance.

(The solution to Joe and Mandy’s

dilemma: they are goldfish. The baseball

flew in through a window and broke their

bowl.)

But absent such an inbuilt cue, how

does one go about creating distance? How

can

one

resist

Watson’s

lack

detachment and be able, like Holmes, to

know when and how to throw his brain out

of action and turn it to lighter things? As it

happens, even something as seemingly

inborn as creativity and imagination can

be broken down into steps that traverse

that very you-have-it-or-you-don’t divide.

Distancing Through Unrelated Activity

What, pray tell, is a three-pipe problem?

It certainly doesn’t make it on the list of

common problem types in the psychology

literature. And yet perhaps it’s time it

should.

In “The Red-Headed League,” Sherlock

Holmes is presented with an unusual

conundrum, which at first glance has no

reasonable solution. Why in the world

would someone be singled out for the

color of his hair, and then be paid to do

nothing but sit around, along with the hair

in question, in a closed room for hours on

end?

When Mr. Wilson, the man of the

flaming-red hair, leaves Holmes after

telling his story, Holmes tells Watson that

he must give his prompt attention to the

matter. “What are you going to do, then?”

asks Watson, anxious as ever to know

how the case will be resolved. Holmes’s

reply may come as somewhat of a

surprise:

“To smoke,” he answered. “It is quite a

three-pipe problem, and I beg that you

won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.” He

curled himself up in his chair, with his

thick knees drawn up to his hawk-like

nose, and there he sat with his eyes closed

and his black clay pipe thrusting out like

the bill of some strange bird. I had come

to the conclusion that he had dropped

asleep, and indeed was nodding myself,

when he suddenly sprang out of his chair

with the gesture of a man who has made

up his mind, and put his pipe down upon

the mantel-piece.

A three-pipe problem, then: one that

requires doing something other than

thinking directly about the problem—i.e.,

smoking a pipe—in concentrated silence

(and, one expects, smoke), for the time

that it takes to smoke three pipes.

Presumably, one of a subset of problems

ranging from the single-pipe problem to

the largest number you can smoke without

making yourself sick and so putting the

entire effort to waste.

Holmes, of course, means something

quite a bit more by his response. For him,

the pipe is but a means—and one means of

many—to an end: creating psychological

distance between himself and the problem

at hand, so that he can let his observations

(in this case, what he has learned from the

visitor’s story and appearance) percolate

in his mind, mixing with all of the matter

in his brain attic in leisurely fashion, in

order to know what the actual next step in

the case should be. Watson would have

him do something at once, as suggested by

his question. Holmes, however, puts a

pipe in between himself and the problem.

He gives his imagination time to do its

thing undisturbed.

The pipe is but a means to an end, yes,

but it is an important, physical means as

well. It’s significant here that we are

dealing with an actual object and an actual

activity. A change in activity, to something

seemingly unrelated to the problem in

question, is one of the elements that is

most conducive to creating the requisite

distance for imagination to take hold.

Indeed, it is a tactic that Holmes employs

often and to good effect. He smokes his

pipe, but he also plays his violin, visits

the opera, and listens to music; these are

his preferred distancing mechanisms.

The precise activity isn’t as important

as its physical nature and its ability to

train your thoughts in a different direction.

It needs to have several characteristics: it

needs to be unrelated to what you are

trying to accomplish (if you are solving a

crime, you shouldn’t switch to solving

another crime; if you are deciding on an

important purchase, you shouldn’t go

shopping for something else; and so on); it

needs to be something that doesn’t take too

much effort on your part (if you’re trying

to learn a new skill, for instance, your

brain will be so preoccupied that it won’t

be able to free up the resources needed to

root through your attic; Holmes’s violin

playing—unless you are, like him, a

virtuoso, you need not apply that

particular route); and yet it needs to be

something that engages you on some level

(if Holmes hated pipe smoking, he would

hardly benefit from a three-pipe problem;

likewise, if he found pipe smoking boring,

his mind might be too dulled to do any

real thinking, on whatever level—or might

find itself unable to detach, in the manner

that so afflicts Watson).

When we switch gears, we in effect

move the problem that we have been

trying to solve from our conscious brain to

our unconscious. While we may think we

are doing something else—and indeed,

our attentional networks become engaged

in something else—our brains don’t

actually stop work on the original

problem. We may have left our attic to

smoke a pipe or play a sonata, but our

staging area remains a place of busy

activity, with various items being dragged

into the light, various combinations being

tried, and various approaches being

evaluated.

The key to diagnosing Watson’s

inability to create distance between

himself and a case may well be that he

hasn’t found a suitably engaging yet not

overwhelming activity as a substitute. In

some instances he tries reading. Too

difficult of a task: not only does he fail to

concentrate on the reading, thereby losing

the intent of the activity, but he can’t stop

his mind from returning to the very thing

he shouldn’t be thinking about. (And yet

for Holmes, reading is indeed a suitable

distancing method. “Polyphonic Motets of

Lassus” anyone?) Other times, Watson

tries sitting in contemplation. Too boring,

as he himself puts it; he soon finds himself

almost nodding off.

In either case, the distancing fails. The

mind is simply not doing what it is

supposed to—dissociating itself from the

present environment and thus engaging its

more diffuse attentional network (that

same default network that is active when

our brains are at rest). It’s the opposite of

t h e distraction

problem

that

encountered in the last chapter. Watson

now can’t be distracted enough. What he

should be doing is distracting himself

from the case, but instead he is letting the

case distract him from his chosen

distraction and so failing to get the benefit

of either concentrated thought or diffuse

attention. Distraction isn’t always a bad

thing. It all depends on the timing and

type. (Interesting fact: we get better at

solving insight problems when we are

tired or intoxicated. Why? Our executive

function is inhibited, so information that

would normally be deemed distracting is

allowed to filter in. We thus become

better at seeing remote associations.) The

last chapter was all about mindless

distraction; this, on the contrary, is

mindful distraction.

But for it to work it’s essential to

choose the right activity, be it the pipe or

the violin or an opera or something else

entirely. Something that is engaging

enough that it distracts you properly—and

yet not so overwhelming that it prevents

reflection from taking place in the

background. Once you find your sin of

choice, you can term the problems and

decisions you face accordingly: three-

pipe, two-movement, one-museum visit,

you get the idea.

In fact, there’s one activity that is

almost tailor-made to work. And it is a

simple one indeed: walking (the very thing

that Holmes was doing when he had his

insight in “The Lion’s Mane”). Walks

have been shown repeatedly to stimulate

creative thought and problem solving,

especially if these walks take place in

natural surroundings, like the woods,

rather

than

urbanized

environments (but both types are better

than none—and even walking along a tree-

lined street can help). After a walk,

people become better at solving problems;

they persist longer at difficult tasks; and

they become more likely to be able to

grasp an insightful solution (like being

able to connect those four dots you saw

earlier). And all from walking past some

trees and some sky.

Indeed, being surrounded by nature

tends to increase feelings of well-being,

and such feelings, in turn, tend to facilitate

problem solving and creative thinking,

modulating attention and cognitive control

mechanisms in the brain in a way that

predisposes us to engage in more Holmes-

like imagination. Even the walk can—at

times when the pressure seems just too

high to handle so that, like Watson, you

can’t even begin to contemplate doing

something else—be forfeited in favor of

looking at screen shots of natural scenes.

It’s not ideal but it just might do the trick

in a pinch.

Showers are likewise often associated

with imaginative thought, facilitating the

same type of distance as Holmes’s pipe or

a walk in the park. (You can shower for

only so long, however. A three-pipe

problem would signify quite the shower

ahead of you. In such cases, the walk

might be the better solution.) Ditto

listening to music—Holmes’s violin and

opera in action—and engaging in visually

stimulating activities, such as looking at

visual illusions or abstract art.

In every case, that diffuse attentional

network is able to do its thing. As our

inhibition is lowered, the attentional

network takes over whatever is bothering

us. It ramps up, so to speak, for whatever

comes next. It makes us more likely to

grasp remote connections, to activate

unrelated

memories,

thoughts,

and

experiences that may help in this instance,

to synthesize the material that needs to be

synthesized. Our unconscious processing

is a powerful tool, if only we give it the

space and time to work.

Consider a classic problem-solving

paradigm known as compound remote

associates. Look at these words:

CRAB PINE SAUCE

Now, try to think of a single word that

can be added to each of these to form a

compound or a two-word phrase.

Done? How long did it take? And how

did you come about your solution?

There are two ways to solve this

problem. One comes from insight, or

seeing the right word after a few seconds

of searching, and the other comes from an

analytical approach, or trying out word

after word until one fits. Here, the proper

answer is apple ( crab apple, pineapple,

applesauce), and one can arrive at it

either by seeing the solution or going

through a list of possible candidates

( Cake? Works for crab but not pine.

Grass? Ditto. Etcetera). The former is the

equivalent of picking out those items in the

opposite corners of your attic and making

them into a third related, yet unrelated,

thing that makes complete sense the

moment you see it. The latter is the

equivalent of rummaging through your attic

slowly and painfully, box by box, and

discarding object after object that does not

match until you find the one that does.

Absent imagination, you’re stuck with

that second not very palatable alternative,

as Watson would be. And while Watson

might get to the right answer eventually in

the case of a puzzle like the word

associates, in the real world there’s no

guarantee of his success, since he doesn’t

have the elements laid out in front of him

as nicely as those three words, crab, pine,

sauce. He hasn’t created the requisite

mind space for insight to even be

possible. He has no idea which elements

may need to come together. He has, in

other words, no conception of the

problem.

Even his brain will be different from

Holmes’s as he approaches the problem,

be it the word association or the case of

the builder. At first glance, if Watson

were to come to the right answer on his

own, we might not see an immediate

difference. In either Holmes or Watson’s

case, a brain scan would show us that a

solution has been reached approximately

three hundred milliseconds before the

solver realizes it himself. Specifically, we

would see a burst of activity from the right

anterior temporal lobe (an area just above

his right ear that is implicated in complex

cognitive processing), and an increased

activation in the right anterior superior

temporal gyrus (an area that has been

associated with perceiving emotional

prosody—or the rhythm and intonation of

language that conveys a certain feeling—

and

bringing

together

disparate

information

complex

language

comprehension).

But Watson may well never reach that

point of solution—and we’d likely know

he’s doomed long before he himself does.

While he’s struggling with the puzzle, we

would be able to predict if he was

heading in the right direction by looking at

neural activity in two areas: the left and

right temporal lobes, associated with the

processing of lexical and semantic

information, and the mid-frontal cortex,

including

the

cingulate,

associated with attention switching and

the

detection

inconsistent

and

competing activity. That latter activation

would be particularly intriguing, as it

suggests the process by which we’re able

to gain insight into a preciously

inscrutable problem: the anterior cingulate

is likely waiting to detect disparate

signals from the brain, even weak ones

that we are unaware of sending, and

turning its attention to them to gain a

possible solution, amplifying, so to speak,

information that already exists but that

needs a little push to be integrated and

processed as a general whole. In

Watson’s brain, we’re not likely to see

much action. But Holmes’s would tell a

different story.

In fact, were we to simply compare

Watson’s brain to Holmes’s, we would

find

telltale

signs

Holmes’s

predisposition to such insights—and

Watson’s lack thereof—even absent a

target for his mind to latch on to.

Specifically, we would discover that the

detective’s brain was more active in the

right-hemisphere regions associated with

lexical and semantic processing than your

average Watson brain, and that it

exhibited greater diffuse activation of the

visual system.

What would these differences mean?

The right hemisphere is more involved in

processing

such

loose

remote

associations as often come together in

moments of insight, while the left tends to

focus

tighter,

explicit

connections. More likely than not, the

specific patterns that accompany insight

signal a mind that is ever ready to process

associations that, at first glance, don’t

seem to be associations at all. In other

words, a mind that can find connections

between the seemingly unconnected can

access its vast network of ideas and

impressions and detect even faint links

that can then be amplified to recognize a

broader

significance,

such

significance exists. Insight may seem to

come from nowhere, but really, it comes

from somewhere quite specific: from the

attic and the processing that has been

taking place while you’ve been busy doing

other things.

The pipe, the violin, the walk, the

concert, the shower, they all have

something else in common, beyond the

earlier criteria we used to nominate them

as good potential activities for creating

distance. They allow your mind to relax.

They take the pressure off. In essence, all

the

mentioned

characteristics—

unrelated, not too effortful, and yet

effortful enough—come together to offer

the proper environment for neural

relaxation. You can’t relax if you’re

supposed to be working on a problem;

hence the unrelatedness. Nor can you relax

if you’re finding something effortful. And

too lax, well, you may not be stimulated to

do anything, or you might relax a bit too

much and fall asleep.

Even if you don’t come to any

conclusions or gain any perspective in

your time off from a problem, chances are

you will return to it both reenergized and

ready to expend more effort. In 1927,

Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik

noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna

restaurant could remember only orders

that were in progress. As soon as the

order was sent out and complete, they

seemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnik

then did what any good psychologist

would do: she went back to the lab and

designed a study. A group of adults and

children was given anywhere between

eighteen and twenty-two tasks to perform

(both physical ones, like making clay

figures, and mental ones, like solving

puzzles), but half of those tasks were

interrupted so that they couldn’t be

completed. At the end, the subjects

remembered the interrupted tasks far

better than the completed ones—over two

times better, in fact.

Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state

of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending.

Your mind wants to know what comes

next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep

working—and it will keep working even

if you tell it to stop. All through those

other tasks, it will subconsciously be

remembering the ones it never got to

complete. It’s the same Need for Closure

that we’ve encountered before, a desire of

our minds to end states of uncertainty and

resolve unfinished business. This need

motivates us to work harder, to work

better, and to work to completion. And a

motivated mind, as we already know, is a

far more powerful mind.

Distancing Through Actual Distance

And what if, like Watson, you simply

can’t fathom doing something that would

enable you to think of something else,

even if you have all of these suggestions to

choose from? Luckily, distance isn’t

limited to a change in activity (though that

does happen to be one of the easier

routes). Another way to cue psychological

distance is to acquire literal distance. To

physically move to another point. For

Watson, that would be the equivalent of

getting up and walking out of Baker Street

instead of sitting there looking at his

flatmate. Holmes may be able to change

location mentally, but an actual physical

change may help the lesser willed—and

could even aid the great detective himself

when imaginative inspiration is not

otherwise forthcoming.

I n The Valley of Fear , Holmes

proposes to return in the evening to the

scene of the crime under investigation,

leaving the hotel where he has been doing

most of his thinking.

“An evening alone!” Watson exclaims.

Surely, that would be more morbid than

anything else. Nonsense, Holmes counters.

It could actually be quite illustrative. “I

propose to go up there presently. I have

arranged it with the estimable Ames, who

is by no means whole-hearted about

Barker. I shall sit in that room and see if

its atmosphere brings me inspiration. I’m

a believer in the genius loci. You smile,

Friend Watson. Well, we shall see.” And

with that, Holmes is off to the study.

And does he find inspiration? He does.

The next morning he is ready with his

solution to the mystery. How is that

possible? Could the genius loci have

really brought the inspiration that Holmes

had hoped?

Indeed it could have. Location affects

thought in the most direct way possible—

in fact, it even affects us physically. It all

goes back to one of the most famous

experiments in psychology: Pavlov’s

dogs. Ivan Pavlov wanted to show that a

physical cue (in this case it was a sound,

but it can just as easily be something

visual or a smell or a general location)

could eventually elicit the same response

as an actual reward. So, he would ring a

bell and then present his dogs with food.

At the sight of the food, the dogs would—

naturally—salivate. But soon enough, they

began to salivate at the bell itself, before

any sight or smell of food was present.

The bell triggered the anticipation of food

and with it, a physical reaction.

We now know that this type of learned

association goes far beyond dogs and

bells and meat. Humans tend to build such

patterns as a matter of course, eventually

leading innocuous things like bells to

trigger predictable reactions in our brains.

When you enter a doctor’s office, for

example, the smell alone may be enough to

trigger butterflies—not because you know

there will be something painful (you might

be coming in to drop off some forms, for

all that) but because you have learned to

associate that environment with the

anxiety of a medical visit.

The power of learned associations is

ubiquitous. We tend, for instance, to

remember material better in the location

where we first learned it. Students who

take tests in the room where they did their

studying tend to do better than if they take

those same tests in a new environment.

And the opposite is true: if a particular

location is tied to frustration or boredom

or distraction, it doesn’t make for a good

study choice.

At every level, physical and neural,

locations get linked to memories. Places

tend to get associated with the type of

activity that occurs there, and the pattern

can be remarkably difficult to break.

Watching television in bed, for instance,

may make it difficult to get to sleep

(unless, that is, you go to sleep while

watching TV). Sitting at the same desk all

day may make it difficult to unstick

yourself if your mind gets stuck.

The tie between location and thought

explains why so many people can’t work

from home and need to go to a specified

office. At home, they are not used to

working, and they find themselves being

distracted by the same types of things that

they would normally do around the house.

Those neural associations are not the ones

that would be conducive to getting things

—work-related things, that is—done. The

memory traces simply aren’t there, and the

ones that are there aren’t the ones you

want to activate. It also illustrates why

walking might be so effective. It’s much

difficult

fall

into

counterproductive thought pattern if your

scenery is changing all the time.

Location affects thought. A change in

location cues us, so to speak, to think

differently. It renders our ingrained

associations irrelevant and, in so doing

frees us to form new ones, to explore

ways of thinking and paths of thought that

hadn’t

previously

considered.

Whereas our imagination may be stymied

by our usual locations, it is set loose when

we separate it from learned constraints.

We have no memories, no neural links that

kick in to tie us down. And in that lies the

secret link between imagination and

physical distance. The most important

thing that a change in physical perspective

can do is to prompt a change in mental

perspective. Even Holmes, who unlike

Watson doesn’t need to be led by the hand

and forcibly removed from Baker Street in

order to profit from some mental distance,

benefits from this property.

Let’s return once more to Holmes’s

strange request in The Valley of Fear to

spend his night alone in the room where a

murder has taken place. In light of the link

between

location,

memory,

and

imaginative distance, his belief in the

genius loci no longer seems nearly as

strange. Holmes doesn’t actually think that

he can re-create events by being in the

room where they took place; instead, he

banks on doing precisely what we’ve just

discussed. He wants to trigger a change of

perspective by a literal change of

location, in this case a very specific

location and a very specific perspective,

that of the people involved in the crime at

hand. In doing so, he frees up his

imagination to take not the path of his own

experiences, memories, and connections

but that of the people involved in the

events themselves. What associations

might the room have triggered for them?

What might it have inspired?

Holmes realizes both the necessity of

getting into the mindset of the actors

involved in the drama and the immediate

difficulty of doing so, with all of the

elements that could at any point go wrong.

And what better way to push all

distracting information to the side and

focus on the most basic particulars, in a

way that is most likely to recall that of the

original actors, than to request a solitary

evening in the room of the crime? Of

course, Holmes still needs all of his

observational and imaginative skills once

he is there—but he now has access to the

tableau and elements that presented

themselves to whomever was present at

the original scene of the crime. And from

there he can proceed on a much more sure

footing.

Indeed, it is in that room that he first

notices a single dumbbell, surmising at

once that the missing member of the pair

must have somehow been involved in the

unfolding events, and from that room that

he deduces the most likely location of the

dumbbell’s pair: out the only window

from which it could reasonably have been

dropped. And when he emerges from the

study, he has changed his mind from his

original conjectures as to the proper

course of events. While there, he was

better able to get into the mindset of the

actors in question and in so doing clarify

the elements that had previously been

hazy.

And in that sense, Sherlock Holmes

invokes the same contextual memory

principle as we just explored, using

context to cue perspective taking and

imagination. Given this specific room, at

this specific time of day, what would

someone who was committing or had just

committed the crime in question be most

likely to do or think?

Absent the physical change and

distance, however, even Holmes may have

found his imagination faltering, as indeed

he did prior to that evening, in failing to

conceive of the actual course of events as

one of the possibilities. We are not often

trained to look at the world from another’s

point of view in a more basic, broad

fashion that transcends simple interaction.

How might someone else interpret a

situation differently from us? How might

act

given

specific

set

circumstances? What might he think given

certain inputs? These are not questions

that we often find ourselves asking.

Indeed, so poorly trained are we at

actually taking someone else’s point of

view that when we are explicitly

requested to do so, we still proceed from

an egocentric place. In one series of

studies, researchers found that people

adopt the perspective of others by simply

adjusting from their own. It’s a question of

degree rather than type: we tend to begin

with our own view as an anchoring point,

and then adjust slightly in one direction

instead of altering the view altogether.

Moreover, once we reach an estimate that

sounds satisfactory to us, we stop thinking

and consider the problem resolved.

We’ve successfully captured the required

point of view. That tendency is known as

satisficing, a blend of sufficing and

satisfying: a response bias that errs on the

egocentric side of plausible answers to a

given question. As soon as we find an

answer that satisfies, we stop looking,

whether or not the answer is ideal or even

remotely accurate. (In a recent study of

online behavior, for instance, individuals

were profoundly influenced by existing

personal preferences in their evaluations

websites—and

they

used

those

preferences as an anchor to reduce the

number of sites they considered and to

terminate their online search. As a result,

they returned often to already known sites,

instead of taking the time to evaluate

potential new sources of information, and

they chose to focus on search engine

summaries instead of using actual site

visits to make their decisions.) The

tendency toward an egocentric bias in

satisficing is especially strong when a

plausible answer is presented early on in

the search process. We then tend to

consider our task complete, even if it’s far

from being so.

A change in perspective, in physical

location, quite simply forces mindfulness.

It forces us to reconsider the world, to

look at things from a different angle. And

sometimes that change in perspective can

be the spark that makes a difficult decision

manageable, or that engenders creativity

where none existed before.

Consider a famous problem-solving

experiment,

originally

designed

Norman Maier in 1931. A participant was

placed in a room where two strings were

hanging from the ceiling. The participant’s

job was to tie the two strings together.

However, it was impossible to reach one

string while holding the other. Several

items were also available in the room,

such as a pole, an extension cord, and a

pair of pliers. What would you have

done?

Most participants struggled with the

pole and the extension cord, trying their

best to reach the end while holding on to

the other string. It was tricky business.

The most elegant solution? Tie the

pliers to the bottom of one string, then use

it as a pendulum and catch it as it floats

toward you while you hold the other

string. Simple, insightful, quick.

But very few people could visualize the

change in object use (here, imagining the

pliers as something other than pliers, a

weight that could be tied to a string) while

embroiled in the task. Those that did did

one thing differently: they stepped back.

They looked at it from a literal distance.

They saw the whole and then tried to

envision how they could make the details

work. Some did this naturally; some had

to be prompted by the experimenter, who

seemingly by accident brushed one of the

strings to induce a swinging motion (that

action was enough to get participants to

spontaneously think of the pliers solution).

But none did it without a shift, however

slight, of point of view, or, to speak in

Trope’s terms, a move from the concrete

(pliers) to the abstract (pendulum weight),

from those puzzle pieces to the overall

puzzle.

Never

underestimate

how

powerful a cue physical perspective can

be. As Holmes puts it in “The Problem of

Thor Bridge,” “When once your point of

view is changed, the very thing which was

so damning becomes a clue to the truth.”

Distancing Through Mental Techniques

Let’s return for a moment to a scene that

we’ve visited once before, in The Hound

of the Baskervilles. After Dr. Mortimer’s

initial visit, Dr. Watson leaves Baker

Street to go to his club. Holmes, however,

remains seated in his armchair, which is

where Watson finds him when he returns

to the flat around nine o’clock in the

evening. Has Holmes been a fixture there

all day? Watson inquires. “On the

contrary,” responds Holmes. “I have been

to Devonshire.” Watson doesn’t miss a

beat. “In spirit?” he asks. “Exactly,”

responds the detective.

What is it, exactly, that Holmes does as

he sits in his chair, his mind far away from

the physicality of the moment? What

happens in his brain—and why is it such

an effective tool of the imagination, such

an important element of his thought

process that he hardly ever abandons it?

Holmes’s mental journeying goes by many

names, but most commonly it is called

meditation.

When I say meditation, the images

invoked for most people will include

monks or yogis or some other spiritual-

sounding monikers. But that is only a tiny

portion of what the word means. Holmes

is neither monk nor yoga practitioner, but

he understands what meditation, in its

essence, actually is—a simple mental

exercise to clear your mind. Meditation is

nothing more than the quiet distance that

you need for integrative, imaginative,

observant, and mindful thought. It is the

ability to create distance, in both time and

space, between you and all of the

problems you are trying to tackle, in your

mind alone. It doesn’t even have to be, as

people

often

assume,

way

experiencing nothing; directed meditation

can take you toward some specific goal or

destination (like Devonshire), as long as

your mind is clear of every other

distraction—or, to be more precise, as

long as your mind clears itself of every

distraction and continues to do so as the

distractions continue to arise (as they

inevitably will).

2011,

researchers

from

the

University of Wisconsin studied a group

of people who were not in the habit of

meditating and instructed them in the

following manner: relax with your eyes

closed and focus on the flow of your

breath at the tip of your nose; if a random

thought arises, acknowledge the thought

and then simply let it go by gently bringing

your attention back to the flow of your

breath.

For

fifteen

minutes,

the

participants attempted to follow these

guidelines. Then they were broken up into

two groups: one group had the option of

receiving nine thirty-minute sessions of

meditation instruction over the course of

five weeks, and the other group had that

option at the conclusion of the experiment,

but not before. At the end of the five

weeks, everyone completed the earlier

thought assignment a second time.

During each session, the researchers

measured

participants’

electroencephalographic (EEG) activity—

a recording of electrical activity along the

scalp—and what they found presents a

tantalizing picture. Even such a short

training period—participants averaged

between five and sixteen minutes of

training and practice a day—can cause

changes at the neural level. The

researchers were particularly interested in

frontal EEG asymmetry, toward a pattern

that has been associated with positive

emotions (and that had been shown to

follow seventy or more hours of training

in mindfulness meditation techniques).

While prior to training the two groups

showed no differences, by the end of the

study, those who had received additional

training showed a leftward shift in

asymmetry, which means a move toward a

pattern that has been associated with

positive and approach-oriented emotional

states—such states as have been linked

repeatedly to increased creativity and

imaginative capacity.

What does that mean? First, unlike past

studies of meditation that asked for a very

real input of time and energy, this

experiment did not require extensive

resource commitment, and yet it still

showed striking neural results. Moreover,

the training provided was extremely

flexible: people could choose when they

would want to receive instruction and

when they would want to practice. And,

perhaps more important, participants

reported a spike in spontaneous passive

practice, when, without a conscious

decision

meditate,

they

found

themselves in unrelated situations thinking

along the lines of the instructions they had

been provided.

True, it is only one study. But there’s

more to the brain story than that. Earlier

work suggests that meditation training can

affect the default network—that diffuse

attentional network that we’ve already

talked about, that facilitates creative

insights and allows our brains to work on

remote connections while we’re doing

something else entirely. Individuals who

meditate regularly show increased resting-

state functional connectivity in the

network compared to nonmeditators.

What’s more, in one study of meditation’s

effects over a period of eight weeks,

researchers found changes in gray-matter

density in a group of meditation-naive

participants (that is, they hadn’t practiced

meditation before the beginning of the

study) as compared to a control group.

There were increases in concentration in

the left hippocampus, the posterior

cingulate cortex (PCC), the tempero-

parietal

junction

(TPJ),

and

the

cerebellum—areas involved in learning

and memory, emotion regulation, self-

referential processing, and perspective

taking. Together, the hippocampus, PCC,

and TPJ form a neural network that

supports both self-projection—including

thinking about the hypothetical future—

and perspective taking, or conceiving

others’ point of view—in other words,

precisely the type of distancing that we’ve

been discussing.

Meditation is a way of thinking. A habit

of distance that has the fortunate

consequence of being self-reinforcing.

One tool in the arsenal of mental

techniques that can help you create the

right frame of mind to attain the distance

necessary

for

mindful,

imaginative

thought. It is far more attainable, and far

widely

applicable,

than

the

connotations of the word might have you

believe.

Consider the case of someone like Ray

Dalio. Almost every morning, Dalio

meditates. Sometimes he does it before

work. Sometimes in his office, right at his

desk: he leans back, closes his eyes,

clasps his hands in a simple grip. Nothing

more is necessary. “It’s just a mental

exercise in which you are clearing your

mind,” he once told the New Yorker in an

interview.

Dalio isn’t the person that comes to

mind most readily when you think of

practitioners of meditation. He isn’t a

monk or a yoga fanatic or a hippie New

Ager, and he isn’t doing this just for the

interest in participating in a psych study.

He happens to be the founder of the

world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater

Associates, someone who has little time to

waste and many ways to spend the time he

does have. And yet he chooses, actively,

to devote a portion of each day to

mediation, in its broadest, most classic

sense.

When Dalio meditates, he clears his

mind. He prepares it for the day by

relaxing and trying to keep all of the

thoughts that will proceed to bother him

for the next however many hours at bay.

Yes, it may seem like a waste to spend

any time at all doing, well, nothing that

looks productive. But spending those

minutes in the space of his mind will

actually make Dalio more productive,

more flexible, more imaginative, and more

insightful. In short, it will help him be a

better decision maker.

But is it for everyone? Meditation, that

mental space, is not nothing; it requires

real energy and concentration (hence the

easier route of physical distance). While

someone like Holmes or Dalio may well

be able to dive right into blankness to

great effect, I’m willing to bet that Watson

would struggle. With nothing else to

occupy his mind, his breathing alone

would likely not be enough to keep all

those thoughts in check. It’s far easier to

distance yourself with physical cues than

it is to have to rely on your mind alone.

Luckily, as I mentioned in passing,

meditation need not be blank. In

meditation, we can indeed be focusing on

something as difficult to capture as breath

or emotion or the sensations of the body to

the exclusion of everything else. But we

can

also

use

what’s

known

visualization: a focus on a specific mental

image that will replace that blankness

with something more tangible and

accessible. Go back for a moment to The

Hound of the Baskervilles, where we left

Holmes floating above the Devonshire

moors. That, too, is meditation—and it

wasn’t at all aimless or blank or devoid of

mental imagery. It requires the same focus

as any meditation, but is in some ways

more approachable. You have a concrete

plan, something with which to occupy

your mind and keep intrusive thoughts at

bay, something on which you can focus

your energy that is more vibrant and

multidimensional than the rise and fall of

your breath. And what’s more, you can

focus on attaining the distance that Trope

would call hypotheticality, to begin

considering the ifs and what-ifs.

Try this exercise. Close your eyes

(well, close them once you finish reading

the instructions). Think of a specific

situation where you felt angry or hostile,

your most recent fight with a close friend

or significant other, for instance. Do you

have a moment in mind? Recall it as

closely as you can, as if you were going

through it again. Once you’re done, tell me

how you feel. And tell me as far as you

can what went wrong. Who was to blame?

Why? Do you think it’s something that can

be fixed?

Close your eyes again. Picture the same

situation. Only now, I want you to imagine

that it is happening to two people who are

not you. You are just a small fly on the

wall, looking down at the scene and taking

note of it. You are free to buzz around and

observe from all angles and no one will

see you. Once again, as soon as you finish,

tell me how you feel. And then respond to

the same questions as before.

You’ve just completed a classic

exercise in mental distancing through

visualization. It’s a process of picturing

something vividly but from a distance, and

so, from a perspective that is inherently

different from the actual one you have

stored in your memory. From scenario one

to scenario two, you have gone from a

concrete to an abstract mindset; you’ve

likely become calmer emotionally, seen

things that you missed the first time

around, and you may have even come

away with a slightly modified memory of

what happened. In fact, you may have even

become wiser and better at solving

p r o b l e ms overall, unrelated to the

scenario in question. (And you will have

also been practicing a form of meditation.

Sneaky, isn’t it?)

Psychologist

Ethan

Kross

has

demonstrated that such mental distancing

(the above scenario was actually taken

from one of his studies) is not just good

for emotional regulation. It can also

enhance your wisdom, both in terms of

dialectism (i.e., being cognizant of change

and contradictions in the world) and

intellectual humility (i.e., knowing your

own limitations), and make you better able

to solve problems and make choices.

When you distance yourself, you begin to

process

things

broadly,

see

connections that you couldn’t see from a

closer vantage point. In other words,

being wiser also means being more

imaginative. It might not lead to a eureka

moment, but it will lead to insight. You

think as if you had actually changed your

location, while you remain seated in your

armchair.

Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer,

was one of the most talented and prolific

inventors of the twentieth century. Among

his 230 U.S. patents is the automatic

letter-sorting machine that the postal

service still uses to sort the mail, a

magnetic memory device that served as a

precursor to the hard disk drive, and the

straight-arm phonograph. One of the tricks

that helped sustain his remarkable

creativity and productivity? None other

than visualization. As he once told

psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

whenever a task proves difficult or takes

time or doesn’t have an obvious answer,

“I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail, time is

of no consequence. In other words, if it

takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week.

What else have I got to do? I’m going to

be here for twenty years. See? This is a

kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say,

‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you

make mistakes. My way, you say time is of

absolutely no consequence.” Visualization

helped Rabinow to shift his mindset to one

where he was able to tackle things that

would

otherwise

overwhelm

him,

providing the requisite imaginative space

for such problem solving to occur.

The technique is widespread. Athletes

often visualize certain elements of a game

or move before they actually perform

them, acting them out in their minds before

they do so in reality: a tennis player

envisions a serve before the ball has left

his hand; a golfer sees the path of the ball

before he lifts his club. Cognitive

behavioral therapists use the technique to

help people who suffer from phobias or

other conditions to relax and be able to

experience situations without actually

experiencing them. Psychologist Martin

Seligman urges that it might even be the

single most important tool toward

fostering a more imaginative, intuitive

mindset. He goes as far as to suggest that

by repeated, simulated visual enactment,

“intuition may be teachable virtually and

on a massive scale.” How’s that for

endorsement.

It is all about learning to create distance

with the mind by actually picturing a

world as if you were seeing and

experiencing

for

real.

the

philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once put

it, “To repeat: don’t think, but look!” That

is the essence of visualization: learning to

look internally, to create scenarios and

alternatives in your mind, to play out

nonrealities as if they were real. It helps

you see beyond the obvious, to not make

the mistakes of a Lestrade or a Gregson by

playing through only the scenario that is in

front of you, or the only one you want to

see. It forces imagination because it

necessitates the use of imagination.

It’s easier than you might think. In fact,

all it is really is what we do naturally

when we try to recall a memory. It even

uses the same neural network—the MPFC,

lateral temporal cortex, medial and lateral

parietal lobes, and the medial temporal

lobe (home of the hippocampus). Except,

instead of recalling a memory exactly, we

shuffle around details from experience to

create something that never actually

occurred, be it a not-yet-extant future or a

counterfactual past. We test it in our minds

instead of having to experience it in

reality. And by so doing, we attain the

very same thing we do by way of physical

distance: we separate ourselves from the

situation we are trying to analyze.

It is all meditation of one form or

another. When we saw Holmes in The

Valley of Fear , he asked for a physical change in location, an actual prompt for

his mind from the external world. But the

same effect can be accomplished without

having to go anywhere—from behind your

desk, if you’re Dalio, or your armchair, if

you’re Holmes, or wherever else you

might find yourself. All you have to do is

be able to free up the necessary space in

your mind. Let it be the blank canvas. And

then the whole imaginative world can be

your palette.

Sustaining Your Imagination:

The Importance of Curiosity and Play

Once upon a time, Sherlock Holmes urged

us to maintain a crisp and clean brain

attic: out with the useless junk, in with

meticulously organized boxes that are

uncluttered by useless paraphernalia. But

it’s not quite that simple. Why on earth,

for instance, did Holmes, in “The Lion’s

Mane,” know about an obscure species of

jellyfish in one warm corner of the ocean?

Impossible to explain it by virtue of the

stark criteria he imposes early on. As with

most things, it is safe to assume that

Holmes was exaggerating for effect.

Uncluttered, yes, but not stark. An attic

that contained only the bare essentials for

your professional success would be a sad

little attic indeed. It would have hardly

any material to work with, and it would be

practically incapable of any great insight

or imagination.

How did the jellyfish make its way into

Holmes’s pristine palace? It’s simple. At

some point Holmes must have gotten

curious. Just like he got curious about the

Motets. Just like he gets curious about art

long enough to try to convince Scotland

Yard that his nemesis, Professor Moriarty,

can’t possibly be up to any good. Just as

he says to Inspector MacDonald in The

Valley of Fear , when the inspector

indignantly refuses Holmes’s offer of

reading a book on the history of Manor

House, “Breadth of view, my dear Mr.

Mac, is one of the essentials of our

profession. The interplay of ideas and the

oblique uses of knowledge are often of

extraordinary interest.” Time and time

again, Holmes gets curious, and his

curiosity leads him to find out more. And

that “more” is then tucked away in some

obscure (but labeled!) box in his attic.

For that is basically what Holmes is

telling us. Your attic has levels of storage.

There is a difference between active

and passive knowledge, those boxes that

you need to access regularly and as a

matter of course and those that you may

need to reach one day but don’t

necessarily look to on a regular basis.

Holmes isn’t asking that we stop being

curious, that we stop acquiring those

jellyfish. No. He asks that we keep the

active knowledge clean and clear—and

that we store the passive knowledge

cleanly and clearly, in properly labeled

boxes and bins, in the right folders and the

right drawers.

It’s not that we should all of a sudden

go against his earlier admonition and take

up our precious mental real estate with

junk. Not at all. Only, we don’t always

know when something that may at first

glance appear to be junklike is not junk at

all but an important addition to our mental

arsenal. So, we must tuck those items

away securely in case of future use. We

don’t even need to store the full item; just

a trace of what it was, a reminder that will

allow us to find it again—just as Holmes

looks up the jellyfish particulars in an old

book rather than knowing them as a matter

of course. All he needs to do is remember

that the book and the reference exist.

An organized attic is not a static attic.

Imagination allows you to make more out

of your mind space than you otherwise

could. And the truth is you never quite

know what element will be of most use

and when it might end up being more

useful than you ever thought possible.

Here, then, is Holmes’s all-important

caveat: the most surprising of articles can

end up being useful in the most surprising

of ways. You must open your mind to new

inputs, however unrelated they may seem.

And that is where your general mindset

comes in. Is there a standing openness to

inputs no matter how strange or

unnecessary they might seem, as opposed

to a tendency to dismiss anything that is

potentially distracting? Is that open-

minded stance your habitual approach, the

way that you train yourself to think and to

look at the world?

With practice, we might become better

at sensing what may or may not prove

useful, what to store away for future

reference and what to throw out for the

time being. Something that at first glance

may seem like simple intuition is actually

far more—a knowledge that is actually

based on countless hours of practice, of

training yourself to be open, to integrate

experiences in your mind until you

become familiar with the patterns and

directions those experiences tend to take.

Remember those remote-association

experiments, where you had to find a

word that could complete all three

members of a set? In a way, that

encapsulates most of life: a series of

remote associations that you won’t see

unless you take the time to stop, to

imagine, and to consider. If your mindset

is one that is scared of creativity, scared

to go against prevailing customs and

mores, it will only hold you back. If you

fear creativity, even subconsciously, you

will have more difficulty being creative.

You will never be like Holmes, try as you

may. Never forget that Holmes was a

renegade—and a renegade that was as far

from a computer as it gets. And that is

what makes his approach so powerful.

Holmes gets to the very heart of the

matter in The Valley of Fear , when he

admonishes Watson that “there should be

no combination of events for which the

wit

man

cannot

conceive

explanation. Simply as a mental exercise,

without any assertion that it is true, let me

indicate a possible line of thought. It is, I

admit, mere imagination; but how often is

imagination the mother of truth?”

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“Here is a young man who learns

suddenly . . .” “Not until I have been to

Blackheath.”

from The Casebook of

Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the

Norwood Builder,” p. 829.

“You

will

rise

high

your

profession.” from His Last Bow, “The

Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” p. 1231.

“One

the

most

remarkable

characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was

his power of throwing his brain out of

action . . .” from His Last Bow, “The

Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,”

p. 297.

“It is quite a three-pipe problem . . .”

from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,

“The Red-Headed League,” p. 50.

“I have been to Devonshire.” from The

Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 3: The

Problem, p. 22.

“I’m a believer in the genius loci.”

“Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is

one of the essentials of our profession.”

from chapter 6: A Dawning Light, p. 51;

chapter 7: The Solution, p. 62 The Valley

of Fear.

PART THREE

CHAPTER FIVE

Navigating the Brain Attic:

Deduction from the Facts

Imagine you are Holmes, and I, Maria, a

potential client. You’ve spent the last

hundred-odd pages being presented with

information, much as you would if you

were to observe me in your sitting room

for some time. Take a minute to think, to

consider what you may know about me as

a person. What can you infer based on

what I’ve written?

I won’t go down the list of all possible

answers, but here’s one to make you

pause: the first time I ever heard the name

Sherlock Holmes was in Russian. Those

stories my dad read by the fire? Russian

translations, not English originals. You

see, we had only recently come to the

United States, and when he read to us, it

was in the language that my family uses to

this day with one another at home.

Alexandre Dumas, Sir H. Rider Haggard,

Jerome K. Jerome, Sir Arthur Conan

Doyle: all men whose voices I first heard

in Russian.

What does this have to do with

anything? Simply this: Holmes would

have known without my having to tell him.

He would have made a simple deduction

based on the available facts, infused with

just a bit of that imaginative quality we

spoke about in the last chapter. And he

would have realized that I couldn’t have

possibly had my first encounter with his

methods in any language but Russian.

Don’t believe me? All of the elements are

there, I promise. And by the end of this

chapter, you, too, should be in a position

to follow Holmes in putting them together

into the only explanation that would suit

all of the available facts. As the detective

says over and over, when all avenues are

exhausted, whatever remains, however

improbable, must be the truth.

And so we turn finally to that most flashy

of steps: deduction. The grand finale. The

fireworks at the end of a hard day’s work.

The moment when you can finally

complete your thought process and come

to your conclusion, make your decision,

do whatever it was that you had set out to

do. Everything has been gathered and

analyzed. All that remains is to see what it

all means and what that meaning implies

for you, to draw the implications out to

their logical conclusion.

It’s the moment when Sherlock Holmes

utters that immortal line in “The Crooked

Man,” elementary.

“I have the advantage of knowing your

habits, my dear Watson,” said he. “When

your round is a short one you walk, and

when it is a long one you use a hansom.

As I perceive that your boots, although

used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt

that you are at present busy enough to

justify the hansom.”

“Excellent!” I cried.

“Elementary,” said he. “It is one of

those instances where the reasoner can

produce an effect which seems remarkable

to his neighbour, because the latter has

missed the one little point which is the

basis of the deduction.”

What does deduction actually entail?

Deduction is that final navigation of your

brain attic, the moment when you put

together all of the elements that came

before in a single, cohesive whole that

makes sense of the full picture, the attic

yielding in orderly fashion what it has

gathered so methodically. What Holmes

means by deduction and what formal logic

means by deduction are not one and the

same. In the purely logical sense,

deduction is the arrival at a specific

instance from a general principle. Perhaps

the most famous example:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Socrates is mortal.

But for Holmes, this is but one possible

way to reach the conclusion. His

deduction includes multiple ways of

reasoning—as long as you proceed from

fact and reach a statement that must

necessarily be true, to the exclusion of

other alternatives.3

Whether it’s solving a crime, making a

decision, or coming to some personal

determination,

the

process

remains

essentially the same. You take all of your

observations—those attic contents that

you’ve decided to store and integrate into

your existing attic structure and that

you’ve

already

mulled

over

and

reconfigured in your imagination—you put

them in order, starting from the beginning

and leaving nothing out, and you see what

possible answer remains that will both

incorporate all of them and answer your

initial question. Or, to put it in Holmesian

terms, you lay out your chain of reasoning

and test possibilities until whatever

remains (improbability aside) is the truth:

“That process starts upon the supposition

that when you have eliminated all which is

impossible,

then

whatever

remains,

however improbable, must be the truth,”

he tells us. “It may well be that several

explanations remain, in which case one

tries test after test until one or other of

them has a convincing amount of support.”

That, in essence, is deduction, or what

Holmes calls “systematized common

sense.” But the common sense is not as

common, or as straightforward, as one

might hope. Whenever Watson himself

tries to emulate Holmes, he often finds

himself in error. And it’s only natural.

Even if we’ve been accurate up to this

point, we have to push back one more time

lest System Watson leads us astray at the

eleventh hour.

Why is deduction far more difficult than

it appears? Why is it that Watson so often

falters when he tries to follow in his

companion’s footsteps. What gets in the

way of our final reasoning? Why is it so

often so difficult to think clearly, even

when we have everything we need to do

so? And how can we circumvent those

difficulties so that, unlike Watson, who is

stuck to repeat his mistakes over and over,

we can use System Holmes to help us out

of the quagmire and deduce properly?

The Difficulty of Proper Deduction:

Our Inner Storyteller at the Wheel

A trio of notorious robbers sets its sights

on Abbey Grange, the residence of Sir

Eustace Brackenstall, one of the richest

men in Kent. One night, when all are

presumed to be sleeping, the three men

make their way through the dining room

window, preparing to ransack the wealthy

residence much as they did a nearby estate

a fortnight prior. Their plan, however, is

foiled when Lady Brackenstall enters the

room. Quickly, they hit her over the head

and tie her to one of the dining room

chairs. All would seem to be well, were it

not for Sir Brackenstall, who comes in to

investigate the strange noises. He is not so

lucky as his wife: he is knocked over the

head with a poker and he collapses, dead,

onto the floor. The robbers hastily clear

the sideboard of its silver but, too agitated

by the murder to do much else, exit

thereafter. But first they open a bottle of

wine to calm their nerves.

Or so it would seem, according to the

testimony of the only living witness, Lady

Brackenstall. But in “The Adventure of the

Abbey Grange,” few things are what they

appear to be.

The story seems sound enough. The

lady’s explanation is confirmed by her

maid, Theresa, and all signs point to

events unfolding much in the manner she

has described. And yet, something doesn’t

feel right to Sherlock Holmes. “Every

instinct that I possess cries out against it,”

he tells Watson. “It’s wrong—it’s all

wrong—I’ll swear that it’s wrong.” He

begins enumerating the possible flaws,

and as he does so, details that seem

entirely plausible, when taken one by one,

now together begin to cast doubt on the

likelihood of the story. It is not, however,

until he comes to the wineglasses that

Holmes knows for sure he is correct.

“And now, on the top of this, comes the

incident of the wineglasses,” he says to

his companion.

“Can you see them in your mind’s eye?”

“I see them clearly.”

“We are told that three men drank from

them. Does that strike you as likely?”

“Why not? There was wine in each

glass.”

“Exactly, but there was beeswing only

in one glass. You must have noticed that

fact. What does that suggest to your

mind?”

“That last glass filled would be most

likely to contain beeswing.”

“Not at all. The bottle was full of it,

and it is inconceivable that the first two

glasses were clear and the third heaving

charged with it. There are two possible

explanations, and only two. One is that

after the second glass was filled the bottle

was violently agitated, and so the third

glass received the beeswing. That does

not appear probable. No, no, I am sure

that I am right.”

“What, then, do you suppose?”

“That only two glasses were used, and

that the dregs of both were poured into a

third glass, so as to give the false

impression that three people had been

there.”

What does Watson know about the

physics of wine? Not much, I venture to

guess, but when Holmes asks him about

the beeswing, he at once comes up with a

ready answer: it must have been the last

glass to be poured. The reason seems

sensible enough, and yet comes from

nowhere. I’d bet that Watson hadn’t even

given it so much as a second thought until

Holmes prompted him to do so. But when

asked, he is only too happy to create an

explanation that makes sense. Watson

doesn’t even realize that he has done it,

and were Holmes not to stop him for a

moment, he would likely hold it as future

fact, as further proof of the veracity of the

original story rather than as a potential

hole in the story’s fabric.

Absent Holmes, the Watson storytelling

approach is the natural, instinctive one.

And absent Holmes’s insistence, it is

incredibly difficult to resist our desire to

form narratives, to tell stories even if they

may not be altogether correct, or correct at

all. We like simplicity. We like concrete

reasons. We like causes. We like things

that make intuitive sense (even if that

sense happens to be wrong).

On the flip side, we dislike any factor

that stands in the way of that simplicity

and causal concreteness. Uncertainty,

chance, randomness, nonlinearity: these

elements threaten our ability to explain,

and to explain quickly and (seemingly)

logically. And so, we do our best to

eliminate them at every turn. Just like we

decide that the last glass of wine to be

poured is also most likely to contain all

the beeswing if we see glasses of uneven

clarity, we may think, to take one example,

that someone has a hot hand in basketball

if we see a number of baskets in a row

(the hot-hand fallacy). In both cases, we

are using too few observations to reach

our conclusions. In the case of the glasses,

we rely only on that bottle and not on the

behavior of other similar bottles under

various circumstances. In the case of

basketball, we rely only on the short

streak (the law of small numbers) and not

on the variability inherent in any player’s

game, which includes long-run streaks.

Or, to take another example, we think a

coin is more likely to land on heads if it

has fallen on tails for a number of times

(the gambler’s fallacy), forgetting that

short sequences don’t necessarily have to

have the fifty-fifty distribution that would

appear in the long term.

Whether

we’re

explaining

why

something has happened or concluding as

to the likely cause of an event, our

intuition often fails us because we prefer

things to be much more controllable,

predictable, and causally determined than

they are in reality.

From these preferences stem the errors

in thinking that we make without so much

as a second thought. We tend to deduce as

we shouldn’t, arguing, as Holmes would

put it, ahead of the data—and often in

spite of the data. When things just “make

sense” it is incredibly difficult to see them

any other way.

W.J. was a World War II veteran. He was

gregarious, charming, and witty. He also

happened to suffer from a form of epilepsy

so incapacitating that, in 1960, he elected

to have a drastic form of brain surgery.

The connecting fabric between the left and

right hemispheres of the brain that allows

the two halves to communicate—his

corpus collosum—would be severed. In

the past, this form of treatment had been

shown to have a dramatic effect on the

incidence of seizures. Patients who had

been unable to function could all of a

sudden lead seizure-free lives. But did

such a dramatic change to the brain’s

natural connectivity come at a cost?

At the time of W.J.’s surgery, no one

really knew the answer. But Roger Sperry,

a neuroscientist at Caltech who would go

on to win a Nobel Prize in medicine for

his work on hemispheric connectictivity,

suspected that it might. In animals, at least,

a severing of the corpus collosum meant

that the hemispheres became unable to

communicate. What happened in one

hemisphere was now a complete mystery

to the other. Could this effective isolation

occur in humans as well?

The

pervasive

wisdom

was

emphatic no. Our human brains were not

animal brains. They were far more

complicated, far too smart, far too

evolved, really. And what better proof

than all of the high-functioning patients

who had undergone the surgery. This was

no frontal lobotomy. These patients

emerged with IQ intact and reasoning

abilities aplenty. Their memory seemed

unaffected. Their language abilities were

normal.

The

resounding

wisdom

seemed

intuitive and accurate. Except, of course,

it was resoundingly wrong. No one had

ever figured out a way to test it

scientifically: it was a Watson just-so

story that made sense, founded on the

same

absence

verified

factual

underpinnings. Until, that is, the scientific

equivalent of Holmes arrived at the scene:

Michael Gazzaniga, a young neuroscientist

in Sperry’s lab. Gazzaniga found a way to

test Sperry’s theory—that a severed

corpus collosum rendered the brain

hemispheres unable to communicate—

with the use of a tachistoscope, a device

that could present visual stimuli for

specific periods of time, and, crucially,

could do this to the right side or the left

side of each eye separately. (This lateral

presentation meant that any information

would go to only one of the two

hemispheres.)

When Gazzaniga tested W.J. after the

surgery, the results were striking. The

same man who had sailed through his tests

weeks earlier could no longer describe a

single object that was presented to his left

visual field. When Gazzaniga flashed an

image of a spoon to the right field, W.J.

named it easily, but when the same picture

was presented to the left, the patient

seemed to have, in essence, gone blind.

His eyes were fully functional, but he

could neither verbalize nor recall having

seen a single thing.

What was going on? W.J. was

Gazzaniga’s patient zero, the first in a long

line of initials who all pointed in one

direction: the two halves of our brains are

not created equal. One half is responsible

for processing visual inputs—it’s the one

with the little window to the outside

world, if you recall the Shel Silverstein

image—but the other half is responsible

f o r verbalizing what it knows—it’s the

one with the staircase to the rest of the

house. When the two halves have been

split apart, the bridge that connects the

two no longer exists. Any information

available to one side may as well not exist

as far as the other is concerned. We have,

in effect, two separate mind attics, each

with its unique storage, contents, and, to

some extent, structure.

And here’s where things get really

tricky. If you show a picture of, say, a

chicken claw to just the left side of the eye

(which means the picture will be

processed only by the right hemisphere of

the brain—the visual one, with the

window) and one of a snowy driveway to

just the right side of the eye (which means

it will be processed only by the left

hemisphere—the

one

with

the

communicating staircase), and then ask the

individual to point at an image most

closely related to what he’s seen, the two

hands don’t agree: the right hand (tied to

the left input) will point to a shovel, while

the left hand (tied to the right input) will

point to a chicken. Ask the person why

he’s pointing to two objects, and instead

of being confused he’ll at once create an

entirely plausible explanation: you need a

shovel to clean out the chicken coop. His

mind has created an entire story, a

narrative that will make plausible sense of

his hands’ discrepancy, when in reality it

all goes back to those silent images.

Gazzaniga calls the left hemisphere our

left-brain interpreter, driven to seek

causes and explanations—even for things

that may not have them, or at least not

readily available to our minds—in a

natural and instinctive fashion. But while

the interpreter makes perfect sense, he is

more often than not flat-out wrong, the

Watson of the wineglasses taken to an

extreme.

Split-brain patients provide some of the

best scientific evidence of our proficiency

at narrative self-deception, at creating

explanations that make sense but are in

reality far from the truth. But we don’t

even need to have our corpus collosum

severed to act that way. We do it all the

time, as a matter of course. Remember that

pendulum study of creativity, where

subjects were able to solve the problem

after the experimenter had casually set one

of the two cords in motion? When subjects

were then asked where their insight had

come from, they cited many causes. “It

was the only thing left.” “I just realized

the cord would swing if I fastened a

weight to it.” “I thought of the situation of

swinging across a river.” “I had imagery

of monkeys swinging from trees.”

All plausible enough. None correct. No

one mentioned the experimenter’s ploy.

And even when told about it later, over

two-thirds continued to insist that they had

not noted it and that it had had no impact

at all on their own solutions—although

they had reached those solutions, on

average, within forty-five seconds of the

hint. What’s more, even the one-third that

admitted the possibility of influence

proved susceptible to false explanation.

When a decoy cue (twirling the weight on

a cord) was presented, which had no

impact on the solution, they cited that cue,

and not the actual one that helped them, as

having prompted their behavior.

Our minds form cohesive narratives out

of disparate elements all the time. We’re

not comfortable if something doesn’t have

a cause, and so our brains determine a

cause one way or the other, without asking

our permission to do so. When in doubt,

our brains take the easiest route, and they

do so at every stage of the reasoning

process, from forming inferences to

generalizations.

W.J. is but a more extreme example of

the exact thing that Watson does with the

wineglasses. In both instances there is the

spontaneous construction of story, and

then a firm belief in its veracity, even

when it hinges on nothing more than its

seeming cohesiveness. That is deductive

problem number one.

Even though all of the material is there

for the taking, the possibility of ignoring

some of it, knowingly or not, is real.

Memory is highly imperfect, and highly

subject to change and influence. Even our

observations themselves, while accurate

enough to begin with, may end up affecting

our recall and, hence, our deductive

reasoning more than we think. We must be

careful lest we let something that caught

our attention, whether because it is out of

all proportion (salience) or because it just

happened (recency) or because we’ve

been thinking about something totally

unrelated (priming or framing), weigh too

heavily in our reasoning and make us

forget other details that are crucial for

proper deduction. We must also be sure

that we answer the same question we

posed in the beginning, the one that was

informed by our initial goals and

motivation, and not one that somehow

seems more pertinent or intuitive or

easier, now that we’ve reached the end of

the thought process. Why do Lestrade and

the rest of the detectives so often persist in

wrongful arrests, even when all evidence

points to the contrary? Why do they keep

pushing their original story, as if failing to

note altogether that it is coming apart at

the seams? It’s simple, really. We don’t

like to admit our initial intuition to be

false and would much rather dismiss the

evidence that contradicts it. It is perhaps

why wrongful arrests are so sticky even

outside the world of Conan Doyle.

The precise mistakes or the names we

give them don’t matter as much as the

broad idea: we often aren’t mindful in our

deduction, and the temptation to gloss

over and jump to the end becomes ever

stronger the closer we get to the finish

line. Our natural stories are so incredibly

compelling that they are tough to ignore or

reverse. They get in the way of Holmes’s

dictate of systematized common sense, of

going through all alternatives, one by one,

sifting the crucial from the incidental, the

improbable from the impossible, until we

reach the only answer.

As a simple illustration of what I mean,

consider the following questions. I want

you to write down the first answer that

comes to your mind. Ready?

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The

bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How

much does the ball cost?

2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make

5 widgets, how long would it take 100

machines to make 100 widgets?

3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads.

Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it

takes 48 days for the patch to cover the

entire lake, how long would it take for the

patch to cover half of the lake?

You have just taken Shane Frederick’s

Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). If you

are like most people, chances are you

wrote down at least one of the following:

$0.10 for question one; 100 minutes for

question two; and 24 days for question

three. In each case, you would have been

wrong. But you would have been wrong in

good company. When the questions were

asked of Harvard students, the average

score was 1.43 correct (with 57 percent

of students getting either zero or one

right). At Princeton, a similar story: 1.63

correct, and 45 percent scoring zero or

one. And even at MIT, the scores were far

from perfect: 2.18 correct on average,

with 23 percent, or near to a quarter, of

students getting either none or one correct.

These “simple” problems are not as

straightforward as they may seem at first

glance.

The correct answers are $0.05, 5

minutes, and 47 days, respectively. If you

take a moment to reflect, you will likely

see why—and you’ll say to yourself, Of

course, how did I ever miss that? Simple.

Good old System Watson has won out

once again. The initial answers are the

intuitively appealing ones, the ones that

come quickly and naturally to mind if we

don’t pause to reflect. We let the salience

of certain elements (and they were framed

to be salient on purpose) draw us away

from considering each element fairly and

accurately. We use mindless verbatim

strategies—repeating an element in the

prior answer and not reflecting on the

actual best strategy to solve the present

problem—instead of mindful ones (in

essence, substituting an intuitive question

for the more difficult and time-consuming

alternative, just because the two happen to

seem related). Those second answers

require you to suppress System Watson’s

eager response and let Holmes take a

look: to reflect, inhibit your initial

intuition, and then edit it accordingly,

which is not something that we are overly

eager to do, especially when we are tired

from all the thinking that came before. It’s

tough to keep that motivation and

mindfulness going from start to finish, and

far easier to start conserving our cognitive

resources by letting Watson take the helm.

While the CRT may seem far removed

from any real problems we might

encounter, it happens to be remarkably

predictive of our performance in any

number of situations where logic and

deduction come into play. In fact, this test

is often more telling than are measures of

cognitive ability, thinking disposition, and

executive function. Good performance on

these three little questions predicts

resistance to a number of common logical

fallacies, which, taken together, are

considered to predict adherence to the

basic structures of rational thought. The

CRT even predicts our ability to reason

through the type of formal deductive

problem—the Socrates one—that we saw

earlier in the chapter: if you do poorly on

the test, you are more likely to say that if

all living things need water and roses

need water, it follows that roses are living

things.

Jumping to conclusions, telling a

selective story instead of a logical one,

even with all of the evidence in front of

you and well sorted, is common (though

avoidable, as you’ll see in just a moment).

Reasoning through everything up until the

last moment, not letting those mundane

details bore you, not letting yourself peter

out toward the end of the process: that is

altogether rare. We need to learn to take

pleasure in the lowliest manifestations of

reason. To take care that deduction not

seem boring, or too simple, after all of the

effort that has preceded it. That is a

difficult task. In the opening lines of “The

Adventure of the Copper Beeches,”

Holmes reminds us, “To the man who

loves art for its own sake, it is frequently

in its least important and lowliest

manifestations that the keenest pleasure is

to be derived. . . . If I claim full justice for

my art, it is because it is an impersonal

thing—a thing beyond myself. Crime is

common. Logic is rare.” Why? Logic is

boring. We think we’ve already figured it

out. In pushing past this preconception lies

the challenge.

Learning to Tell the Crucial from the

Incidental

So how do you start from the beginning

and make sure that your deduction is going

along the right track and has not veered

fabulously off course before it has even

begun?

In “The Crooked Man,” Sherlock

Holmes describes a new case, the death of

Sergeant James Barclay, to Watson. At

first glance the facts are strange indeed.

Barclay and his wife, Nancy, were heard

to be arguing in the morning room. The

two were usually affectionate, and so the

argument in itself was something of an

event. But it became even more striking

when the housemaid found the door to the

room

locked

and

its

occupants

unresponsive to her knocks. Add to that a

strange name that she heard several times

—David—and then the most remarkable

fact of all: after the coachman succeeded

in entering the room from outside through

the open French doors, no key was to be

found. The lady was lying insensible on

the couch, the gentleman dead, with a

jagged cut on the back of his head and his

face twisted in horror. And neither one

possessed the key that would open the

locked door.

How to make sense of these multiple

elements? “Having gathered these facts,

Watson,” Holmes tells the doctor, “I

smoked several pipes over them, trying to

separate those which were crucial from

others which were merely incidental.”

And that, in one sentence, is the first step

toward

successful

deduction:

the

separation of those factors that are crucial

to your judgment from those that are just

incidental, to make sure that only the truly

central elements affect your decision.

Consider the following descriptions of

two people, Bill and Linda. Each

description is followed by a list of

occupations and avocations. Your task is

to rank the items in the list by the degree

that Bill or Linda resembles the typical

member of the class.

Bill is thirty-four years old. He is

intelligent but unimaginative, compulsive,

and generally lifeless. In school he was

strong in mathematics but weak in social

studies and humanities.

Bill is a physician who plays poker for

a hobby.

Bill is an architect.

Bill is an accountant.

Bill plays jazz for a hobby.

Bill is a reporter.

Bill is an accountant who plays jazz for

a hobby.

Bill climbs mountains for a hobby.

Linda is thirty-one years old, single,

outspoken, and very bright. She majored

in philosophy. As a student, she was

deeply

concerned

with

issues

discrimination and social justice, and also

participated in antinuclear demonstrations.

Linda is a teacher in an elementary

school.

Linda works in a bookstore and takes

yoga classes.

Linda is active in the feminist

movement.

Linda is a psychiatric social worker.

Linda is a member of the League of

Women Voters.

Linda is a bank teller.

Linda is an insurance salesperson.

Linda is a bank teller and is active in

the feminist movement.

After you’ve made your ranking, take a

look at two pairs of statements in

particular: Bill plays jazz for a hobby and

Bill is an accountant who plays jazz for a

hobby, and Linda is a bank teller and

Linda is a bank teller and is active in the

feminist movement. Which of the two

statements have you ranked as more likely

in each pair?

I am willing to bet that it was the

second one in both cases. If it was, you’d

be with the majority, and you would be

making a big mistake.

This exercise was taken verbatim from

a 1983 paper by Amos Tversky and

Daniel Kahneman, to illustrate our present

point: when it comes to separating crucial

details from incidental ones, we often

don’t fare particularly well. When the

researchers’ subjects were presented with

these lists, they repeatedly made the same

judgment that I’ve just predicted you

would make: that it was more likely that

Bill was an accountant who plays jazz for

a hobby than it was that he plays jazz for a

hobby, and that it was more likely that

Linda was a feminist bank teller than that

she was a bank teller at all.

Logically, neither idea makes sense: a

conjunction cannot be more likely than

either of its parts. If you didn’t think it

likely that Bill played jazz or that Linda

was a bank teller to begin with, you

should not have altered that judgment just

because you did think it probable that Bill

was an accountant and Linda, a feminist.

An unlikely element or event when

combined with a likely one does not

somehow magically become any more

likely. And yet 87 percent and 85 percent

of participants, for the Bill scenario and

the Linda scenario, respectively, made

that exact judgment, in the process

committing the infamous conjunction

fallacy.

They even made it when their choices

were limited: if only the two relevant

options (Linda is a bank teller or Linda is

a feminist bank teller) were included, 85

percent of participants still ranked the

conjunction as more likely than the single

instance. Even when people were given

the logic behind the statements, they sided

with the incorrect resemblance logic

( Linda seems more like a feminist, so I

will say it’s more likely that she’s a

feminist bank teller) over the correct

extensional logic (feminist bank tellers are

only a specific subset of bank tellers, so

Linda must be a bank teller with a higher

likelihood than she would be a feminist

one in particular) in 65 percent of cases.

We can all be presented with the same set

of facts and features, but the conclusions

we draw from them need not match

accordingly.

Our brains weren’t made to assess

things in this light, and our failings here

actually make a good amount of sense.

When it comes to things like chance and

probability, we tend to be naive reasoners

(and as chance and probability play a

large part in many of our deductions, it’s

no wonder that we often go astray). It’s

called probabilistic incoherence, and it all

stems

from

that

same

pragmatic

storytelling that we engage in so naturally

and readily—a tendency that may go back

to a deeper, neural explanation; to, in

some sense, W.J. and the split brain.

Simply

put,

while

probabilistic

reasoning seems to be localized in the left

hemisphere, deduction appears to activate

mostly the right hemisphere. In other

words, the neural loci for evaluating

logical implications and those for looking

at their empirical plausibility may be in

opposite

hemispheres—a

cognitive

architecture that isn’t conducive to

coordinating statement logic with the

assessment of chance and probability. As

a result, we aren’t always good at

integrating various demands, and we often

fail to do so properly, all the while

remaining perfectly convinced that we

have succeeded admirably.

The description of Linda and feminist

(and Bill and accountant) coincides so

well that we find it hard to dismiss the

match as anything but hard fact. What is

crucial here is our understanding of how

frequently something occurs in real life—

and the logical, elementary notion that a

whole simply can’t be more likely than the

sum of its parts. And yet we let the

incidental descriptors color our minds so

much that we overlook the crucial

probabilities.

What we should be doing is something

much more prosaic. We should be gauging

how likely any separate occurrence

actually is. In chapter three, I introduced

the concept of base rates, or how

frequently something appears in the

population, and promised to revisit it

when we discussed deduction. And that’s

because base rates, or our ignorance of

them, are at the heart of deductive errors

like the conjunction fallacy. They hamper

observation, but where they really throw

you off is in deduction, in moving from all

of your observations to the conclusions

they imply. Because here, selectivity—

and selective ignorance—will throw you

off completely.

To accurately cast Bill and Linda’s

likelihood of belonging to any of the

professions, we need to understand the

prevalence of accountants, bank tellers,

amateur jazz musicians, active feminists,

and the whole lot in the population at

large. We can’t take our protagonists out

of context. We can’t allow one potential

match to throw off other information we

might have.

So, how does one go about resisting this

trap, sorting the details properly instead of

being swept up in irrelevance?

Perhaps the pinnacle of Holmes’s

deductive prowess comes in a case that is

less traditional than many of his London

pursuits. Silver Blaze, the prize-winning

horse of the story’s title, goes missing

days before the big Wessex Cup race, on

which many a fortune ride. That same

morning, his trainer is found dead some

distance from the stable. His skull looks

like it has been hit by some large, blunt

object. The lackey who had been guarding

the

horse

has

been

drugged

and

remembers precious little of the night’s

events.

The case is a sensational one: Silver

Blaze is one of the most famous horses in

England. And so, Scotland Yard sends

Inspector Gregson to investigate. Gregson,

however, is at a loss. He arrests the most

likely suspect—a gentleman who had been

seen around the stable the evening of the

disappearance—but

admits

that

all

evidence is circumstantial and that the

picture may change at any moment. And

so, three days later, with no horse in sight,

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson make

their way to Dartmoor.

Will the horse run the race? Will the

trainer’s murderer be brought to justice?

Four more days pass. It is the morning of

the race. Silver Blaze, Holmes assures the

worried owner, Colonel Ross, will run.

Not to fear. And run he does. He not only

runs, but wins. And his trainer’s murderer

is identified soon thereafter.

We’ll be returning to “Silver Blaze”

several times for its insights into the

science of deduction, but first let’s

consider how Holmes introduces the case

to Watson.

“It is one of those cases,” says Holmes,

“where the art of the reasoner should be

used rather for the sifting of details than

for the acquiring of fresh evidence. The

tragedy has been so uncommon, so

complete,

and

such

personal

importance to so many people that we are

suffering from a plethora of surmise,

conjecture, and hypothesis.” In other

words, there is too much information to

begin with, too many details to be able to

start making them into any sort of coherent

whole, separating the crucial from the

incidental. When so many facts are piled

together, the task becomes increasingly

problematic. You have a vast quantity of

your own observations and data but also

an even vaster quantity of potentially

incorrect information from individuals

who may not have observed as mindfully

as you have.

Holmes puts the problem this way:

“The difficulty is to detach the framework

of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—

from the embellishments of theorists and

reporters.

Then,

having

established

ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our

duty to see what inferences may be drawn

and what are the special points upon

which the whole mystery turns.” In other

words, in sorting through the morass of

Bill and Linda, we would have done well

to set clearly in our minds what were the

actual

facts,

and

what

were

the

embellishments or stories of our minds.

When we pry the incidental and the

crucial apart, we have to exercise the

same care that we spent on observing to

make sure that we have recorded

accurately all of the impressions. If we’re

not careful, mindset, preconception, or

subsequent turns can affect even what we

think we observed in the first place.

In one of Elizabeth Loftus’s classic

studies

eyewitness

testimony,

participants viewed a film depicting an

automobile accident. Loftus then asked

each participant to estimate how fast the

cars were going when the accident

occurred—a classic deduction from

available data. But here’s the twist: each

time she asked the question, she subtly

altered the phrasing. Her description of

the accident varied by verb: the cars

smashed, collided, bumped, contacted, or hit. What Loftus found was that her

phrasing had a drastic impact on subjects’

memory. Not only did those who viewed

the “smashed” condition estimate a higher

speed than those who viewed the other

conditions, but they were also far more

likely to recall, one week later, having

seen broken glass in the film, even though

there was actually no broken glass at all.

It’s called the misinformation effect.

When we are exposed to misleading

information, we are likely to recall it as

true and to take it into consideration in our

deductive

process.

(In

the

Loftus

experiment, the subjects weren’t even

exposed to anything patently false, just

misleading.) All the specific word choice

does is act as a simple frame that impacts

our line of reasoning and even our

memory. Hence the difficulty, and the

absolute necessity, that Holmes describes

of learning to sift what is irrelevant (and

all that is media conjecture) from the real,

objective, hard facts—and to do so

thinkingly and systematically. If you don’t,

you may find yourself remembering

broken glass instead of the intact

windshield you actually saw.

In fact, it’s when we have more, not

less, information that we should be most

careful. Our confidence in our deductions

tends to increase along with the number of

details on which we base them—

especially if one of those details makes

sense. A longer list somehow seems more

reasonable, even if we were to judge

individual items on that list as less than

probable given the information at hand. So

when we see one element in a conjunction

that seems to fit, we are likely to accept

the full conjunction, even if it makes little

sense to do so. Linda the feminist bank

teller. Bill the jazz-playing accountant. It’s

perverse, in a way. The better we’ve

observed and the more data we’ve

collected, the more likely we are to be led

astray by a single governing detail.

Similarly, the more incidental details

we see, the less likely we are to home in

on the crucial, and the more likely we are

to give the incidental undue weight. If we

are told a story, we are more likely to find

it compelling and true if we are also given

more details, even if those details are

irrelevant to the story’s truth. Psychologist

Ruma Falk has noted that when a narrator

adds specific, superfluous details to a

story of coincidence (for instance, that

two people win the lottery in the same

small town), listeners are more likely to

find the coincidence surprising and

compelling.

Usually when we reason, our minds

have a tendency to grab any information

that seems to be related to the topic, in the

process retrieving both relevant cues and

those that seem somehow to be connected

but may not actually matter. We may do

this for several reasons: familiarity, or a

sense that we’ve seen this before or

should know something even when we

can’t quite put our finger on it; spreading

activation, or the idea that the activation

of one little memory node triggers others,

and over time the triggered memories

spread further away from the original; or

simple accident or coincidence—we just

happen to think of something while

thinking about something else.

If, for example, Holmes were to

magically emerge from the book and ask

us, not Watson, to enumerate the

particulars of the case at hand, we’d

rummage through our memory ( What did I

just read? Or was that the other case? ),

take certain facts out of storage ( Okay:

horse

gone,

trainer

dead,

lackey

drugged, possible suspect apprehended.

Am I missing anything? ), and in the

process, likely bring up others that may

not matter all that much ( I think I forgot to

eat lunch because I was so caught up in

the drama; it’s like that time I was

reading The Hound of the Baskervilles

for the first time, and forgot to eat, and

then my head hurt, and I was in bed, and

. . .).

If the tendency to over-activate and

over-include isn’t checked, the activation

can spread far wider than is useful for the

purpose at hand—and can even interfere

with the proper perspective needed to

focus on that purpose. In the case of Silver

Blaze, Colonel Ross constantly urges

Holmes to do more, look at more,

consider more, to leave, in his words, “no

stone unturned.” Energy and activity, more

is more; those are his governing

principles. He is supremely frustrated

when Holmes refuses, choosing instead to

focus on the key elements that he has

already identified. But Holmes realizes

that to weed out the incidental, he should

do anything but take in more and more

theories and potentially relevant (or not)

facts.

We need, in essence, to do just what the

CRT teaches us: reflect, inhibit, and edit.

Plug System Holmes in, check the

tendency to gather detail thoughtlessly,

and instead focus—thoughtfully—on the

details we already have. All of those

observations? We need to learn to divide

them in our minds in order to maximize

productive reasoning. We have to learn

when not to think of them as well as when

to bring them in. We have to learn to

concentrate—reflect,

inhibit,

edit—

otherwise we may end up getting exactly

nowhere on any of the myriad ideas

floating through our heads. Mindfulness

and motivation are essential to successful

deduction.

But essential never means simple, nor

does it mean sufficient. Even with Silver

Blaze, Holmes, as focused and motivated

as he is, finds it difficult to sift through all

of the possible lines of thought. As he tells

Watson once Silver Blaze is recovered, “I

confess that any theories which I had

formed from the newspaper reports were

entirely erroneous. And yet there were

indications there, had they not been

overlaid by other details which concealed

their true import.” The separation of

crucial and incidental, the backbone of

any deduction, can be hard for even the

best-trained minds. That’s why Holmes

doesn’t run off based on his initial

theories. He first does precisely what he

urges us to do: lay the facts out in a neat

row and proceed from there. Even in his

mistakes, he is deliberative and Holmes-

like, not letting System Watson act though

it may well want to.

How does he do this? He goes at his

own pace, ignoring everyone who urges

haste. He doesn’t let anyone affect him.

He does what he needs to do. And beyond

that he uses another simple trick. He tells

Watson everything—something that occurs

with great regularity throughout the

Holmes canon (and you thought it was just

a clever expository device!). As he tells

the doctor before he delves into the

pertinent observations, “nothing clears up

a case so much as stating it to another

person.” It’s the exact same principle

we’ve seen in operation before: stating

something through, out loud, forces pauses

and reflection. It mandates mindfulness. It

forces you to consider each premise on its

logical merits and allows you to slow

down your thinking so that you do not

blunder into a feminist Linda. It ensures

that you do not let something that is of real

significance go by simply because it

didn’t catch your attention enough or fit

with the causal story that you have

(subconsciously,

doubt)

already

created in your head. It allows your inner

Holmes to listen and forces your Watson

to pause. It allows you to confirm that

you’ve actually understood, not just

thought you understood because it seemed

right.

Indeed, it is precisely in stating the

facts to Watson that Holmes realizes the

thing that will allow him to solve the case.

“It was while I was in the carriage, just as

we reached the trainer’s house, that the

immense

significance of the curried

mutton occurred to me.” The choice of a

dinner is easy to mistake for triviality,

until you state it along with everything

else and realize that the dish was perfectly

engineered to hide the smell and taste of

powdered opium, the poison that was used

on the stable boy. Someone who didn’t

know the curried mutton was to be served

would never risk using a poison that could

be tasted. The culprit, then, is someone

who knew what was for dinner. And that

realization prompts Holmes to his famous

conclusion: “Before deciding that question

I had grasped the significance of the

silence of the dog, for one true inference

invariably suggests others.” Start on the

right track, and you are far more likely to

remain there.

While you’re at it, make sure you are

recalling all of your observations, all of

the possible permutations that you’ve

thought up in your imaginative space, and

avoiding those instances that are not part

of the picture. You can’t just focus on the

details that come to mind most easily or

the ones that seem to be representative or

the ones that seem to be most salient or the

ones that make the most intuitive sense.

You have to dig deeper. You would likely

never judge Linda a likely bank teller

from her description, though you very well

might judge her a likely feminist. Don’t let

that latter judgment color what follows;

instead, proceed with the same logic that

you did before, evaluating each element

separately and objectively as part of a

consistent whole. A likely bank teller?

Absolutely not. And so, a feminist one?

Even less probable.

You have to remember, like Holmes, all

of the details about Silver Blaze’s

disappearance, stripped of all of the

papers’ conjectures and the theories your

mind may have inadvertently formed as a

result. Never would Holmes call Linda a

feminist bank teller, unless he was first

certain that she was a bank teller.

The Improbable Is Not Impossible

I n The Sign of Four, a robbery and

murder are committed in a small room,

locked from the inside, on the top floor of

a rather large estate. How in the world did

the criminal get inside to do the deed?

Holmes enumerates the possibilities: “The

door has not been opened since last

night,” he tells Watson. “Window is

snibbed on the inner side. Framework is

solid. No hinges at the side. Let us open it.

No water-pipe near. Roof quite out of

reach.”

Then how to possibly get inside?

Watson ventures a guess: “The door is

locked, the window is inaccessible. Was

it through the chimney?”

No, Holmes tells him. “The grate is

much too small. I had already considered

that possibility.”

“How then?” asks an exasperated

Watson.

“You will not apply my precept.”

Holmes shakes his head. “How often have

I said to you that when you have

eliminated the impossible, whatever

remains, however improbable, must be the

truth? We know that he did not come

through the door, the window, or the

chimney. We also know that he could not

have been concealed in the room, as there

is no concealment possible. Whence, then,

did he come?”

And then, at last, Watson sees the

answer: “He came from the hole in the

roof.” And Holmes’s reply, “Of course he

did. He must have done so,” makes it

seem the most logical entrance possible.

It isn’t, of course. It is highly

improbable, a proposition that most

people would never consider, just as

Watson, trained as he is in Holmes’s

approach, failed to do without prompting.

Just like we find it difficult to separate the

incidental from the truly crucial, so, too,

we often fail to consider the improbable

—because our minds dismiss it as

impossible before we even give it its due.

And it’s up to System Holmes to shock us

out of that easy narrative and force us to

consider that something as unlikely as a

rooftop entrance may be the very thing we

need to solve our case.

Lucretius called a fool someone who

believes that the tallest mountain that

exists in the world and the tallest mountain

he has ever observed are one and the

same. We’d probably brand someone who

thought that way foolish as well. And yet

we do the same thing every single day.

Author and mathematician Nassim Taleb

even has a name for it, inspired by the

Latin poet: the Lucretius underestimation.

(And back in Lucretius’s day, was it so

strange to think that your world was

limited to what you knew? In some ways,

it’s smarter than the mistakes we make

today given the ease of knowledge at our

disposal.)

Simply put, we let our own personal

past experience guide what we perceive

to be possible. Our repertoire becomes an

anchor of sorts; it is our reasoning starting

point, our place of departure for any

further thoughts. And even if we try to

adjust from our egocentric perspective,

we tend not to adjust nearly enough to

matter, remaining stubbornly skewed in a

self-directed

approach.

It’s

our

storytelling proclivity in another guise: we

imagine stories based on the ones we’ve

experienced, not the ones we haven’t.

Learning of historical precedent as well

matters little, since we don’t learn in the

same way from description as we do from

experience. It’s something known as the

description-experience

gap.

Perhaps

Watson had read at one time or another

about a daring rooftop entrance, but

because he has never had direct

experience from it, he will not have

processed the information in the same way

and is not likely to use it in the same

manner when trying to solve a problem.

Lucretius’s fool? Having read of high

peaks, he may still not believe they exist. I

want to see them with my own two eyes,

he’ll say. What am I, some kind of fool?

Absent a direct precedent, the improbable

seems so near impossible that Holmes’s

maxim falls by the wayside.

And yet distinguishing the two is an

essential ability to have. For, even if we

have successfully separated the crucial

from the incidental, even if we’ve

gathered all of the facts (and their

implications) and have focused on the

ones that are truly relevant, we are lost if

we don’t let our minds think of the roof,

however unlikely it is, as a possible entry

point into a room. If, like Watson, we

dismiss it out of hand—or fail to even

think about—we will never be able to

deduce those alternatives that would flow

directly from our reasoning if only we’d

let them.

We use the best metric of the future—

the past. It’s natural to do so, but that

doesn’t mean it’s accurate. The past

doesn’t often make room for the

improbable. It constrains our deduction to

the known, the likely, the probable. And

who is to say that the evidence, if taken

together and properly considered, doesn’t

lead to an alternative beyond these

realms?

Let’s go back for a moment to “Silver

Blaze.”

Sherlock

Holmes

emerges

triumphant, it’s true—the horse is found,

as is the trainer’s murderer—but not after

a delay that is uncharacteristic of the great

detective. He is late to the investigation

(three days late, to be specific), losing

valuable time at the scene. Why? He does

just what he reprimands Watson for doing:

he fails to apply the precept that the

improbable is not yet the impossible, that

it must be considered along with the more

likely alternatives.

As Holmes and Watson head to

Dartmoor to help with the investigation,

Holmes mentions that on Tuesday evening

both the horse’s owner and Inspector

Gregson

had

telegraphed

for

his

assistance on the case. The flummoxed

Watson responds, “Tuesday evening! And

this is Thursday morning. Why didn’t you

go down yesterday?” To which Holmes

answers, “Because I made a blunder, my

dear Watson—which is, I am afraid, a

more common occurrence than anyone

would think who only knew me through

your memoirs. The fact is that I could not

believe it possible that the most

remarkable horse in England could long

remain concealed, especially in so

sparsely inhabited a place as the north of

Dartmoor.”

Holmes has dismissed the merely

improbable as impossible and has failed

to act in a timely fashion as a result. In so

doing, he has reversed the usual Holmes-

Watson

exchange,

making

Watson’s

reprimand

uncharacteristically

well

warranted and on point.

Even the best and sharpest mind is

necessarily subject to its owner’s unique

experience and world perception. While a

mind such as Holmes’s is, as a rule, able

to consider even the most remote of

possibilities, there are times when it, too,

becomes limited by preconceived notions,

by what is available to its repertoire at

any given point. In short, even Holmes is

limited by the architecture of his brain

attic.

Holmes sees a horse of exceptional

appearance missing in a rural area.

Everything in his experience tells him it

can’t go missing for long. His logic is as

follows: if the horse is the most

remarkable such animal in the whole of

England, then how could it go under the

radar in a remote area where hiding

places are limited? Surely someone would

notice the beast, dead or alive, and make a

report. And that would be perfect

deduction from the facts, if it happened to

be true. But it is Thursday, the horse has

been missing since Tuesday, and the

report has failed to come. What is it then

that Holmes failed to take into account?

A horse couldn’t remain concealed if it

could still be recognized as that horse.

The possibility of disguising the animal

doesn’t cross the great detective’s mind; if

it had, surely he wouldn’t have discounted

the likelihood of the animal remaining

hidden. What Holmes sees isn’t just what

there is; he is also seeing what he knows.

Were we to witness something that in no

way fit with past schemas, had no

counterpart in our memory, we would

likely not know how to interpret it—or we

may even fail to see it altogether, and

instead see what we were expecting all

along.

Think of it as a complex version of any

one of the famous Gestalt demonstrations

of visual perception, whereby we are

easily able to see one thing in multiple

ways, depending on the context of

presentation.

For instance, consider this picture:

Do you see the middle figure as a B or a

13? The stimulus remains the same, but

what we see is all a matter of expectation

and context. A disguised animal? Not in

Holmes’s repertoire, however vast it

might be, and so he does not even

consider the possibility. Availability—

from experience, from contextual frames,

from ready anchors—affects deduction.

We wouldn’t deduce a B if we took away

the A and C, just like we’d never deduce a 13 were the 12 and 14 to be removed. It

wouldn’t even cross our minds, even

though it is highly possible, merely

improbable given the context. But if the

context were to shift slightly? Or if the

missing row were to be present, only

hidden from our view? That would change

the picture, but it wouldn’t necessarily

change the choices we consider.

This raises another interesting point:

not only does our experience affect what

we consider possible, but so, too, do our

expectations.

Holmes

was expecting

Silver Blaze to be found, and as a result

he viewed his evidence in a different

light, allowing certain possibilities to go

unexamined. Demand characteristics rear

their ugly head yet again; only this time

they take the guise of the confirmation

bias, one of the most prevalent mistakes

made by novice and experienced minds

alike.

From early childhood, we seem to be

susceptible

forming

confirmatory

biases, to deciding long before we

actually decide and dismissing the

improbable out of hand as impossible. In

one early study of the phenomenon,

children as young as third grade were

asked to identify which features of sports

balls were important to the quality of a

person’s serve. Once they made up their

minds (for instance, size matters but color

does not), they either altogether failed to

acknowledge evidence that was contrary

to their preferred theory (such as the

actual importance of color, or the lack

thereof of size) or considered it in a highly

selective and distorted fashion that

explained away anything that didn’t

correspond to their initial thought.

Furthermore, they failed to generate

alternative theories unless prompted to do

so, and when they later recalled both the

theory

and

the

evidence,

they

misremembered the process so that the

evidence became much more consistent

with the theory than it had been in reality.

In other words, they recast the past to

better suit their own view of the world.

As we age, it only gets worse—or at

the very least it doesn’t get any better.

Adults are more likely to judge one-sided

arguments as superior to those that present

both sides of a case, and more likely to

think that such arguments represent good

thinking. We are also more likely to

search for confirming, positive evidence

for hypotheses and established beliefs

even when we are not actually invested in

those hypotheses. In a seminal study,

researchers found that participants tested a

concept by looking only at examples that

would hold if that concept were correct—

and failed to find things that would show

it to be incorrect. Finally, we exhibit a

remarkable asymmetry in how we weigh

evidence of a hypothesis: we tend to

overweight

any

positive

confirming

evidence and underweight any negative

disconfirming evidence—a tendency that

professional mind readers have exploited

for ages. We see what we are looking for.

In these final stages of deduction,

System Watson will still not let us go.

Even if we do have all the evidence, as we surely will by this point in the process,

might still theorize before the

evidence, in letting our experience and our

notion of what is and is not possible color

how we see and apply that evidence. It’s

Holmes disregarding the signs in “Silver

Blaze” that would point him in the right

direction because he doesn’t consider it

possible that the horse could remain

undetected. It’s Watson disregarding the

roof as an option for entrance because he

doesn’t consider it possible that someone

could enter a room in that fashion. We

might have all the evidence, but that

doesn’t mean when we reason, we’ll take

into account that all of the evidence is

objective, intact, and in front of us.

But Holmes, as we know, does manage

to catch and correct his error—or have it

caught for him, with the failure of the

horse to materialize. And as soon as he

allows that improbable possibility to

become possible, his entire evaluation of

the case and the evidence changes and

falls into place. And off he and Watson go

to find the horse and save the day.

Likewise, Watson is able to correct his

incomprehension when prompted to do so.

Once Holmes reminds him that however

improbable something may be, it must still

be considered, he right away comes up

with the alternative that fits the evidence

—an alternative that just a moment ago he

had dismissed entirely.

The improbable is not yet impossible.

As we deduce, we are too prone to that

satisficing

tendency,

stopping

when

something is good enough. Until we have

exhausted the possibilities and are sure

that we have done so, we aren’t home

clear. We must learn to stretch our

experience, to go beyond our initial

instinct. We must learn to look for

evidence

that

both

confirms

and

disconfirms and, most important, we must

try to look beyond the perspective that is

the all too natural one to take: our own.

We must, in short, go back to that CRT

and its steps; reflect on what our minds

want to do; inhibit what doesn’t make

sense (here, asking whether something is

truly impossible or merely unlikely); and

edit our approach accordingly. We won’t

always have a Holmes prompting us to do

so, but that doesn’t mean we can’t prompt

ourselves, through that very mindfulness

that we’ve been cultivating. While we

may still be tempted to act first and think

later, to dismiss options before we’ve

even considered them, we can at least

recognize the general concept: think first,

act later, and try our utmost to approach

every decision with a fresh mind.

The necessary elements are all there (at

least if you’ve done your observational

and imaginative work). The trick is in

what you do with them. Are you using all

available evidence, and not just what you

happen to remember or think of or

encounter? Are you giving it all the same

weight, so that you are truly able to sift the

crucial from the incidental instead of

being swayed by some other, altogether

irrelevant factors? Are you laying each

piece out in a logical sequence, where

each step implies the next and each factor

is taken to its conclusion, so that you don’t

fall victim to the mistake of thinking

you’ve thought it through when you’ve

done no such thing? Are you considering

all logical paths—even those that may

seem to you to be impossible? And

finally: are you focused and motivated?

Do you remember what the problem was

that got you there in the first place—or

have you been tempted off course, or off

to some other problem, without really

knowing how or why?

I first read Sherlock Holmes in Russian

because that was the language of my

childhood and of all of my childhood

books. Think back to the clues I’ve left for

you. I’ve told you that my family is

Russian, and that both my sister and I

were born in the Soviet Union. I’ve told

you that the stories were read to me by my

dad. I’ve told you that the book in question

was old—so old that I wondered if his

dad had, in turn, read it to him. In what

other language could it have possibly

been, once you see everything laid out

together? But did you stop to consider that

as you were seeing each piece of

information separately? Or did it not even

cross your mind because of its . . .

improbability? Because Holmes is just so,

well, English?

It doesn’t matter that Conan Doyle

wrote in English and that Holmes himself

deeply

ingrained

the

consciousness of the English language. It

doesn’t matter that I now read and write in

English just as well as I ever did in

Russian. It doesn’t matter that you may

have never encountered a Russian

Sherlock Holmes or even considered the

likelihood of his existence. All that

matters is what the premises are and

where they take you if you let them unwind

to their logical conclusion, whether or not

that is the place that your mind had been

gearing to go.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“ ‘Elementary,’ said he.” “I smoked

several pipes over them, trying to

separate those which were crucial from

others which were merely incidental.”

from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes,

“The Crooked Man,” p. 138.

“Every instinct that I possess cries out

against it.” from The Return of Sherlock

Holmes, “The Adventure of the Abbey

Grange,” p. 1158.

“It is one of those cases where the art

of the reasoner should be used rather for

the sifting of details . . .” “I confess that

any theories which I had formed from the

newspaper

reports

were

entirely

erroneous.”

from The Memoirs of

Sherlock Holmes, “Silver Blaze,” p. 1.

“How often have I said to you that

when

you

have

eliminated

the

impossible, whatever remains, however

improbable, must be the truth?” from The

Sign of Four, chapter 6: Sherlock Holmes

Gives a Demonstration, p. 41.

CHAPTER SIX

Maintaining the Brain Attic:

Education Never Stops

A lodger’s behavior has been markedly

unusual. His landlady, Mrs. Warren,

hasn’t seen him a single time over a

period often days. He remains always in

his room—save for the first evening of his

stay, when he went out and returned late at

night—pacing back and forth, day in, day

out. What’s more, when he needs

something, he prints a single word on a

scrap of paper and leaves it outside: SOAP.

MATCH. DAILY GAZZETTE . Mrs. Warren is

alarmed. She feels that something must be

wrong. And so she sets off to consult

Sherlock Holmes.

At first, Holmes has little interest in the

case. A mysterious lodger hardly seems

worth investigating. But little by little, the

details begin to grow intriguing. First,

there is the business of the printed words.

Why not write them normally instead?

Why choose such a cumbersome, unnatural

all-caps means of communication? Then

there is the cigarette, which Mrs. Warren

has helpfully brought along: while the

landlady has assured Holmes that the

mystery man has a beard and mustache,

Holmes asserts that only a clean-shaven

man could have smoked the cigarette in

question. Still, it is not much to go on, so

the detective tells Mrs. Warren to report

back “if anything fresh occurs.”

And something does occur. The

following morning, Mrs. Warren returns to

Baker

Street

with

the

following

exclamation: “It’s a police matter, Mr.

Holmes! I’ll have no more of it!” Mr.

Warren, the landlady’s husband, has been

attacked by two men, who put a coat over

his head and threw him into a cab, only to

release him, roughly an hour later. Mrs.

Warren blames the lodger and resolves to

have him out that very day.

Not so fast, says Holmes. “Do nothing

rash. I begin to think that this affair may be

very much more important than appeared

at first sight. It is clear now that some

danger is threatening your lodger. It is

equally clear that his enemies, lying in

wait for him near your door, mistook your

husband for him in the foggy morning light.

On discovering their mistake they released

him.”

That afternoon, Holmes and Watson

travel to Great Orme Street, to glimpse the

identity of the guest whose presence has

caused such a stir. Soon enough, they see

her—for it is, in fact, a she. Holmes’s

conjecture had been correct: a substitution

of lodger has been made. “A couple seek

refuge in London from a very terrible and

instant danger. The measure of that danger

is the rigour of their precautions,” Holmes

explains to Watson.

“The man, who has some work which he

must do, desires to leave the woman in

absolute safety while he does it. It is not

an easy problem, but he solved it in an

original fashion, and so effectively that

her presence was not even known to the

landlady who supplies her with food. The

printed messages, as is now evident, were

to prevent her sex being discovered by her

writing. The man cannot come near the

woman, or he will guide their enemies to

her. Since he cannot communicate with her

direct, he has recourse to the agony

column of a paper. So far all is clear.”

But to what end? Watson wants to

know. Why the secrecy and the danger?

Holmes presumes that the matter is one of

life and death. The attack on Mr. Warren,

the lodger’s look of horror when she

suspects someone might be looking at her,

everything points to a sinister cast.

Why, then, asks Watson, should Holmes

continue to investigate? He has solved

Mrs. Warren’s case—and the landlady

herself would like nothing more than to

force the lodger out of the boardinghouse.

Why involve himself further, especially if

the case is as risky as it sounds? It would

be easy enough to leave and let events

take their course. “What have you to gain

from it?” he asks the detective.

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

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

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

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

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,

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,

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.

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

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)

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

“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

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.

The greats don’t become complacent.

And that, in a nutshell, is Holmes’s secret.

Even though he doesn’t need anyone to

walk him through the scientific method of

the mind—he may as well have invented

the

thing—he

nevertheless

keeps

challenging himself to learn more, to do

things better, to improve, to tackle a case

or an angle or an approach that he has

never seen in the past. Part of this goes

back to his constant enlistment of Watson,

who challenges him, stimulates him, and

forces him to never take his prowess for

granted. And another part goes to the

choice

the

cases

themselves.

Remember, Holmes doesn’t take on just

any case. He takes on only those that

interest him. It’s a tricky moral code. He

doesn’t take his cases merely to reduce

crime but to challenge some aspect of his

thinking. The commonplace criminal need

not apply.

But either way, whether in cultivating

Watson’s companionship or in choosing

the harder, more exceptional case over the

easier one, the message is the same: keep

feeding the need to learn and to improve.

At the end of “The Red Circle” Holmes

finds himself face-to-face with Inspector

Gregson, who turns out to have been

investigating the very case that Holmes

decides to pursue after his initial work is

done. Gregson is perplexed to the

extreme. “But what I can’t make head or

tail of, Mr. Holmes, is how on earth you

got yourself mixed up in the matter,” he

says.

Holmes’s

response

simple.

“Education, Gregson, education. Still

seeking knowledge at the old university.”

The complexity and unrelatedness of this

second crime do the opposite of deterring

him. They engage him and invite him to

learn more.

In a way, that, too, is a habit, of never

saying no to more knowledge, as scary or

as complicated as it may be. The case in

question is “a specimen of the tragic and

grotesque,” as Holmes says to Watson.

And as such, it is well worthy of pursuit.

We, too, must resist the urge to pass on

a difficult case, or to give in to the

comfort of knowing we’ve already solved

a crime, already accomplished a difficult

task. Instead, we have to embrace the

challenging, even when it is far easier not

to. Only by doing so can we continue

throughout our lives to reap the benefits of

Holmesian thinking.

The Perils of Overconfidence

But how do we make sure we don’t fall

victim to overly confident thinking,

thinking that forgets to challenge itself on

a regular basis? No method is foolproof.

In fact, thinking it foolproof is the very

thing that might trip us up. Because our

habits have become invisible to us,

because we are no longer learning

actively and it doesn’t seem nearly as hard

to think well as it once did, we tend to

forget how difficult the process once was.

We take for granted the very thing we

should value. We think we’ve got it all

under control, that our habits are still

mindful, our brains still active, our minds

still constantly learning and challenged—

especially since we’ve worked so hard to

get there—but we have instead replaced

one, albeit far better, set of habits with

another. In doing so we run the risk of

falling prey to those two great slayers of

success:

complacency

and

overconfidence. These are powerful

enemies indeed. Even to someone like

Sherlock Holmes.

Consider for a moment “The Yellow

Face,” one of the rare cases where

Holmes’s theories turn out to be

completely wrong. In the story, a man

named Grant Munro approaches Holmes

to uncover the cause of his wife’s bizarre

behavior. A cottage on the Munros’

property has recently acquired new

tenants, and strange ones at that. Mr.

Munro glimpses one of its occupants and

remarks that “there was something

unnatural and inhuman about the face.”

The very sight of it chills him.

But even more surprising than the

mystery tenants is his wife’s response to

their arrival. She leaves the house in the

middle of the night, lying about her

departure, and then visits the cottage the

next day, extracting a promise from her

husband that he will not try to pursue her

inside. When she goes a third time, Munro

follows, only to find the place deserted.

But in the same room where he earlier

saw the chilling face, he finds a

photograph of his wife.

What ever is going on? “There’s

blackmail in it, or I am much mistaken,”

proclaims Holmes. And the blackmailer?

“The creature who lives in the only

comfortable room in the place and has her

photograph above his fireplace. Upon my

word, Watson, there is something very

attractive about that livid face at the

window, and I would not have missed the

case for worlds.”

Watson is intrigued at these tidbits.

“You have a theory, then?” he asks.

“Yes, a provisional one,” Holmes is

quick to reply. “But,” he adds, “I shall be

surprised if it does not turn out to be

correct. This woman’s first husband is in

that cottage.”

But this provisional theory proves

incorrect. The occupant of the cottage is

not Mrs. Munro’s first husband at all, but

her daughter, a daughter of whose

existence neither Mr. Munro nor Holmes

had any prior knowledge. What had

appeared to be blackmail is instead

simply the money that enabled the

daughter and the nanny to make the

passage from America to England. And

the face that had seemed so unnatural and

inhuman was that way because it was,

indeed, just that. It was a mask, designed

to hide the little girl’s black skin. In short,

Holmes’s wonderings have ended up far

from the truth. How could the great

detective have gone so wrong?

Confidence in ourselves and in our skills

allows us to push our limits and achieve

more than we otherwise would, to try

even those borderline cases where a less

confident person would bow out. A bit of

excess confidence doesn’t hurt; a little bit

of above-average sensation can go a long

way toward our psychological well-being

and even our effectiveness at problem

solving. When we’re more confident, we

take on tougher problems than we

otherwise might. We push ourselves

beyond our comfort zone.

But there can be such a thing as being

too certain of yourself: overconfidence,

when confidence trumps accuracy. We

become more confident of our abilities, or

of our abilities as compared with others’,

than

should

be,

given

the

circumstances and the reality. The illusion

of validity grows ever stronger, the

temptation to do things as you do ever

more tempting. This surplus of belief in

ourselves can lead to unpleasant results—

like being so incredibly wrong about a

case when you are usually so incredibly

right, thinking a daughter is a husband, or

a loving mother, a blackmailed wife.

It happens to the best of us. In fact, as

I’ve hinted at already, it happens more to

the best of us. Studies have shown that

with

experience,

overconfidence

increases instead of decreases. The more

you know and the better you are in reality,

the more likely you are to overestimate

your own ability—and underestimate the

force of events beyond your control. In

one study, CEOs were shown to become

more overconfident as they gained

mergers and acquisitions experience: their

estimates of a deal’s value become overly

optimistic (something not seen in earlier

deals). In another, in contributions to

pension plans, overconfidence correlated

with age and education, such that the most

overconfident contributors were highly

educated males nearing retirement. In

research from the University of Vienna,

individuals were found to be, in general,

not overconfident in their risky asset

trades in an experimental market—until,

that

is,

they

obtained

significant

experience with the market in question.

Then levels of overconfidence rose apace.

What’s more, analysts who have been

more accurate at predicting earnings in the

prior four quarters have been shown to be

less accurate in subsequent earnings

predictions, and professional traders tend

to have a higher degree of overconfidence

than students. In fact, one of the best

predictors of overconfidence is power,

which tends to come with time and

experience.

Success breeds overconfidence like

nothing else. When we are nearly always

right, how far is it to saying that we’ll

always be right? Holmes has every reason

to be confident. He is almost invariably

correct, almost invariably better than

anyone else at almost everything, be it

thinking, solving crimes, playing the

violin, or wrestling. And so, he should

rightly fall victim to overconfidence often.

His saving grace, however, or what is

usually his saving grace, is precisely what

we identified in the last section: that he

knows the pitfalls of his mental stature and

fights to avoid them by following his strict

thought guidelines, realizing that he needs

to always keep learning.

For those of us who live off the page,

overconfidence remains a tricky thing. If

we let our guard down for just a moment,

as Holmes does here, it will get us.

Overconfidence causes blindness, and

blindness in turn causes blunders. We

become so enamored of our own skill that

we discredit information that experience

would otherwise tell us shouldn’t be

discredited—even information as glaring

as Watson telling us that our theories are

“all surmise,” as he does in this case—

and we proceed as before. We are blinded

for a moment to everything we know about

not theorizing before the facts, not getting

ahead of ourselves, prying deeper and

observing more carefully, and we get

carried away by the simplicity of our

intuition.

Overconfidence

replaces

dynamic,

active

investigation

with

passive

assumptions about our ability or the

seeming familiarity of our situation. It

shifts our assessment of what leads to

success from the conditional to the

essential. I am skilled enough that I can

beat the environment as easily as I have

been doing. Everything is due to my

ability, nothing due to the fact that the

surroundings just so happened to

provide a good background for my skill

to shine. And so I will not adjust my

behavior.

Holmes fails to consider the possibility

of unknown actors in the drama or

unknown elements in Mrs. Munro’s

biography. He also does not consider the

possibility of disguise (something of a

blind spot for the detective. If you

remember, he, with equal confidence,

does not take it into account in the case of

Silver Blaze; nor does he do so in “The

Man with the Twisted Lip”). Had Holmes

had the same benefit of rereading his own

exploits as we do, he may have learned

that he was prone to this type of error.

Many studies have shown this process

in action. In one classic demonstration,

clinical psychologists were asked to give

confidence judgments on a personality

profile. They were given a case report in

four parts, based on an actual clinical

case, and asked after each part to answer

a series of questions about the patient’s

personality, such as his behavioral

patterns, interests, and typical reactions to

life events. They were also asked to rate

their confidence in their responses. With

each section, background information

about the case increased.

As the psychologists learned more,

their confidence rose—but accuracy

remained at a plateau. Indeed, all but two

of the clinicians became overconfident (in

other words, their confidence outweighed

their accuracy), and while the mean level

of confidence rose from 33 percent at the

first stage to 53 percent by the last, the

accuracy hovered at under 28 percent

(where 20 percent was chance, given the

question setup).

Overconfidence

often

directly

connected

this

kind

underperformance—and at times, to grave

errors in judgment. (Imagine a clinician in

a nonexperimental setting trusting too

much in his however inaccurate judgment.

Is he likely to seek a second opinion or

advise

his

patient

so?)

Overconfident individuals trust too much

in their own ability, dismiss too easily the

influences that they cannot control, and

underestimate others—all of which leads

to them doing much worse than they

otherwise would, be it blundering in

solving a crime or missing a diagnosis.

The sequence can be observed over and

over, even outside of experimental

settings, when real money, careers, and

personal

outcomes

are

stake.

Overconfident traders have been shown to

perform worse than their less confident

peers. They trade more and suffer lower

returns. Overconfident CEOs have been

shown to overvalue their companies and

delay IPOs, with negative effects. They

are also more likely to conduct mergers in

general, and unfavorable mergers in

particular. Overconfident managers have

been shown to hurt their firms’ returns.

And overconfident detectives have been

shown to blemish their otherwise pristine

record through an excess of self-

congratulation.

Something about success has a tendency

to bring about an end to that very essential

process

constant,

never-ending

education—unless the tendency is actively

resisted, and then resisted yet again.

There’s nothing quite like victory to cause

us to stop questioning and challenging

ourselves in the way that is essential for

Holmesian thinking.

Learning to Spot the Signs of

Overconfidence

Perhaps

the

best

remedy

for

overconfidence is knowing when it is

most likely to strike. Holmes, for one,

knows how liable past success and

experience are to cause a blunder in

thought. It is precisely this knowledge that

lets him lay his master trap for the villain

at the heart of the tragedies in The Hound

of the Baskervilles. When the suspect

learns that Sherlock Holmes has arrived at

the scene, Watson worries that the

knowledge will prove to make his capture

all the more difficult: “I am sorry that he

has seen you,” he tells Holmes. But

Holmes is not so sure that it’s a bad thing.

“And so was I at first,” he responds. But

now he realizes that the knowledge, “may

drive him to desperate measures at once.

Like most clever criminals, he may be too

confident in his own cleverness and

imagine that he has completely deceived

us.”

Holmes knows that the successful

criminal is likely to fall victim to his very

success. He knows to watch out for the

red flag of cleverness that thinks itself too

clever,

thereby

underestimating

its

opponents while overestimating its own

strength. And he uses that knowledge in

his capture of the villain on multiple

occasions—not just at Baskerville Hall.

Spotting

overconfidence,

the

elements that lead to it, in others is one

thing; identifying it in ourselves is

something else entirely, and far more

difficult.

Hence

Holmes’s

Norbury

blunders. Luckily for us, however,

psychologists

have

made

excellent

headway

identifying

where

overconfidence most often lies in wait.

Four sets of circumstances tend to

predominate. First, overconfidence is

most common when facing difficulty: for

instance, when we have to make a

judgment on a case where there’s no way

of knowing all the facts. This is called the

hard-easy

effect.

tend

under confident on easy problems and

over confident on difficult ones. That

means that we underestimate our ability to

do well when all signs point to success,

and we overestimate it when the signs

become much less favorable, failing to

adjust enough for the change in external

circumstances. For instance, in something

known as the choice-50 (C50) task,

individuals must choose between two

alternatives and then state how confident

they are in their choice, between 0.5 and

1. Repeatedly, researchers have found that

as the difficulty of the judgment increases,

the mismatch between confidence and

accuracy (i.e., overconfidence) increases

dramatically.

One domain where the hard-easy effect

is prevalent is in the making of future

predictions—a task that is nothing if not

difficult (it is, as a matter of fact,

impossible). The impossibility, however,

doesn’t stop people from trying, and from

becoming a bit too confident in their

predictions

based

their

own

perceptions and experience. Consider the

stock market. It’s impossible to actually

predict the movement of a particular

stock. Sure, you might have experience

and

even

expertise—but

you

are

nevertheless trying to predict the future. Is

it such a surprise, then, that the same

people who at times have outsized success

also have outsized failures? The more

successful you are, the more likely you are

to attribute everything to your ability—and

not to the luck of the draw, which, in all

future predictions, is an essential part of

the equation. (It’s true of all gambling and

betting, really, but the stock market makes

it somewhat easier to think you have an

inside, experiential edge.)

Second, overconfidence increases with

familiarity. If I’m doing something for the

first time, I will likely be cautious. But if I

do it many times over, I am increasingly

likely to trust in my ability and become

complacent, even if the landscape should

change (overconfident drivers, anyone?).

And when we are dealing with familiar

tasks, we feel somehow safer, thinking

that we don’t have the same need for

caution as we would when trying

something new or that we haven’t seen

before. In a classic example, Ellen Langer

found that people were more likely to

succumb to the illusion of control (a side

of overconfidence whereby you think you

control the environment to a greater extent

than you actually do) if they played a

lottery that was familiar versus one that

was unknown.

It’s like the habit formation that we’ve

been talking about. Each time we repeat

something, we become better acquainted

with it and our actions become more and

more automatic, so we are less likely to

put adequate thought or consideration into

what we’re doing. Holmes isn’t likely to

pull a Yellow Face-style mess-up on his

early cases; it’s telling that the story takes

place later in his career, and that it seems

to resemble a more traditional blackmail

case, the likes of which he has

experienced many times before. And

Holmes knows well the danger of

familiarity, at least when it comes to

others. In “The Adventure of the Veiled

Lodger,” he describes the experience of a

couple who had fed a lion for too long. “It

was deposed at the inquest that there has

been some signs that the lion was

dangerous, but, as usual, familiarity begat

contempt, and no notice was taken of the

fact.” All Holmes has to do is apply that

logic to himself.

Third, overconfidence increases with

information. If I know more about

something, I am more likely to think I can

handle

it,

even

the

additional

information doesn’t actually add to my

knowledge in a significant way. This is

the exact effect we observed earlier in the

chapter with the clinicians who were

making judgments on a case: the more

information they had about the patient’s

background, the more confident they were

in the accuracy of the diagnosis, yet the

less warranted was that confidence. As

for Holmes, he has detail upon detail

when he travels to Norbury But all the

details are filtered through the viewpoint

of Mr. Munro, who is himself unaware of

the most important ones. And yet

everything seems so incredibly plausible.

Holmes’s theory certainly covers all of

the facts—the known facts, that is. But

Holmes

doesn’t

calibrate

for

the

possibility that, despite the magnitude of

the information, it continues to be

selective information. He lets the sheer

amount overwhelm what should be a note

of caution: that he still knows nothing from

the main actor who could provide the most

meaningful information, Mrs. Munro. As

ever, quantity does not equal quality.

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

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,

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

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

t h e 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

decl i ne that has already occurred. I

place

that

emphasis

out

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

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

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?

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

s ur e 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 embark 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.

As for the stick itself, here, too, the

good doctor has not been as careful in his

observations as he should have been. First

off, he merely glances at it, whereas

Holmes “examined it for a few minutes

with his naked eyes. Then with an

expression of interest he laid down his

cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the

window, he looked over it again with a

convex lens.” Closer scrutiny, from

multiple angles and multiple approaches.

Not as fast as the Watson method, to be

sure, but much more thorough. And while

it may well be true that such care will not

be rewarded with any new details, you

can never know in advance, so if you are

to truly observe, you can never afford to

forego it. (Though, of course, our own

window and convex lens may be

metaphorical, they nevertheless imply a

degree

closer

scrutiny,

scrupulousness and sheer time spent in

contemplation of the problem.)

Watson notes the stick’s size and the

worn-down bottom, true. But he fails to

see that there are teeth marks plainly

visible on its middle. Teeth marks on a

stick? It’s hardly a leap of faith to take that

observation as implying the existence of a

dog who has carried the stick, and carried

it often, behind his master (as Holmes, in

fact, does). That, too, is part of the

observation, part of the full story of Dr.

Mortimer. What’s more, as Holmes points

out to his friend, the size of the dog’s jaw

is evident from the space between the

marks, making it possible to envision just

what type of dog it might have been. That,

of course, would be jumping ahead to

deduction—but it wouldn’t be possible at

all without recognizing the necessary

details and mentally noting their potential

significance for your overall goal.

3. Imagine—Remembering to Claim the

Space You May Not Think You Need

After observation comes that creative

space, that time to reflect and explore the

ins and outs of your attic called

imagination. It’s that break of the mind,

that three-pipe problem, that violin

interlude or opera or concerto or trip to

the art museum, that walk, that shower,

that who knows what that forces you to

take a step back from the immediacy of the

situation before you once more move

forward.

We need to give Watson some credit

here. He doesn’t exactly have time to take

a break, as Holmes puts him on the spot,

challenging him to apply the detective’s

methods to inferring what he can about the

implications of C.C.H. standing for

Charing Cross Hospital instead of for

Something Hunt. Watson can hardly be

expected to break out the cigarettes or

brandy.

And yet Watson could do something a

little

less

extreme

but

far

appropriate to a problem of far lesser

magnitude than solving a full crime. After

all, not everything is a three-pipe

problem. It may be enough to take a more

metaphorical step back. To distance

yourself mentally, to pause and reflect and

reconfigure and reintegrate in a much

shorter time frame.

But Watson does no such thing. He

doesn’t even give himself time to think

after Holmes prompts him to do so, saying

that he can only draw “the obvious

conclusions” but can’t see anything

further.

Contrast the approach that Watson and

Holmes take. Watson goes right to it: from

observation of the heft and shape of the

stick

image

old-fashioned

practitioner, from C.C.H. to Something

Hunt, from worn-down iron ferrule to

country practitioner, from Charing Cross

to a move from town to country, and

nothing more besides. Holmes, on the

other hand, spends quite a bit more time in

between

his

observations

and

his

conclusions. Recall that first, he listens to

Watson; next, he examines the stick; then,

he once more speaks with Watson; and

finally, when he begins to list his own

conclusions, he does not do so all at once.

Rather, he asks himself questions,

questions that suggest a number of

answers, before settling on a single

possibility.

looks

different

permutations—could Dr. Mortimer have

been in a well-established London

practice? A house surgeon? A house

physician? A senior student?—and then

considers which would be more likely in

light of all of the other observations. He

doesn’t deduce. Rather, he reflects and he

plays around with options. He questions

and he considers. Only after will he start

to form his conclusions.

4. Deduce— Only from What You’ve

Observed, and Nothing More

From a walking stick to a “successful,

elderly medical man, well-esteemed,” a

“country practitioner who does a lot of his

visiting on foot” and who has “given some

surgical assistance” to a local hunt (for

which he has received said stick), if

you’re Watson. And from that same stick

to a former Charing Cross Hospital

“house-surgeon or house-physician,” a

“young fellow under thirty, amiable,

unambitious, absent-minded, and the

possessor of a favourite dog”—nay, a

curly-haired spaniel—who received the

stick on the occasion of the change from

Charing Cross to the country, if you’re

Holmes. Same starting point, altogether

different deductions (with the sole

intersection of a country practitioner who

walks a great deal). How do two people

come out so differently when faced with

an identical problem?

Watson

has

made

two

correct

deductions: that the stick belongs to a

country

practitioner

and

that

practitioner does much of his visiting on

foot. But why elderly and well esteemed?

Whence came this picture of the

conscientious

and

dedicated

family

practitioner?

Not

from

any

actual

observation. It came instead from a

fabrication of Watson’s mind, of his

immediate reaction that the stick was just

such

“as

the

old-fashioned

family

practitioner used to carry—dignified,

solid, and reassuring.”

The stick itself is no such thing, other

than solid. It is just an object that carries

certain signs. But to Watson, it at once has

a story. It has brought up memories that

have little bearing on the case at hand and

instead are stray pieces of attic furniture

that have become activated by virtue of

some associative memory processes of

which Watson himself is hardly aware.

Ditto the local hunt. So focused has

Watson become on his imagined solid and

dignified country practitioner that it seems

only logical to him that the walking stick

was the gift of a hunt, to whose members

Dr. Mortimer has, naturally, given some

surgical

assistance.

Watson

doesn’t

actually have any solid, logical steps to

show for these deductions. They stem

from his selective focus and the doctor

that exists in his imagination. As a

reassuring and elderly family man, Dr.

Mortimer would naturally be both a

member of a local hunt and ever ready to

give assistance. Surgical? But of course.

Someone of such stature and refinement

must clearly be a surgical man.

Watson fails to note entirely the

M.R.C.S. appended to Mortimer’s name

(something that the man himself will later

point out in correcting Holmes when the

latter addresses him as Doctor: “Mister,

sir, Mister—a humble M.R.C.S.”)—an

addition that belies the stature Mortimer

has assumed in Watson’s hyperactive

mind. And he makes no note, as we’ve

already discussed, of the sheer fact of the

stick having been left in the visiting room

—minus so much as a visiting card. His

memory in this instance is as mindlessly

selective as his attention—after all, he did

read the M.R.C.S. when he first looked at

the stick; it was just overshadowed

completely by the details his mind then

supplied of its own accord based on the

nature of the stick itself. And he did

recognize at the very beginning that the

stick’s owner had left it behind on the

prior evening, but that, too, slipped his

mind as an observation or fact worthy of

note.

Holmes’s version, in contrast, comes

from an entirely different thought process,

one that is fully aware of itself and of its

information, that seeks to incorporate all

evidence and not just selective bits, and to

use that evidence as a whole, rather than

focusing on some parts but not others,

coloring some more brightly, and others in

a paler hue.

First, the man’s age. “You will

observe,” he tells Watson, after having

convinced the doctor that the most likely

meaning of C.C.H. is Charing Cross

Hospital and not Something Hunt (after

all, we are talking about a doctor; isn’t it

most logical that he would receive a

presentation from a hospital and not a

hunt? Which of the two H s is the more

likely, given the objective information and

not any subjective version thereof?), “that

he could not have been on the staff of the

hospital, since only a man well-

established in a London practice could

hold such a position, and such a one

would not drift to the country.” (We know,

of course, that drift to the country the man

did, based on the indications of the stick,

the very ones that Watson so eagerly noted

and grasped.) Fair enough. Someone so

well established as to be a staff member

would hardly be expected to up and leave

—unless, of course, there were some

unforeseen circumstances. But there are no

such circumstances that one could grasp

from the evidence of the stick, so that is

not an explanation to be considered from

the

available

evidence

(indeed,

considering it would entail the precise

fallacy that Watson commits in creating

his version of the doctor, a story told by

the mind and not based in objective

observation).

Who, then? Holmes reasons it out: “If

he was in the hospital and yet not on the

staff he could only have been a house-

surgeon or a house-physician—little more

than a senior student. And he left five

years ago—the date is on the stick.”

Hence, “a young fellow under thirty” to

Watson’s middle-aged practitioner. Note

also that while Holmes is certain about the

age—after all, he has exhausted all

options of his former position, until only

one reasonable age alternative remains

(remember: “It may well be that several

explanations remain, in which case one

tries to test after test until one or other of

them has a convincing amount of support”)

—he does not go as far as Watson in

necessitating that the man in question be a

surgeon. He may just as well be a

physician. There is zero evidence to point

in either direction, and Holmes does not

deduce past where the evidence leads.

That would be just as fallacious as not

deducing far enough.

What of the man’s personality? “As to

the adjectives,” says Holmes, “I said, if I

remember right, amiable, unambitious, and

absent-minded.” (He does remember

right.) How could he have possibly

deduced these characteristics? Not, it

turns out, in the mindless fashion that

Watson deduced his own set of attributes.

“It is my experience,” says Holmes, “that

it is only an amiable man in this world

who receives testimonials, only an

unambitious one who abandons a London

career for the country, and only an absent-

minded one who leaves his stick and not

his visiting-card after waiting an hour in

your room.” Each trait emerges directly

from one of the observations (filtered

through the time and space of imagination,

even if only for a span of some minutes)

that Holmes has made earlier.

Objective fact, to a consideration of

multiple possibilities, to a narrowing of

the most likely ones. No extraneous

details, no holes filled in by an all too

willing imagination. Scientific deduction

at its best.

Finally, why does Holmes give Dr.

Mortimer a dog, and a very specific one at

that? We’ve already discussed the teeth

marks that Watson has missed. But the

marks—or rather, the distance between

them—are quite specific, “too broad in

my opinion for a terrier and not broad

enough for a mastiff.” Holmes may well

have gotten to a curly-haired spaniel on

his own, following that logical train, but

he has no opportunity to do so, as the dog

in question appears at that moment

alongside its owner. And there, the

deductive trail comes to an end. But

wasn’t it a clear one as far as it went?

Didn’t it make you want to say,

Elementary? How could I not have seen

that myself? That is exactly what

deduction at its best, of course, is meant to

do.

5. Learn— From Your Failures Just as

You Do from Your Successes

In observing Watson’s fallacies in this

particular instance, Holmes learns ever

more about the pitfalls of the thought

process, those moments when it is easy to

go astray—and precisely in which

direction the false path usually lies. From

this encounter, he will take away the

power of stereotype activation and the

overwhelming influence an improper

initial frame can have on the inferences

that follow, as well as the error that is

introduced when one fails to consider

every observation and focuses instead on

the most salient, recent, or otherwise

accessible ones. Not that he doesn’t know

both of these things already, but each time

serves as a reminder, a reinforcement, a

new manifestation in a different context

that ensures that his knowledge never goes

stale.

And if Watson is paying close attention,

he should take away much the same things,

learning from Holmes’s corrections to

identify those moments where he went

wrong and to learn how better to go right

the next time around. Alas, he chooses the

other route, focusing instead on Holmes’s

statement that he is not “entirely wrong in

this instance. The man is certainly a

country practitioner. And he walks a good

deal.” Instead of trying to see why it was

precisely that he got these two details

right and the rest altogether wrong,

Watson says, “Then I was right,”

forsaking the opportunity to learn, and

instead

focusing

once

only

selectively on the available observations.

Education is all well and good, but it

needs to be taken from the level of theory

to that of practice, over and over and over

—lest it begin to gather dust and let out

that stale, rank smell of the attic whose

door has remained unopened for years.

Any time we get the urge to take it easy,

we’d do well to bring to mind the image

of the rusted razor blade from The Valley

of Fear: “A long series of sterile weeks

lay behind us, and here at last was a fitting

object for those remarkable powers

which, like all special gifts, become

irksome to their owner when they are not

in use. That razor brain blunted and rusted

with inaction.” Picture that rusted, blunted

razor, the yucky orange specks peeling off,

the dirt and decay so palpable that you

don’t even want to reach out to remove it

from its place of neglect, and remember

that

even

when

everything

seems

wonderful and there are no major choices

to be made or thoughts to be thought, the

blade has to remain in use. Exercising our

minds even on the unimportant things will

help keep them sharp for the important

ones.

Time to Keep a Diary

Let’s take a quick break from Mr.

Mortimer. A good friend of mine—I’ll

call her Amy—has long been a migraine

sufferer. Everything will be going just fine

when out of the blue, it hits her. Once, she

thought she was dying, another time, that

she’d gotten the terrible Norovirus that

had been going around. It took some years

for her to learn to discern the first signs

and run for the nearest dark room and a

nice dose of Imitrex before the I’m-about-

to-die/I-have-a-horrible-stomach-flu

panic set in. But eventually, she could

more or less manage. Except when the

migraines struck several times a week,

putting her behind work, writing, and

everything else in a steady stream of pain.

Or when they came at those inopportune

times when she had neither a dark, quiet

room nor medicine to fall back on. She

soldiered on.

A year or so ago, Amy switched

primary care doctors. During the usual

getting-to-know-you chat, she complained,

as always, about her migraines. But

instead of nodding sympathetically and

prescribing more Imitrex, as every doctor

before her had done, this particular

physician asked her a question. Had Amy

ever kept a migraine diary?

Amy was confused. Was she supposed

to write from the migraine’s point of

view? Try to see through the pain and

describe her symptoms for posterity? No.

It was much simpler. The doctor gave her

a stack of preprinted sheets, with fields

like Time Started/Ended, Warning Signs,

Hours of Sleep, what she’d eaten that day,

and the lot. Each time Amy had a

migraine,

she

was

fill

retroactively, as best she could. And she

was to keep doing it until she had a dozen

or so entries.

Amy called me afterward to tell me just

what she thought of the new doctor’s

approach: the whole exercise was rather

absurd. She knew what caused her

migraines, she told me confidently. It was

stress and changes of weather. But she

said she’d give it a shot, if only for a

laugh and despite her reservations. I

laughed right along with her.

I wouldn’t be telling the story now if

the results didn’t shock us both. Did

caffeine ever cause migraines? the doctor

had

asked

Amy

their

initial

conversation. Alcohol? Amy had shaken

her head knowingly. Absolutely not. No

connection whatsoever. Except that’s not

the story the migraine diary told. Strong

black tea, especially later in the day, was

almost always on the list of what she’d

eaten before an attack. More than a glass

of wine, also a frequent culprit. Hours of

sleep? Surely that wasn’t important. But

there it was. The number of hours listed

on those days when she found it hard to

move tended to be far below the usual

amount. Cheese (cheese? seriously?), also

on the list. And, yes, she had been right,

too. Stress and changes in weather were

surefire triggers.

Only, Amy hadn’t been right entirely.

She had been like Watson, insisting that

she’d been correct, when she’d been

correct only “to that extent.” She’d just

never taken notice of anything else, so

salient were those two factors. And she

certainly never drew the connections that

were, in retrospect, all too apparent.

Knowing is only part of the battle, of

course. Amy still gets migraines more

often than she would like. But at the very

least, she can control some of the trigger

factors much better than she ever could

before. And she can spot symptoms

earlier, too, especially if she’s knowingly

done something she shouldn’t, like have

some wine and cheese . . . on a rainy day.

Then she can sometimes sneak in the

medicine before the headache sets in for

good, and at least for the moment she has

it beat.

Not everyone suffers from migraines. But

everyone makes choices and decisions,

thinks through problems and dilemmas, on

a daily basis. So here’s what I recommend

to speed up our learning and help us

integrate all of those steps that Holmes has

so graciously shown us: we should keep a

decision diary. And I don’t mean

metaphorically.

mean

actually,

physically, writing things down, just as

Amy had to do with her migraines and

triggers.

When we make a choice, solve a

problem, come to a decision, we can

record the process in a single place. We

can put here a list of our observations, to

make sure we remember them when the

time comes; we can include, too, our

thoughts, our inferences, our potential

lines of inquiry, things that intrigued us.

But we can even take it a step further.

Record what we ended up doing. Whether

we had any doubts or reservations or

considered other options (and in all cases,

we’d do well to be specific and say what

those were). And then, we can revisit each

entry to write down how it went. Was I

happy? Did I wish I’d done something

differently? Is there anything that is

clear to me in retrospect that wasn’t

before?

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

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

they

start

firing

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?”

f r o m 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

undisputed

authority

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

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

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

not

yet

impossible—but

requires

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 black 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.

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.

creature

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

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”

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

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

comparati ve 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

screen. 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

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

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

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

i n The Sign of Four, when Holmes sets

out to learn the particulars of the steam

l a unc h 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

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.

Consider “The Adventure of the Abbey

Grange,” when Holmes decides at the last

moment not to give up the suspect to

Scotland Yard. “No I couldn’t do it,

Watson,” he says to the doctor.

“Once that warrant was made out, nothing

on earth would save him. Once or twice in

my career I feel that I have done more real

harm by my discovery of the criminal than

ever he had done by his crime. I have

learned caution now, and I had rather play

tricks with the law of England than with

my own conscience. Let us know a little

more before we act.”

You don’t mindlessly follow the same

preplanned set of actions that you had

determined

early

on.

Circumstances

change, and with them so does the

approach. You have to think before you

leap to act, or to judge someone, as the

case may be. Everyone makes mistakes,

but some may not be mistakes as such,

when taken in context of the time and the

situation. (After all, we wouldn’t make a

choice if we didn’t think it the right one at

the time.) And if you do decide to keep to

the same path, despite the changes, at least

you will choose the so-called nonoptimal

route mindfully, and with full knowledge

of why you’re doing it. And you will learn

to always “know a little more” before you

act. As William James puts it, “We all,

scientists and non-scientists, live on some

inclined plane of credulity. The plane tips

one way in one man, another way in

another; and may he whose plane tips in

no way be the first to cast a stone!”

Acknowledging Limitations

The hunter knows his weak spots. If he has

a blind side, he asks someone to cover it;

or he makes sure it is not exposed, if no

one is available. If he tends to overshoot,

he knows that, too. Whatever the

handicap, he must take it into account if he

is to emerge successful from the hunt.

In “The Disappearance of Lady Frances

Carfax,” Holmes realizes where the

eponymous lady has disappeared to only

when it is almost too late to save her.

“Should you care to add the case to your

annals, my dear Watson,” he says, once

they return home, having beaten the clock

by mere minutes, “it can only be as an

example of that temporary eclipse to

which even the best-balanced mind may

be exposed. Such slips are common to all

mortals, and the greatest is he who can

recognize and repair them. To this

modified credit I may, perhaps, make

some claim.”

The hunter must err before he realizes

where his weakness may lie. The

difference between the successful hunter

and the unsuccessful one isn’t a lack of

error. It is the recognition of error, and the

ability to learn from it and to prevent its

occurrence in the future. We need to

recognize our limitations in order to

overcome them, to know that we are

fallible, and to recognize the fallibility

that we see so easily in others in our own

thoughts and actions. If we don’t, we’ll be

condemned to always believe in fairies—

or to never believe in them, even should

signs point to the need for a more open-

minded consideration.

Cultivating Quiet

A hunter knows when to quiet his mind. If

he allows himself to always take in

everything that is there for the taking, his

senses will become overwhelmed. They

will lose their sharpness. They will lose

their ability to focus on the important signs

and to filter out the less so. For that kind

of vigilance, moments of solitude are

essential.

Watson makes the point succinctly in

The Hound of the Baskervilles, when

Holmes asks to be left alone. His friend

doesn’t complain. “I knew that seclusion

and solitude were very necessary for my

friend in those hours of intense mental

concentration during which he weighed

every particle of evidence, constructed

alternative theories, balanced one against

the other, and made up his mind as to

which points were essential and which

immaterial,” he writes.

The world is a distracting place. It will

never quiet down for you, nor will it leave

you alone of its own accord. The hunter

must seek out his own seclusion and

solitude, his own quietness of mind, his

own space in which to think through his

tactics, his approaches, his past actions,

and his future plans. Without that

occasional silence, there can be little hope

of a successful hunt.

Constant Vigilance

And most of all, a hunter never lets down

his guard, not even when he thinks that no

tiger in its right mind could possibly be

out and about in the heat of the afternoon

sun. Who knows, it might just be the day

that the first-ever black tiger is spotted,

and that tiger may have different hunting

habits than you are used to (isn’t its

camouflage different? wouldn’t it make

sense that it would approach in an

altogether different manner?). As Holmes

warns over and over, it is the least

remarkable crime that is often the most

difficult. Nothing breeds complacency like

routine and the semblance of normality.

Nothing kills vigilance so much as the

commonplace. Nothing kills the successful

hunter like a complacency bred of that

very success, the polar opposite of what

enabled that success to begin with.

Don’t be the hunter who missed his

prey because he thought he’d gotten it all

down so well that he succumbed to

mindless routine and action. Remain ever

mindful of how you apply the rules. Never

stop thinking. It’s like the moment in The

Valley of Fear when Watson says, “I am

inclined to think—” and Holmes cuts him

off in style: “I should do so.”

Could there be a more appropriate image

to that awareness of mind that is the

pinnacle of the Holmesian approach to

thought? A brain, first and foremost, and

in it, the awareness of a hunter. The hunter

who is never just inclined to think, but

who does so, always. For that mindfulness

doesn’t begin or end with the start of each

hunt, the beginning of each new venture or

thought process. It is a constant state, a

well-rehearsed presence of mind even as

he settles down for the night and stretches

his legs in front of the fire.

Learning to think like a hunter will go a

long way toward making sure that we

don’t blind ourselves to the obvious

inconsistencies of fairy land when they

stare us in the face. We shouldn’t rule

them out, but we should be wary—and

know that even if we really want to be the

ones to discover the first real proof of

their existence, that proof may still be in

the future, or nowhere at all; in either

case, the evidence should be treated just

as severely. And we should apply that

same attitude to others and their beliefs.

The way you see yourself matters. View

yourself as a hunter in your own life, and

you may find yourself becoming more able

to hunt properly, in a matter of speaking.

Whether you choose to consider the

possibility of fairies’ existence or not, you

—the hunter you—will have done it

thinkingly.

You

won’t

have

been

unprepared.

In 1983, the tale of the Cottingley Fairies

came to as near an end as it ever would.

than

sixty

years

after

the

photographs first surfaced, seventy-six-

year-old Frances Griffiths made a

confession: the photographs were fake. Or

at least four of them were. The fairies had

been her older cousin’s illustrations,

secured by hat pins to the scenery. And the

evidence of a belly button that Conan

Doyle had thought he’d seen on the goblin

in the original print was actually nothing

more than that—a hat pin. The final

photograph, however, was genuine. Or so

said Frances.

Two weeks later, Elsie Hill (née

Wright) herself came forward. It’s true,

she said, after having held her silence

since the original incident. She had drawn

the fairies in sepia on Windsor and Bristol

board, coloring them in with watercolors

while her parents were out of the house.

She had then fastened them to the ground

with hat pins. The figures themselves had

apparently been traced from the 1915

Princess Mary Gift Book. And that last

picture, that Frances had maintained was

real? Frances wasn’t even there, Elsie

told The Times. “I am very proud of that

one—it was all done with my own

contraption and I had to wait for the

weather to be right to take it,” she said. “I

won’t reveal the secret of that one until the

very last page of my book.”

Alas, the book was never written.

Frances Griffiths died in 1986 and Elsie,

two years later. To this day, there are

those who maintain that the fifth

photograph was genuine. The Cottingley

Fairies just refuse to die.

But maybe, just maybe, Conan Doyle

the hunter would have escaped the same

fate. Had he taken himself (and the girls)

just a bit more critically, pried just a bit

harder, perhaps he could have learned

from his mistakes, as did his creation

when it came to his own vices. Arthur

Conan Doyle may have been a Spiritualist,

but his spirituality failed to take the one

page of Sherlock Holmes that was

nonnegotiable for the taking: mindfulness.

W. H. Auden writes of Holmes,

His attitude towards people and his

technique of observation and deduction

are those of the chemist or physicist. If he

chooses

human

beings

rather

than

inanimate matter as his material, it is

because investigating the inanimate is

unheroically easy since it cannot tell lies,

which human beings can and do, so that in

dealing with them, observation must be

twice as sharp and logic twice as

rigorous.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle valued few

things as highly as he did heroism. And yet

he failed to realize that the animals he was

hunting were just as human as those that he

created. He was not twice as sharp, twice

as logical, twice as rigorous. But perhaps

he could have been, with a little help from

the mindset that he himself created for his

own detective, someone who would

surely have never forgotten that human

beings can and do tell lies, that everyone

can be mistaken and everyone is fallible,

ourselves included.

Conan Doyle could not know where

science was headed. He did the best he

could, and did so within the parameters

that he had set for himself, and which, I

might add, remain to this day. For, unlike

William James’s confident prediction, our

knowledge about the unseen forces that

guide our lives, while light-years further

than Sir Arthur could ever imagine when it

comes to explaining natural phenomena, is

still stuck circa 1900 when it comes to

explaining psychical ones.

But the point is greater than either

Sherlock Holmes or Arthur Conan Doyle

—or, for that matter, Daryl Bem or

William James. We are all limited by our

knowledge and context. And we’d do well

to remember it. Just because we can’t

fathom something doesn’t make it not so.

And just because we screw up for lack of

knowledge doesn’t mean we’ve done so

irredeemably—or that we can’t keep

learning. When it comes to the mind, we

can all be hunters.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“And yet the motives of women are so

inscrutable”

from The

Return

Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the

Second Stain,” p. 1189.

“If the devil did decide to have a hand

in the affairs of men—.” “I knew that

seclusion and solitude were very

necessary for my friend . . .” from The

Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 3: The

Problem, p. 22.

“One realized the red-hot energy that

underlay Holmes’s phlegmatic exterior.”

from His Last Bow, “The Adventure of the

Devil’s Foot,” p. 1392.

“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.” from The Adventures of

Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the

Blue Carbuncle,” p. 158.

“Once that warrant was made out,

nothing on earth could save him.” from

The Return of Sherlock Holmes, “The

Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” p. 1158.

“Should you care to add the case to

your annals, my dear Watson, it can only

be as an example of that temporary

eclipse to which even the best-balanced

mind may be exposed.” from His Last

Bow, “The Disappearance of Lady

Frances Carfax,” p. 342.

“I am inclined to think—.” from The

Valley of Fear , Part One, chapter 1: The

Warning, p. 5.

Postlude

Walter Mischel was nine years old when

he started kindergarten. It wasn’t that his

parents had been negligent in his

schooling. It was just that the boy couldn’t

speak English. It was 1940 and the

Mischels had just arrived in Brooklyn.

They’d been one of the few Jewish

families lucky enough to escape Vienna in

the wake of the Nazi takeover in the spring

of 1938. The reason had as much to do

with luck as with foresight: they had

discovered

certificate

U.S.

citizenship

from

long-since-dead

maternal grandfather. Apparently, he had

obtained it while working in New York

City around 1900, before returning once

more to Europe.

But ask Dr. Mischel to recall his

earliest memories, and chances are that

the first thing he will speak of is not how

the Hitler Youths stepped on his new

shoes on the sidewalks of Vienna. Nor

will it be of how his father and other

Jewish men were dragged from their

apartments and forced to march in the

streets in their pajamas while holding

branches in their hands, in a makeshift

“parade” staged by the Nazis in parody of

the Jewish tradition of welcoming spring.

(His father had polio and couldn’t walk

without his cane. And so, the young

Mischel had to watch as he jerked from

side to side in the procession.) Nor will it

be of the trip from Vienna, the time spent

in London in an uncle’s spare room, the

journey to the United States at the outbreak

of war.

Instead, it will be of the earliest days in

that kindergarten classroom, when little

Walter, speaking hardly a word of

English, was given an IQ test. It should

hardly come as a surprise that he did not

fare well. He was in an alien culture and

taking a test in an alien language. And yet

his teacher was surprised. Or so she told

him. She also told him how disappointed

she was. Weren’t foreigners supposed to

be smart? She’d expected more from him.

Carol Dweck was on the opposite side

of the story. When she was in sixth grade

—also, incidentally, in Brooklyn—she,

too, was given an intelligence test, along

with the rest of her class. The teacher then

proceeded to do something that today

would raise many eyebrows but back then

was hardly uncommon: she arranged the

students in order of score. The “smart”

students were seated closest to the

teachers. And the less fortunate, farther

and farther away. The order was

immutable, and those students who had

fared less than well weren’t even allowed

to perform such basic classroom duties as

washing the blackboard or carrying the

flag to the school assembly. They were to

be reminded constantly that their IQ was

simply not up to par.

Dweck herself was one of the lucky

ones. Her seat: number one. She had

scored highest of all her classmates. And

yet, something wasn’t quite right. She

knew that all it would take was another

test to make her less smart. And could it

be that it was so simple as all that—a

score, and then your intelligence was

marked for good?

Years later, Walter Mischel and Carol

Dweck both found themselves on the

faculty of Columbia University. (As of this

writing, Mischel is still there and Dweck

has moved to Stanford.) Both had become

key players in social and personality

psychology research (though Mischel the

sixteen-years-senior one), and both credit

that early test to their subsequent career

trajectories, their desire to conduct

research into such supposedly fixed things

as personality traits and intelligence,

things that could be measured with a

simple test and, in that measurement,

determine your future.

It was easy enough to see how Dweck

had gotten to that pinnacle of academic

achievement. She was, after all, the

smartest. But what of Mischel? How

could someone whose IQ would have

placed him squarely in the back of

Dweck’s classroom have gone on to

become one of the leading figures in

psychology of the twentieth century, he of

the famous marshmallow studies of self-

control and of an entirely new approach to

looking

personality

and

its

measurement? Something wasn’t quite

right, and the fault certainly wasn’t with

Mischel’s intelligence or his stratospheric

career trajectory.

Sherlock Holmes is a hunter. He knows

that there is nothing too difficult for his

mastery—in fact, the more difficult

something is, the better. And in that

attitude may lie a large portion of his

success, and a large part of Watson’s

failure to follow in his footsteps.

Remember

that

scene

from

“The

Adventure of the Priory School,” where

Watson all but gives up hope at figuring

out what happened to the missing student

and teacher?

“I am at my wit’s end,” he tells Holmes.

But Holmes will have none of it. “Tut,

tut, we have solved worse problems.”

Or, consider Holmes’s response to

Watson when the latter declares a cipher

“beyond human power to penetrate.”

Holmes answers, “Perhaps there are

points

that

have

escaped

your

Machiavellian intellect.” But Watson’s

attitude is surely not helping. “Let us

continue the problem in the light of pure

reason,” he directs him, and goes on,

naturally, to decipher the note.

In a way, Watson has beaten himself in

both cases before he has even started. By

declaring himself at his wit’s end, by

labeling something as beyond human

power, he has closed his mind to the

possibility of success. And that mindset,

as it turns out, is precisely what matters

most—and it’s a thing far more intangible

and unmeasurable than a number on a test.

For many years, Carol Dweck has been

researching exactly what it is that

separates Holmes’s “tut, tut” from

Watson’s “wit’s end,” Walter Mischel’s

success from his supposed IQ. Her

research has been guided by two main

assumptions: IQ cannot be the only way to

measure intelligence, and there might be

more to that very concept of intelligence

than meets the eye.

According to Dweck, there are two

main theories of intelligence: incremental

and entity. If you are an incremental

theorist, you believe that intelligence is

fluid. If you work harder, learn more,

apply yourself better, you will become

smarter. In other words, you dismiss the

notion that something might possibly be

beyond human power to penetrate. You

think that Walter Mischel’s original IQ

score is not only something that should not

be a cause for disappointment but that it

has little bearing on his actual ability and

later performance.

If, on the other hand, you are an entity

theorist, you believe that intelligence is

fixed. Try as you might, you will remain

as smart (or not) as you were before. It’s

just your original luck. This was the

position of Dweck’s sixth-grade teacher—

and of Mischel’s kindergarten one. It

means that once in the back, you’re stuck

in the back. And there’s nothing you can

do about it. Sorry, buddy, luck of the

draw.

In the course of her research, Dweck

has repeatedly found an interesting thing:

how someone performs, especially in

reacting to failure, largely depends on

which of the two beliefs he espouses. An

incremental theorist sees failure as a

learning opportunity; an entity theorist, as

a frustrating personal shortcoming that

cannot be remedied. As a result, while the

former may take something away from the

experience to apply to future situations,

the latter is more likely to write it off

entirely. So basically, how we think of the

world and of ourselves can actually

change how we learn and what we know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 even 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

“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

i n 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 and am incredibly

lucky to have you in my life.

Document Outline

Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Epigraph page
Contents
Prelude
PART ONE - UNDERSTANDING (YOURSELF)
CHAPTER ONE - The Scientific Method of the Mind
CHAPTER TWO - The Brain Attic: What Is It and What’s in There?
PART TWO - FROM OBSERVATION TO IMAGINATION
CHAPTER THREE - Stocking the Brain Attic: The Power of Observation
CHAPTER FOUR - Exploring the Brain Attic: The Value of Creativity and Imagination
PART THREE - THE ART OF DEDUCTION
CHAPTER FIVE - Navigating the Brain Attic: Deduction from the Facts
CHAPTER SIX - Maintaining the Brain Attic: Education Never Stops
PART FOUR - THE SCIENCE AND ART OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Dynamic Attic: Putting It All Together
CHAPTER EIGHT - We’re Only Human
Postlude
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Index