Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

the crucial distinction is between quantity and quality.

What we need to do is allocate our attention mindfully. And mindset is the beginning of that selectivity.

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 up 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.

2. Be Objective

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in action: the fact of observing changes the thing being observed.

psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s theory about believing what we see taken a step further: we believe what we 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.)

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.

Setting your goals beforehand will help you direct your precious attentional resources properly.

it’s the rare mind that has trained itself to separate the objective fact from the immediate, subconscious, and automatic subjective interpretation that follows.

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.

To observe, you must learn to separate situation from interpretation, yourself from what you’re seeing.

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

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.

3. Be Inclusive

you should never neglect your sense of smell—or indeed any of your other senses

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 it without consciously registering it.

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.

never assume anything,

4. Be Engaged

Many times, people are not what they may initially be judged to be.

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?

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,

As passive perceivers, we just observe.

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.

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.

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.

found repeatedly that so-called “action” video games—games characterized by 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.

Richard Feynman,

“It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science,

“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 pos...

“The game is afoot,

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.

willingness to engage in the nonlinear, embrace the hypothetical, entertain the conjecture; it’s his capacity for creative thought and imaginative reflection.

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.

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.

linear narrative,

by circuitous and hypothetical meanderings of the mind?

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.

Distancing has been shown to improve cognitive performance, from actual problem solving to the ability to exercise self-control.

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.

those who take a distanced view of political questions tend to emerge with evaluations that are better able to stand the test of time.

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

Showers are likewise often associated with imaginative thought,

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.

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?

keep challenging yourself and questioning your habits,