How to Think Like Sherlock (15 page)

If your initial note-taking process leaves you with rather scruffy notes, re-inscribe them neatly at the earliest opportunity. The longer you leave it, the more notes you are likely to accumulate, and the thought of writing them up neatly will become less appealing.

Use devices to make your notes as easy to review as possible. Most simply, use headings and subheadings. This will add structure to what you write and how you think.

Consider more complex devices too. Will a graph or a diagram make a point most clearly? Colour-coding is another way to make notes visually stimulating. You might write up a main point in blue ink, illustrate with an example in green ink and add some concluding thoughts in red.

One popular way to visually present interconnected ideas or subject matter is the spidergram, also known as the mind map. Spidergrams are a great and simple way to concentrate a lot of ideas in a small space, making review easy and often prompting new trains of thoughts by giving you an overview of the big picture. Here’s how you might create one:

At the centre of a blank piece of paper, write your key word or phrase.

Draw lines from this central concept. Each new branch (or spider’s leg) connects to a related idea or thought.

Impose some order. Don’t let the spidergram get out of control. If there is a clear hierarchy of ideas, number the sections or use a radial hierarchy.

Let your creativity run free. Feel free to use a mixture of upper and lower case printing, different colours, symbols or images. You set the rules.

Here is an example of a spidergram that Holmes might have drawn for ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’:

Improving Your Memory

‘My mind is like a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stowed away therein – so many that I may well have but a vague perception of what was there.’

‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE LION’S MANE’

Having accumulated the wealth of data required for your Holmesian-style thinking, it is vital to ensure it becomes firmly lodged in your memory. Holmes seems to have had little problem with memory, able to pluck from the air tiny details of conversation long after they have occurred or recalling crime reports from years past. But what is memory? In short, it is the way that the brain encodes pieces of information so that we may store them for later retrieval.

The science of memory is continually evolving and we are still in the early stages of understanding how it works. However, it is generally accepted that there are several major classifications of memory:

Sensory memory

This relates to a timescale lasting well under a second from the moment of perception. For instance, you might look at a stream of cars coming down the motorway and process the colour of each car you see but would be unable to recall this data within a few hundred milliseconds of observing it.

Short-term memory

This relates to recall lasting from a few seconds to a minute. On average, a healthy adult can store between four and seven items in this way. Short-term memory allows you to memorise a chunk of a telephone number for quick retrieval a few moments later.

Long-term memory

This type allows us to store huge swathes of information, sometimes created in the earliest years of our life and kept with us to the grave. So while we might use our short-term memory to store a phone number for the local pizza delivery company just until we can get to the phone, our long-term memory allows us to retain the phone number from our childhood home for decades.

There are two main ways to improve memory: through external aids such as an appointments diary or through internal aids, such as certain mental techniques.

External aids are fine for filling certain gaps but there are disadvantages to becoming over-reliant upon them. While there is no problem in using an alarm clock day in and day out to remind us to get up, we might not want to rely on writing too many reminder notes to ourselves simply because it becomes inconvenient. Many studies also suggest that an over-reliance on external aids can make our memories lazier and less able to function without them.

Internal aids are certainly the way forward when it comes to improving our all-important long-term memory. Here are a few techniques you might want to try:

Make it personal

Relate new information to things that are particular to you. This might be anything from people that you know or your favourite sports team to more complex associations incorporating your personal beliefs. You’ve met a girl whose favourite perfume is Chanel No.5 and you want to remember it so you can buy her a bottle for Christmas. Is the number five your lucky number? Was it your shirt number in the school sports team? Your house number? Make a link.

Use imagery

Need a way to remember someone’s name? Just been introduced to Mr Glass? Then imagine Mr Glass as being see-through. Next time the two of you meet, it will be the first thing that pops into your head and you’ll have no problem recalling his name. Alas, not everyone will have such an imagery-friendly name, but the only limit to this system is your own imagination.

Say it proud

Not always a convenient technique, but repeating aloud a vital bit of information gives you more chance of remembering it.

Remember just as you are about to forget

This was the conclusion of a nineteenth century German psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus. Having spent many years testing his recall of lengthy strings of random nonsense, he discerned that the most efficient memorisation goes on during the earliest attempts. Although less new information is retained in each subsequent review, the memory is reinforced so reviews need only occur at ever more distant moments in time. Thus, you should review new information initially after just a few seconds, then after a few minutes, then after an hour and so on. Eventually, you might only need to re-remember a memory every few years for it to remain intact.

Chunking

A useful method for items like strings of numbers, addresses, etc. Imagine you need to remember a twelve-digit bank card number: 196674722199. It will be a lot easier to fix it in your memory if you divide it up into sections: 1966 7472 2199. And if you can attach some meaning to each chunk, it becomes easier still. For instance, you might wish to remember it in these chunks: 1966 (the year England won the World Cup) 747 (a jumbo jet) 221 (Sherlock’s number on Baker Street) 99 (red balloons).

Mnemonics

This is a nice verbal trick to lodge a clump of information in your mind. Many of the most effective mnemonics are nothing more than simple acronyms. Thus, the eminently memorable line ‘Richard of York gave battle in vain’ reminds us of the colours of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) while ‘Naughty elephants squirting water’ reminds us of the order of the compass points (north, east, south, west).