Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (22 page)

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 more difficult to fall into a 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 we 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 he act given a specific set of 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 of 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 by 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, a way of 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).

In 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 to 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.