Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (39 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ENDNOTES

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

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

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

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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

FURTHER READING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prelude

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

For an integrated discussion of the mind, its evolution, and its natural abilities, there are few better sources than Steven Pinker’s
The Blank Slate
and
How the Mind Works.

Chapter One: The Scientific Method of the Mind

For the history of Sherlock Holmes and the background of the Conan Doyle stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, I’ve drawn heavily on several sources: Leslie Klinger’s
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes
; Andrew Lycett’s
The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
; and John Lellenerg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley’s
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters.
While the latter two form a compendium of information on Conan Doyle’s life, the former is the single best source on the background for and various interpretations of the Holmes canon.

For a taste of early psychology, I recommend William James’s classic text,
The Principles of Psychology.
For a discussion of the scientific method and its history, Thomas Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Much of the discussion of motivation, learning, and expertise draws on the research of Angela Duckworth, Ellen Winner (author of
Gifted Children: Myths and Realities
), and K. Anders Ericsson (author of
The Road to Excellence
). The chapter also owes a debt to the work of Daniel Gilbert.

Chapter Two: The Brain Attic

One of the best existing summaries of the research on memory is Eric Kandel’s
In Search of Memory.
Also excellent is Daniel Schacter’s
The Seven Sins of Memory.

John Bargh continues to be the leading authority on priming and its effects on behavior. The chapter also draws inspiration from the work of Solomon Asch and Alexander Todorov and the joint research of Norbert Schwarz and Gerald Clore. A compilation of research on the IAT is available via the lab of Mahzarin Banaji.

Chapter Three: Stocking the Brain Attic

The seminal work on the brain’s default network, resting state, and intrinsic natural activity and attentional disposition was conducted by Marcus Raichle. For a discussion of attention, inattentional blindness, and how our senses can lead us astray, I recommend Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon’s
The Invisible Gorilla.
For an in-depth look at the
brain’s inbuilt cognitive biases, Daniel Kahneman’s
Thinking, Fast and Slow.
The correctional model of observation is taken from the work of Daniel Gilbert.

Chapter Four: Exploring the Brain Attic

For an overview of the nature of creativity, imagination, and insight, I recommend the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, including his books
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
and
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
The discussion of distance and its role in the creative process was influenced by the work of Yaacov Trope and Ethan Kross. The chapter as a whole owes a debt to the writings of Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein.

Chapter Five: Navigating the Brain Attic

My understanding of the disconnect between objective reality and subjective experience and interpretation was profoundly influenced by the work of Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, including their groundbreaking 1977 paper, “Telling More Than We Can Know.” An excellent summary of their work can be found in Wilson’s book,
Strangers to Ourselves
, and a new perspective is offered by David Eagleman’s
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

The work on split-brain patients was pioneered by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. For more on its implications, I recommend Gazzaniga’s
Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.

For a discussion of how biases can affect our deduction, I point you once more to Daniel Kahneman’s
Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham’s
Witness for the Defense
is an excellent starting point for learning more about the difficulty of objective perception and subsequent recall and deduction.

Chapter Six: Maintaining the Brain Attic

For a discussion of learning in the brain, I once more refer you to Daniel Schacter’s work, including his book
Searching for Memory.
Charles Duhigg’s
The Power of Habit
offers a detailed overview of habit formation, habit change, and why it is so easy to get stuck in old ways. For more on the emergence of overconfidence, I suggest Joseph Hallinan’s
Why We Make Mistakes
and Carol Tavris’s
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).
Much of the work on proneness to overconfidence and illusions of control was pioneered by Ellen Langer (see “Prelude”).

Chapter Seven: The Dynamic Attic

This chapter is an overview of the entire book, and while a number of studies went into its writing, there is no specific further reading.

Chapter Eight: We’re Only Human

For more on Conan Doyle, Spiritualism, and the Cottingley Fairies, I refer you once more to the sources on the author’s life listed in chapter one. For those interested in the history of Spiritualism, I recommend William James’s
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy.

Jonathan Haidt’s
The Righteous Mind
provides a discussion of the difficulty of challenging our own beliefs.

Postlude

Carol Dweck’s work on the importance of mindset is summarized in her book
Mindset.
On a consideration of the importance of motivation, see Daniel Pink’s
Drive.

INDEX

activation,
ref1
,
ref2
,
ref3
,
ref4
,
ref5
,
ref6
,
ref7
,
ref8
,
ref9
,
ref10