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Typeset in Minion ProDesigned by Francesca Belanger

To Geoff

Choice of attention—to pay attention tothis and ignore that—is to the inner lifewhat choice of action is to the outer. Inboth cases man is responsible for hischoice and must accept the consequences.As Ortega y Gasset said: “Tell me to whatyou pay attention, and I will tell you whoyou are.”

—W. H. AUDEN

CONTENTS

Prelude

PART ONEUNDERSTANDING (YOURSELF)

CHAPTER ONEThe Scientific Method of the MindCHAPTER TWOThe Brain Attic: What Is It and What’sin There?

PART TWOFROM OBSERVATION TO

IMAGINATION

CHAPTER THREEStocking the Brain Attic: The Power ofObservationCHAPTER FOURExploring the Brain Attic: The Value ofCreativity and Imagination

PART THREETHE ART OF DEDUCTION

CHAPTER FIVENavigating the Brain Attic: Deductionfrom the FactsCHAPTER SIXMaintaining the Brain Attic: EducationNever Stops

PART FOURTHE SCIENCE AND ART OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER SEVENThe Dynamic Attic: Putting It AllTogetherCHAPTER EIGHTWe’re Only HumanPostlude

AcknowledgmentsFurther ReadingIndex

Prelude

When I was little, my dad used to read usSherlock Holmes stories before bed.While my brother often took theopportunity to fall promptly asleep on hiscorner of the couch, the rest of us listenedintently. I remember the big leatherarmchair where my dad sat, holding thebook out in front of him with one arm, thedancing flames from the fireplacereflecting in his black-framed glasses. Iremember the rise and fall of his voice asthe suspense mounted beyond all breakingpoints, and finally, finally, at long last theawaited solution, when it all made senseand I’d shake my head, just like Dr.

Watson, and think, Of course; it’s all sosimple now that he says it. I rememberthe smell of the pipe that my dad himselfwould smoke every so often, a fruity,earthy mix that made its way into the foldsof the leather chair, and the outlines of thenight through the curtained Frenchwindows. His pipe, of course, was ever-so-slightly curved just like Holmes’s. AndI remember that final slam of the book, thethick pages coming together between thecrimson covers, when he’d announce,“That’s it for tonight.” And off we’d go—no matter how much begging and pleadingwe’d try and what sad faces we’d make—upstairs, up to bed.

And then there’s the one thing thatwedged its way so deeply into my brainthat it remained there, taunting me, for

years to come, when the rest of the storieshad long since faded into someindeterminate background and theadventures of Holmes and his faithfulBoswell were all but forgotten: the steps.

The steps to 221B Baker Street. Howmany were there? It’s the question Holmesbrought before Watson in “A Scandal inBohemia,” and a question that never oncesince left my mind. As Holmes andWatson sit in their matching armchairs, thedetective instructs the doctor on thedifference between seeing and observing.Watson is baffled. And then, all at onceeverything becomes crystal clear.

“When I hear you give your reasons,”[Watson] remarked, “the thing alwaysappears to me to be so ridiculously simple

that I could easily do it myself, though ateach successive instance of yourreasoning, I am baffled until you explainyour process. And yet I believe that myeyes are as good as yours.”

“Quite so,” [Holmes] answered,lighting a cigarette, and throwing himselfdown into an armchair. “You see, but youdo not observe. The distinction is clear.For example, you have frequently seen thesteps which lead up from the hall to thisroom.”

“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 seventeensteps, because I have both seen andobserved.”

When I first heard it, on one firelit,pipe-smoke-filled evening, the exchangeshook me. Feverishly, I tried to rememberhow many steps there were in our ownhouse (I had not the faintest idea), howmany led up to our front door (I drew abeautiful blank), how many led down tothe basement (ten? twenty? I couldn’t evenapproximate). And for a long timeafterward, I tried to count stairs and stepswhenever I could, lodging the propernumber in my memory in case anyone evercalled upon me to report. I’d makeHolmes proud.

Of course, I’d promptly forget each

number I so diligently tried to remember—and it wasn’t until later that I realizedthat by focusing so intently onmemorization, I’d missed the pointentirely. My efforts had been doomedfrom the start.

What I couldn’t understand then wasthat Holmes had quite a bit more than a legup on me. For most of his life, he had beenhoning a method of mindful interactionwith the world. The Baker Street steps?Just a way of showing off a skill that nowcame so naturally to him that it didn’trequire the least bit of thought. A by-the-way manifestation of a process that washabitually, almost subconsciously,unfolding in his constantly active mind. Atrick, if you will, of no real consequence,and yet with the most profound

implications if you stopped to considerwhat made it possible. A trick thatinspired me to write an entire book in itshonor.

The idea of mindfulness itself is by nomeans a new one. As early as the end ofthe nineteenth century, William James, thefather of modern psychology, wrote that“the faculty of voluntarily bringing back awandering attention, over and over again,is the very root of judgment, character,and will. . . . An education which shouldimprove this faculty would be theeducation par excellence.” That faculty, atits core, is the very essence ofmindfulness. And the education that Jamesproposes, an education in a mindfulapproach to life and to thought.

In the 1970s, Ellen Langerdemonstrated that mindfulness could reacheven further than improving “judgment,character, and will.” A mindful approachcould go as far as to make elderly adultsfeel and act younger—and could evenimprove their vital signs, such as bloodpressure, and their cognitive function. Inrecent years, studies have shown thatmeditation-like thought (an exercise in thevery attentional control that forms thecenter of mindfulness), for as little asfifteen minutes a day, can shift frontalbrain activity toward a pattern that hasbeen associated with more positive andmore approach-oriented emotional states,and that looking at scenes of nature, foreven a short while, can help us becomemore insightful, more creative, and more

productive. We also know, moredefinitively than we ever have, that ourbrains are not built for multitasking—something that precludes mindfulnessaltogether. When we are forced to domultiple things at once, not only do weperform worse on all of them but ourmemory decreases and our general well-being suffers a palpable hit.

But for Sherlock Holmes, mindfulpresence is just a first step. It’s a means toa far larger, far more practical andpractically gratifying goal. Holmesprovides precisely what William Jameshad prescribed: an education in improvingour faculty of mindful thought and in usingit in order to accomplish more, thinkbetter, and decide more optimally. In itsbroadest application, it is a means for

improving overall decision making andjudgment ability, starting from the mostbasic building block of your own mind.

What Homes is really telling Watsonwhen he contrasts seeing and observing isto never mistake mindlessness formindfulness, a passive approach with anactive involvement. We see automatically:a stream of sensory inputs that requires noeffort on our part, save that of opening oureyes. And we see unthinkingly, absorbingcountless elements from the world withoutnecessarily processing what thoseelements might be. We may not evenrealize we’ve seen something that wasright before our eyes. But when weobserve, we are forced to pay attention.We have to move from passive absorptionto active awareness. We have to engage.

It’s true for everything—not just sight, buteach sense, each input, each thought.

All too often, when it comes to our ownminds, we are surprisingly mindless. Wesail on, blithely unaware of how much weare missing, of how little we grasp of ourown thought process—and how muchbetter we could be if only we’d taken thetime to understand and to reflect. LikeWatson, we plod along the same staircasetens, hundreds, thousands of times,multiple times a day, and we can’t beginto recall the most mundane of detailsabout them (I wouldn’t be surprised ifHolmes had asked about color instead ofnumber of steps and had found Watsonequally ignorant).

But it’s not that we aren’t capable ofdoing 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 meabout the street where you grew up, you’dbe able to recall any number of details.The colors of the houses. The quirks of theneighbors. The smells of the seasons.How different the street was at differenttimes of day. Where you played. Whereyou walked. Where you were afraid ofwalking. I bet you could go on for hours.

As children, we are remarkably aware.We absorb and process information at aspeed that we’ll never again come closeto achieving. New sights, new sounds,new smells, new people, new emotions,new experiences: we are learning aboutour world and its possibilities. Everythingis new, everything is exciting, everythingengenders curiosity. And because of the

inherent newness of our surroundings, weare exquisitely alert; we are absorbed; wetake it all in. And what’s more, weremember: because we are motivated andengaged (two qualities we’ll return torepeatedly), we not only take the world inmore fully than we are ever likely to doagain, but we store it for the future. Whoknows when it might come in handy?

But as we grow older, the blasé factorincreases exponentially. Been there, donethat, don’t need to pay attention to this,and when in the world will I ever need toknow or use that? Before we know it, wehave shed that innate attentiveness,engagement, and curiosity for a host ofpassive, mindless habits. And even whenwe want to engage, we no longer have thatchildhood luxury. Gone are the days

where our main job was to learn, toabsorb, to interact; we now have other,more pressing (or so we think)responsibilities to attend to and demandson our minds to address. And as thedemands on our attention increase—an alltoo real concern as the pressures ofmultitasking grow in the increasingly 24/7digital age—so, too, does our actualattention decrease. As it does so, webecome less and less able to know ornotice our own thought habits, and moreand more allow our minds to dictate ourjudgments and decisions, instead of theother way around. And while that’s notinherently a bad thing—in fact, we’ll betalking repeatedly about the need toautomate certain processes that are at firstdifficult and cognitively costly—it is

dangerously close to mindlessness. It’s afine line between efficiency andthoughtlessness—and one that we need totake care not to cross.

You’ve likely had the experience whereyou need to deviate from a stable routineonly to find that you’ve somehowforgotten to do so. Let’s say you need tostop by the drugstore on your way home.All day long, you remember your errand.You rehearse it; you even picture the extraturn you’ll have to take to get there, just aquick step from your usual route. And yetsomehow, you find yourself back at yourfront door, without having ever stoppedoff. You’ve forgotten to take that turn andyou don’t even remember passing it. It’sthe habit mindlessly taking over, theroutine asserting itself against whatever

part of your mind knew that it needed todo something else.

It happens all the time. You get so set ina specific pattern that you go throughentire chunks of your day in a mindlessdaze (and if you are still thinking aboutwork? worrying about an email? planningahead for dinner? forget it). And thatautomatic forgetfulness, that ascendancy ofroutine and the ease with which a thoughtcan be distracted, is just the smallest part—albeit a particularly noticeable one,because we have the luxury of realizingthat we’ve forgotten to do something—ofa much larger phenomenon. It happensmuch more regularly than we can point to—and more often than not, we aren’t evenaware of our own mindlessness. Howmany thoughts float in and out of your head

without your stopping to identify them?How many ideas and insights haveescaped because you forgot to payattention? How many decisions orjudgments have you made withoutrealizing how or why you made them,driven by some internal default settings ofwhose existence you’re only vaguely, if atall, aware? How many days have gone bywhere you suddenly wonder what exactlyyou did and how you got to where youare?

This book aims to help. It takesHolmes’s methodology to explore andexplain the steps necessary for building uphabits of thought that will allow you toengage mindfully with yourself and yourworld as a matter of course. So that you,too, can offhandedly mention that number

of steps to dazzle a less-with-itcompanion.

So, light that fire, curl up on that couch,and prepare once more to join SherlockHolmes and Dr. John H. Watson on theiradventures through the crime-filled streetsof London—and into the deepest crevicesof the human mind.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Scientific Method of theMind

Something sinister was happening to thefarm animals of Great Wyrley. Sheep,cows, horses—one by one, they werefalling dead in the middle of the night. Thecause of death: a long, shallow cut to thestomach that caused a slow and painfulbleeding. Farmers were outraged; thecommunity, shocked. Who would want tocause such pain to defenseless creatures?

The police thought they had theiranswer: George Edalji, the half-Indian son

of the local vicar. In 1903, twenty-seven-year-old Edalji was sentenced to sevenyears of hard labor for one of the sixteenmutilations, that of a pony whose body hadbeen found in a pit near the vicar’sresidence. Little did it matter that the vicarswore his son was asleep at the time ofthe crime. Or that the killings continuedafter George’s imprisonment. Or, indeed,that the evidence was largely based onanonymous letters that George was said tohave written—in which he implicatedhimself as the killer. The police, led byStaffordshire chief constable captainGeorge Anson, were certain they had theirman.

Three years later, Edalji was released.Two petitions protesting his innocence—one, signed by ten thousand people, the

other, from a group of three hundredlawyers—had been sent to the HomeOffice, citing a lack of evidence in thecase. And yet, the story was far from over.Edalji may have been free in person, butin name, he was still guilty. Prior to hisarrest he had been a solicitor. Now hecould not be readmitted to his practice.

In 1906, George Edalji caught a luckybreak: Arthur Conan Doyle, the famedcreator of Sherlock Holmes, had becomeinterested in the case. That winter, ConanDoyle agreed to meet Edalji at the GrandHotel, at Charing Cross. And there, acrossthe lobby, any lingering doubts Sir Arthurmay have had about the young man’sinnocence were dispelled. As he laterwrote:

He had come to my hotel by appointment,but I had been delayed, and he waspassing the time by reading the paper. Irecognized my man by his dark face, so Istood and observed him. He held thepaper close to his eyes and rathersideways, proving not only a high degreeof myopia, but marked astigmatism. Theidea of such a man scouring fields at nightand assaulting cattle while avoiding thewatching police was ludicrous. . . . There,in a single physical defect, lay the moralcertainty of his innocence.

But though Conan Doyle himself wasconvinced, he knew it would take more tocapture the attention of the Home Office.And so, he traveled to Great Wyrley togather evidence in the case. He

interviewed locals. He investigated thescenes of the crimes, the evidence, thecircumstances. He met with theincreasingly hostile Captain Anson. Hevisited George’s old school. He reviewedold records of anonymous letters andpranks against the family. He traced thehandwriting expert who had proclaimedthat Edalji’s hand matched that of theanonymous missives. And then he put hisfindings together for the Home Office.

The bloody razors? Nothing but old rust—and, in any case, incapable of makingthe type of wounds that had been sufferedby the animals. The dirt on Edalji’sclothes? Not the same as the dirt in thefield where the pony was discovered. Thehandwriting expert? He had previouslymade mistaken identifications, which had

led to false convictions. And, of course,there was the question of the eyesight:could someone with such astigmatism andsevere myopia really navigate nocturnalfields in order to maim animals?

In the spring of 1907, Edalji was finallycleared of the charge of animal slaughter.It was less than the complete victory forwhich Conan Doyle had hoped—Georgewas not entitled to any compensation forhis arrest and jail time—but it wassomething. Edalji was readmitted to hislegal practice. The Committee of Inquiryfound, as summarized by Conan Doyle,that “the police commenced and carriedon their investigations, not for the purposeof finding out who was the guilty party,b ut for the purpose of finding evidenceagainst Edalji, who they were already

sure was the guilty man.” And in August ofthat year, England saw the creation of itsfirst court of appeals, to deal with futuremiscarriages of justice in a moresystematic fashion. The Edalji case waswidely considered one of the mainimpetuses behind its creation.

Conan Doyle’s friends were impressed.None, however, hit the nail on the headquite so much as the novelist GeorgeMeredith. “I shall not mention the namewhich must have become wearisome toyour ears,” Meredith told Conan Doyle,“but the creator of the marvellous AmateurDetective has shown what he can do in thelife of breath.” Sherlock Holmes mighthave been fiction, but his rigorousapproach 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, gofar beyond the world of crime.

Say the name Sherlock Holmes, anddoubtless, any number of images willcome to mind. The pipe. The deerstalker.The cloak. The violin. The hawklikeprofile. Perhaps William Gillette or BasilRathbone or Jeremy Brett or any numberof the luminaries who have, over theyears, taken up Holmes’s mantle,including the current portrayals byBenedict Cumberbatch and RobertDowney, Jr. Whatever the pictures yourmind brings up, I would venture to guessthat the word psychologist isn’t one ofthem. And yet, perhaps it’s time that itwas.

Holmes was a detective second to none,it is true. But his insights into the humanmind rival his greatest feats of criminaljustice. What Sherlock Holmes offers isn’tjust a way of solving crime. It is an entireway of thinking, a mindset that can beapplied to countless enterprises farremoved from the foggy streets of theLondon underworld. It is an approachborn out of the scientific method thattranscends science and crime both and canserve as a model for thinking, a way ofbeing, even, just as powerful in our timeas it was in Conan Doyle’s. And that, Iwould argue, is the secret to Holmes’senduring, overwhelming, and ubiquitousappeal.

When Conan Doyle created SherlockHolmes, he didn’t think much of his hero.

It’s doubtful that he set out intentionally tocreate a model for thought, for decisionmaking, for how to structure, lay out, andsolve problems in our minds. And yet thatis precisely what he did. He created, ineffect, the perfect spokesperson for therevolution in science and thought that hadbeen unfolding in the preceding decadesand would continue into the dawn of thenew century. In 1887, Holmes became anew kind of detective, an unprecedentedthinker who deployed his mind inunprecedented ways. Today, Holmesserves an ideal model for how we canthink better than we do as a matter ofcourse.

In many ways, Sherlock Holmes was avisionary. His explanations, hismethodology, his entire approach to

thought presaged developments inpsychology and neuroscience thatoccurred over a hundred years after hisbirth—and over eighty years after hiscreator’s death. But somehow, too, hisway of thought seems almost inevitable, aclear product of its time and place inhistory. If the scientific method wascoming into its prime in all manner ofthinkings and doings—from evolution toradiography, general relativity to thediscovery of germs and anesthesia,behaviorism to psychoanalysis—then whyever not in the principles of thought itself?

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s ownestimation, Sherlock Holmes was meantfrom the onset to be an embodiment of thescientific, an ideal that we could aspire to,if never emulate altogether (after all, what

are ideals for if not to be just a little bitout of reach?). Holmes’s very namespeaks at once of an intent beyond asimple detective of the old-fashioned sort:it is very likely that Conan Doyle chose itas a deliberate tribute to one of hischildhood idols, the philosopher-doctorOliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a figureknown as much for his writing as for hiscontributions to medical practice. Thedetective’s character, in turn, wasmodeled after another mentor, Dr. JosephBell, a surgeon known for his powers ofclose observation. It was said that Dr.Bell could tell from a single glance that apatient was a recently dischargednoncommissioned officer in a Highlandregiment, who had just returned fromservice in Barbados, and that he tested

routinely his students’ own powers ofperception with methods that includedself-experimentation with various noxioussubstances. To students of Holmes, thatmay all sound rather familiar. As ConanDoyle wrote to Bell, “Round the centre ofdeduction and inference and observationwhich I have heard you inculcate, I havetried to build up a man who pushed thething as far as it would go—furtheroccasionally. . . .” It is here, inobservation and inference and deduction,that we come to the heart of what it isexactly that makes Holmes who he is,distinct from every other detective whoappeared before, or indeed, after: thedetective who elevated the art of detectionto a precise science.

We first learn of the quintessential

Sherlock Holmes approach in A Study inScarlet, the detective’s first appearance inthe public eye. To Holmes, we soondiscover, each case is not just a case as itwould appear to the officials of ScotlandYard—a crime, some facts, some personsof interest, all coming together to bring acriminal to justice—but is something bothmore and less. More, in that it takes on alarger, more general significance, as anobject of broad speculation and inquiry, ascientific conundrum, if you will. It hascontours that inevitably were seen beforein earlier problems and will certainlyrepeat again, broader principles that canapply to other moments that may not evenseem at first glance related. Less, in that itis stripped of any accompanying emotionand conjecture—all elements that are

deemed extraneous to clarity of thought—and made as objective as a nonscientificreality could ever be. The result: thecrime as an object of strict scientificinquiry, to be approached by theprinciples of the scientific method. Itsservant: the human mind.

What Is the Scientific Method ofThought?

When we think of the scientific method,we tend to think of an experimenter in hislaboratory, probably holding a test tubeand wearing a white coat, who follows aseries of steps that runs something likethis: make some observations about aphenomenon; create a hypothesis to

explain those observations; design anexperiment to test the hypothesis; run theexperiment; see if the results match yourexpectations; rework your hypothesis ifyou must; lather, rinse, and repeat. Simpleseeming enough. But how to go beyondthat? Can we train our minds to work likethat automatically, all the time?

Holmes recommends we start with thebasics. As he says in our first meetingwith him, “Before turning to those moraland mental aspects of the matter whichpresent the greatest difficulties, let theenquirer begin by mastering moreelementary problems.” The scientificmethod begins with the most mundaneseeming of things: observation. Beforeyou even begin to ask the questions thatwill define the investigation of a crime, a

scientific experiment, or a decision asapparently simple as whether or not toinvite a certain friend to dinner, you mustfirst explore the essential groundwork. It’snot for nothing that Holmes calls thefoundations of his inquiry “elementary.”For, that is precisely what they are, thevery basis of how something works andwhat makes it what it is.

And that is something that not evenevery scientist acknowledges outright, soingrained is it in his way of thinking.When a physicist dreams up a newexperiment or a biologist decides to testthe properties of a newly isolatedcompound, he doesn’t always realize thathis specific question, his approach, hishypothesis, his very view of what he isdoing would be impossible without the

elemental knowledge at his disposal, thathe has built up over the years. Indeed, hemay have a hard time telling you fromwhere exactly he got the idea for a study—and why he first thought it would makesense.

After World War II, physicist RichardFeynman was asked to serve on the StateCurriculum Commission, to choose highschool science textbooks for California.To his consternation, the texts appeared toleave students more confused thanenlightened. Each book he examined wasworse than the one prior. Finally, he cameupon a promising beginning: a series ofpictures, of a windup toy, an automobile,and a boy on a bicycle. Under each was aquestion: “What makes it go?” At last, hethought, something that was going to

explain the basic science, starting with thefundamentals of mechanics (the toy),chemistry (the car), and biology (the boy).Alas, his elation was short lived. Wherehe thought to finally see explanation, realunderstanding, he found instead fourwords: “Energy makes it go.” But whatwas that? Why did it make it go? How didit make it go? These questions weren’tever acknowledged, never mindanswered. As Feynman put it, “Thatdoesn’t mean anything. . . . It’s just aword!” Instead, he argued, “What theyshould have done is to look at the winduptoy, see that there are springs inside, learnabout springs, learn about wheels, andnever mind ‘energy.’ Later on, when thechildren know something about how thetoy 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, whoalways remembered the building blocks,the elements that lay underneath eachquestion and each principle. And that isprecisely what Holmes means when hetells us that we must begin with the basics,with such mundane problems that theymight seem beneath our notice. How canyou hypothesize, how can you maketestable theories if you don’t first knowwhat and how to observe, if you don’t firstunderstand the fundamental nature of theproblem at hand, down to its most basicelements? (The simplicity is deceptive, asyou will learn in the next two chapters.)

The scientific method begins with abroad base of knowledge, an

understanding of the facts and contours ofthe problem you are trying to tackle. In thecase of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, it’sthe mystery behind a murder in anabandoned house on Lauriston Gardens. Inyour case, it may be a decision whether ornot to change careers. Whatever thespecific issue, you must define andformulate it in your mind as specificallyas possible—and then you must fill it inwith past experience and presentobservation. (As Holmes admonishesLestrade and Gregson when the twodetectives fail to note a similarity betweenthe murder being investigated and anearlier case, “There is nothing new underthe sun. It has all been done before.”)

Only then can you move to thehypothesis-generation point. This is the

moment where the detective engages hisimagination, generating possible lines ofinquiry into the course of events, and notjust sticking to the most obviouspossibility—in A Study in Scarlet, forinstance, rache need not be Rachel cutshort, but could also signify the Germanf o r revenge—or where you mightbrainstorm possible scenarios that mayarise from pursuing a new job direction.But you don’t just start hypothesizing atrandom: all the potential scenarios andexplanations come from that initial base ofknowledge and observation.

Only then do you test. What does yourhypothesis imply? At this point, Holmeswill investigate all lines of inquiry,eliminating them one by one until the onethat remains, however improbable, must

be the truth. And you will run throughcareer change scenarios and try to play outthe implications to their logical, fullconclusion. That, too, is manageable, asyou will later learn.

But even then, you’re not done. Timeschange. Circumstances change. Thatoriginal knowledge base must always beupdated. As our environment changes, wemust never forget to revise and retest outhypotheses. The revolutionary can, ifwe’re not careful, become the irrelevant.The thoughtful can become unthinkingthrough our failure to keep engaging,challenging, pushing.

That, in a nutshell, is the scientificmethod: understand and frame theproblem; observe; hypothesize (orimagine); test and deduce; and repeat. To

follow Sherlock Holmes is to learn toapply that same approach not just toexternal clues, but to your every thought—and then turn it around and apply it to theevery thought of every other person whomay be involved, step by painstaking step.

When Holmes first lays out thetheoretical principles behind hisapproach, he boils it down to one mainidea: “How much an observant man mightlearn by an accurate and systematicexamination of all that came his way.”And that “all” includes each and everythought; in Holmes’s world, there is nosuch thing as a thought that is taken at facevalue. As he notes, “From a drop ofwater, a logician could infer thepossibility of an Atlantic or a Niagarawithout having seen or heard of one or the

other.” In other words, given our existingknowledge base, we can use observationto deduce meaning from an otherwisemeaningless fact. For what kind ofscientist is that who lacks the ability toimagine and hypothesize the new, theunknown, the as-of-yet untestable?

This is the scientific method at its mostbasic. Holmes goes a step further. Heapplies the same principle to humanbeings: a Holmesian disciple will, “onmeeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glanceto distinguish the history of the man andthe trade or profession to which hebelongs. Puerile as such an exercise mayseem, it sharpens the faculties ofobservation, and teaches one where tolook and what to look for.” Eachobservation, each exercise, each simple

inference drawn from a simple fact willstrengthen your ability to engage in ever-more-complex machinations. It will laythe groundwork for new habits of thinkingthat will make such observation secondnature.

That is precisely what Holmes hastaught himself—and can now teach us—todo. For, at its most basic, isn’t that thedetective’s appeal? Not only can he solvethe hardest of crimes, but he does so withan approach that seems, well, elementarywhen you get right down to it. Thisapproach is based in science, in specificsteps, in habits of thought that can belearned, cultivated, and applied.

That all sounds good in theory. But howdo you even begin? It does seem like anawfully big hassle to always think

scientifically, to always have to payattention and break things down andobserve and hypothesize and deduce andeverything in between. Well, it both is andisn’t. On the one hand, most of us have along way to go. As we’ll see, our mindsaren’t meant to think like Holmes bydefault. But on the other hand, new thoughthabits can be learned and applied. Ourbrains are remarkably adept at learningnew ways of thinking—and our neuralconnections are remarkably flexible, eveninto old age. By following Holmes’sthinking in the following pages, we willlearn how to apply his methodology to oureveryday lives, to be present and mindfuland to treat each choice, each problem,each situation with the care it deserves. Atfirst it will seem unnatural. But with time

and practice it will come to be as secondnature for us as it is for him.

Pitfalls of the Untrained Brain

One of the things that characterizesHolmes’s thinking—and the scientificideal—is a natural skepticism andinquisitiveness toward the world. Nothingis taken at face value. Everything isscrutinized and considered, and only thenaccepted (or not, as the case may be).Unfortunately, our minds are, in theirdefault state, averse to such an approach.In order to think like Sherlock Holmes, wefirst need to overcome a sort of naturalresistance that pervades the way we seethe world.

Most psychologists now agree that ourminds operate on a so-called two-systembasis. One system is fast, intuitive,reactionary—a kind of constant fight-or-flight vigilance of the mind. It doesn’trequire much conscious thought or effortand functions as a sort of status quo autopilot. The other is slower, moredeliberative, more thorough, more logical—but also much more cognitively costly.It likes to sit things out as long as it canand doesn’t step in unless it thinks itabsolutely necessary.

Because of the mental cost of that cool,reflective system, we spend most of ourthinking time in the hot, reflexive system,basically ensuring that our naturalobserver state takes on the color of thatsystem: automatic, intuitive (and not

always rightly so), reactionary, quick tojudge. As a matter of course, we go. Onlywhen something really catches ourattention or forces us to stop or otherwisejolts us do we begin to know, turning onthe more thoughtful, reflective, coolsibling.

I’m going to give the systems monikersof my own: the Watson system and theHolmes system. You can guess which iswhich. Think of the Watson system as ournaive selves, operating by the lazy thoughthabits—the ones that come most naturally,the so-called path of least resistance—thatwe’ve spent our whole lives acquiring.And think of the Holmes system as ouraspirational selves, the selves that we’llbe once we’re done learning how to applyhis method of thinking to our everyday

lives—and in so doing break the habits ofour Watson system once and for all.

When we think as a matter of course,our minds are preset to accept whatever itis that comes to them. First we believe,and only then do we question. Putdifferently, it’s like our brains initially seethe world as a true/false exam where thedefault answer is always true. And whileit takes no effort whatsoever to remain intrue mode, a switch of answer to falserequires vigilance, time, and energy.

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert describesit this way: our brains must believesomething in order to process it, if onlyfor a split second. Imagine I tell you tothink of pink elephants. You obviouslyknow that pink elephants don’t actuallyexist. But when you read the phrase, you

just for a moment had to picture a pinkelephant in your head. In order to realizethat it couldn’t exist, you had to believefor a second that it did exist. Weunderstand and believe in the same instant.Benedict de Spinoza was the first toconceive of this necessity of acceptancefor comprehension, and, writing a hundredyears before Gilbert, William Jamesexplained the principle as “Allpropositions, whether attributive orexistential, are believed through the veryfact of being conceived.” Only after theconception do we effortfully engage indisbelieving something—and, as Gilbertpoints out, that part of the process can befar from automatic.

In the case of the pink elephants thedisconfirming process is simple. It takes

next to no effort or time—although it stilldoes take your brain more effort toprocess than it would if I said grayelephant, since counterfactual informationrequires that additional step ofverification and disconfirmation that trueinformation does not. But that’s notalways true: not everything is as glaring asa pink elephant. The more complicated aconcept or idea, or the less obviously trueor false (There are no poisonous snakesin Maine. True or false? Go! But even thatcan be factually verified. How about: Thedeath penalty is not as harsh apunishment as life imprisonment. Whatnow?), the more effort is required. And itdoesn’t take much for the process to bedisrupted or to not occur altogether. If wedecide that the statement sounds plausible

enough as is (sure; no poisonous snakesin Maine; why not?), we are more likelythan not to just let it go. Likewise, if weare busy, stressed, distracted, orotherwise depleted mentally, we may keepsomething marked as true without everhaving taken the time to verify it—whenfaced with multiple demands, our mentalcapacity is simply too limited to be ableto handle everything at once, and theverification process is one of the firstthings to go. When that happens, we areleft with uncorrected beliefs, things thatwe will later recall as true when they are,in fact, false. (Are there poisonous snakesin Maine? Yes, as a matter of fact thereare. But get asked in a year, and whoknows if you will remember that or theopposite—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 thecase may be—as the elephant. And noteverything that our intuition says is blackand white is so in reality. It’s awfully easyto get tripped up. In fact, not only do webelieve everything we hear, at leastinitially, but even when we have been toldexplicitly that a statement is false beforewe hear it, we are likely to treat it as true.For instance, in something known as thecorrespondence bias (a concept we’llrevisit in greater detail), we assume thatwhat a person says is what that personactually believes—and we hold on to thatassumption even if we’ve been toldexplicitly that it isn’t so; we’re even likelyto judge the speaker in its light. Think

back to the previous paragraph; do youthink that what I wrote about the deathpenalty is my actual belief? You have nobasis on which to answer that question—Ihaven’t given you my opinion—and yet,chances are you’ve already answered it bytaking my statement as my opinion. Moredisturbing still, even if we hear somethingdenied—for example, Joe has no links tothe Mafia—we may end upmisremembering the statement as lackingthe negator and end up believing that Joedoes have Mafia links—and even if wedon’t, we are much more likely to form anegative opinion of Joe. We’re even apt torecommend a longer prison sentence forhim if we play the role of jury. Ourtendency to confirm and to believe just alittle too easily and often has very real

consequences both for ourselves and forothers.

Holmes’s trick is to treat every thought,every experience, and every perceptionthe way he would a pink elephant. In otherwords, begin with a healthy dose ofskepticism instead of the credulity that isyour mind’s natural state of being. Don’tjust assume anything is the way it is. Thinkof everything as being as absurd as ananimal that can’t possibly exist in nature.It’s a difficult proposition, especially totake on all at once—after all, it’s the samething as asking your brain to go from itsnatural resting state to a mode of constantphysical activity, expending importantenergy even where it would normallyyawn, say okay, and move on to the nextthing—but not an impossible one,

especially if you’ve got Sherlock Holmeson your side. For he, perhaps better thananyone else, can serve as a trustycompanion, an ever-present model forhow to accomplish what may look at firstglance like a herculean task.

By observing Holmes in action, we willbecome better at observing our ownminds. “How the deuce did he know that Ihad come from Afghanistan?” Watson asksStamford, the man who has introduced himto Holmes for the first time.

Stamford smiles enigmatically inresponse. “That’s just his littlepeculiarity,” he tells Watson. “A goodmany people have wanted to know how hefinds things out.”

That answer only piques Watson’scuriosity further. It’s a curiosity that can

only be satisfied over the course of longand detailed observation—which hepromptly undertakes.

To Sherlock Holmes, the world hasbecome by default a pink elephant world.It’s a world where every single input isexamined with the same care and healthyskepticism as the most absurd of animals.And by the end of this book, if you askyourself the simple question, What wouldSherlock Holmes do and think in thissituation? you will find that your ownworld is on its way to being one, too. Thatthoughts that you never before realizedexisted are being stopped and questionedbefore being allowed to infiltrate yourmind. That those same thoughts, properlyfiltered, can no longer slyly influence yourbehavior without your knowledge.

And just like a muscle that you neverknew you had—one that suddenly beginsto ache, then develop and bulk up as youbegin to use it more and more in a newseries of exercises—with practice yourmind will see that the constant observationand never-ending scrutiny will becomeeasier. (In fact, as you’ll learn later in thebook, it really is like a muscle.) It willbecome, as it is to Sherlock Holmes,second nature. You will begin to intuit, todeduce, to think as a matter of course, andyou will find that you no longer have togive it much conscious effort.

Don’t for a second think it’s not doable.Holmes may be fictional, but Joseph Bellwas very real. So, too, was Conan Doyle(and George Edalji wasn’t the onlybeneficiary of his approach; Sir Arthur

also worked to overturn the convictions ofthe falsely imprisoned Oscar Slater).

And maybe Sherlock Holmes socaptures our minds for the very reason thathe makes it seem possible, effortless even,to think in a way that would bring theaverage person to exhaustion. He makesthe most rigorous scientific approach tothinking seem attainable. Not for nothingdoes Watson always exclaim, afterHolmes gives him an explanation of hismethods, that the thing couldn’t have beenany clearer. Unlike Watson, though, wecan learn to see the clarity before the fact.

The Two Ms: Mindfulness andMotivation

It won’t be easy. As Holmes reminds us,“Like all other arts, the Science ofDeduction and Analysis is one which canonly be acquired by long and patient studynor is life long enough to allow any mortalto attain the highest possible perfection init.” But it’s also more than mere fancy. Inessence, it comes down to one simpleformula: to move from a System Watson–to a System Holmes–governed thinkingtakes mindfulness plus motivation. (That,and a lot of practice.) Mindfulness, in thesense of constant presence of mind, theattentiveness and hereness that is soessential for real, active observation ofthe world. Motivation, in the sense ofactive engagement and desire.

When we do such decidedlyunremarkable things as misplacing our

keys or losing our glasses only to findthem on our head, System Watson is toblame: we go on a sort of autopilot anddon’t note our actions as we make them.It’s why we often forget what we weredoing if we’re interrupted, why we standin the middle of the kitchen wonderingwhy we’ve entered it. System Holmesoffers the type of retracing of steps thatrequires attentive recall, so that we breakthe autopilot and instead remember justwhere and why we did what we did. Wearen’t motivated or mindful all the time,and mostly it doesn’t matter. We do thingsmindlessly to conserve our resources forsomething more important than thelocation of our keys.

But in order to break from thatautopiloted mode, we have to be

motivated to think in a mindful, presentfashion, to exert effort on what goesthrough our heads instead of going withthe flow. To think like Sherlock Holmes,we must want, actively, to think like him.In fact, motivation is so essential thatresearchers have often lamented thedifficulty of getting accurate performancecomparisons on cognitive tasks for olderand younger participants. Why? The olderadults are often far more motivated toperform well. They try harder. Theyengage more. They are more serious, morepresent, more involved. To them, theperformance matters a great deal. It sayssomething about their mental capabilities—and they are out to prove that theyhaven’t lost the touch as they’ve aged. Notso younger adults. There is no comparable

imperative. How, then, can you accuratelycompare the two groups? It’s a questionthat continues to plague research intoaging and cognitive function.

But that’s not the only domain where itmatters. Motivated subjects alwaysoutperform. Students who are motivatedperform better on something as seeminglyimmutable as the IQ test—on average, asmuch as .064 standard deviations better,in fact. Not only that, but motivationpredicts higher academic performance,fewer criminal convictions, and betteremployment outcomes. Children who havea so-called “rage to master”—a termcoined by Ellen Winner to describe theintrinsic motivation to master a specificdomain—are more likely to be successfulin any number of endeavors, from art to

science. If we are motivated to learn alanguage, we are more likely to succeed inour quest. Indeed, when we learn anythingnew, we learn better if we are motivatedlearners. Even our memory knows ifwe’re motivated or not: we rememberbetter if we were motivated at the time thememory was formed. It’s called motivatedencoding.

And then, of course, there is that finalpiece of the puzzle: practice, practice,practice. You have to supplement yourmindful motivation with brutal training,thousands of hours of it. There is no wayaround it. Think of the phenomenon ofexpert knowledge: experts in all fields,from master chess players to masterdetectives, have superior memory in theirfield of choice. Holmes’s knowledge of

crime is ever at his fingertips. A chessplayer often holds hundreds of games,with all of their moves, in his head, readyfor swift access. Psychologist K. AndersEricsson argues that experts even see theworld differently within their area ofexpertise: they see things that are invisibleto a novice; they are able to discernpatterns at a glance that are anything butobvious to an untrained eye; they seedetails as part of a whole and know atonce what is crucial and what isincidental.

Even Holmes could not have begun lifewith System Holmes at the wheel. Youcan be sure that in his fictional world hewas born, just as we are, with Watson atthe controls. He just hasn’t let himself staythat way. He took System Watson and

taught it to operate by the rules of SystemHolmes, imposing reflective thoughtwhere there should rightly be reflexivereaction.

For the most part, System Watson is thehabitual one. But if we are conscious ofits power, we can ensure that it is not incontrol nearly as often as it otherwisewould be. As Holmes often notes, he hasmade it a habit to engage his Holmessystem, every moment of every day. In sodoing, he has slowly trained his quick-to-judge inner Watson to perform as hispublic outer Holmes. Through sheer forceof habit and will, he has taught his instantjudgments to follow the train of thought ofa far more reflective approach. Andbecause this foundation is in place, ittakes a matter of seconds for him to make

his initial observations of Watson’scharacter. That’s why Holmes calls itintuition. Accurate intuition, the intuitionthat Holmes possesses, is of necessitybased on training, hours and hours of it.An expert may not always realizeconsciously where it’s coming from, but itcomes from some habit, visible or not.What Holmes has done is to clarify theprocess, break down how hot can becomecool, reflexive become reflective. It’swhat Anders Ericsson calls expertknowledge: an ability born from extendedand intense practice and not some innategenius. It’s not that Holmes was born to bethe consulting detective to end allconsulting detectives. It’s that he haspracticed his mindful approach to theworld 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 newcompanion on his masterfulaccomplishment: “You have broughtdetection as near an exact science as itever will be brought in this world.” Ahigh compliment indeed. But in thefollowing pages, you will learn to do theexact same thing for your every thought,from its very inception—just as ArthurConan Doyle did in his defense of GeorgeEdalji, and Joseph Bell in his patientdiagnoses.

Sherlock Holmes came of age at a timewhen psychology was still in its infancy.We are far better equipped than he couldhave ever been. Let’s learn to put thatknowledge to good use.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“How the deuce did he know . . .” from AStudy in Scarlet, chapter 1: Mr. SherlockHolmes, p. 7.1“Before turning to those moral andmental aspects . . .” “How much anobservant man might learn . . .” “Likeall other arts, the Science of Deductionand Analysis . . .” from A Study inScarlet, chapter 2: The Science ofDeduction, p. 15.

CHAPTER TWO

The Brain Attic: What Is It andWhat’s in There?

One of the most widely held notions aboutSherlock Holmes has to do with hissupposed ignorance of Copernican theory.“What the deuce is [the solar system] tome?” he exclaims to Watson in A Study inScarlet. “You say that we go round thesun. If we went round the moon it wouldnot make a pennyworth of difference to meor to my work.” And now that he knowsthat fact? “I shall do my best to forget it,”he promises.

It’s fun to home in on that incongruitybetween the superhuman-seemingdetective and a failure to grasp a fact sorudimentary that even a child would knowit. And ignorance of the solar system isquite an omission for someone who wemight hold up as the model of thescientific method, is it not? Even the BBCseries Sherlock can’t help but use it as afocal point of one of its episodes.

But two things about that perceptionbear further mention. First, it isn’t, strictlyspeaking, true. Witness Holmes’s repeatedreferences to astronomy in future stories—in “The Musgrave Ritual,” he talks about“allowances for personal equation, as theastronomers would have it”; in “TheGreek Interpreter,” about the “obliquity ofthe ecliptic”; in “The Adventure of the

Bruce-Partington Plans,” about “a planetleaving its orbit.” Indeed, eventuallyHolmes does use almost all of theknowledge that he denies having at theearliest stages of his friendship with Dr.Watson. (And in true-to-canon form,Sherlock the BBC series does end on anote of scientific triumph: Holmes doesknow astronomy after all, and thatknowledge saves the day—and the life ofa little boy.)

In fact, I would argue that heexaggerates his ignorance precisely todraw our attention to a second—and, Ithink, much more important—point. Hissupposed refusal to commit the solarsystem to memory serves to illustrate ananalogy for the human mind that willprove to be central to Holmes’s thinking

and to our ability to emulate hismethodology. As Holmes tells Watson,moments after the Copernican incident, “Iconsider that a man’s brain originally islike a little empty attic, and you have tostock it with such furniture as youchoose.”

When I first heard the term brainattic—back in the days of firelight and theold crimson hardcover—all I couldpicture in my seven-year-old head was thecover of the black-and-white ShelSilverstein book that sat prominently onmy bookshelf, with its half-smiling,lopsided face whose forehead wasdistended to a wrinkled triangle, completewith roof, chimney, and window withopen shutters. Behind the shutters, a tinyface peeking out at the world. Is this what

Holmes meant? A small room with slopedsides and a foreign creature with a funnyface waiting to pull the cord and turn thelight off or on?

As it turns out, I wasn’t far from wrong.For Sherlock Holmes, a person’s brainattic really is an incredibly concrete,physical space. Maybe it has a chimney.Maybe it doesn’t. But whatever it lookslike, it is a space in your head, speciallyfashioned for storing the most disparate ofobjects. And yes, there is certainly a cordthat you can pull to turn the light on or offat will. As Holmes explains to Watson,“A fool takes in all the lumber of everysort that he comes across, so that theknowledge which might be useful to himgets crowded out, or at best is jumbled upwith a lot of other things, so that he has a

difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Nowthe skillful workman is very carefulindeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic.”

That comparison, as it turns out, isremarkably accurate. Subsequent researchon memory formation, retention, andretrieval has—as you’ll soon see—provenitself to be highly amenable to the atticanalogy. In the chapters that follow, wewill trace the role of the brain attic fromthe inception to the culmination of thethought process, exploring how itsstructure and content work at every point—and what we can do to improve thatworking on a regular basis.

The attic can be broken down, roughlyspeaking, into two components: structure

and contents. The attic’s structure is howour mind works: how it takes ininformation. How it processes thatinformation. How it sorts it and stores itfor the future. How it may choose tointegrate it or not with contents that arealready in the attic space. Unlike aphysical attic, the structure of the brainattic isn’t altogether fixed. It can expand,albeit not indefinitely, or it can contract,depending on how we use it (in otherwords, our memory and processing canbecome more or less effective). It canchange its mode of retrieval (How do Irecover information I’ve stored? ). It canchange its storage system (How do Ideposit information I’ve taken in: wherewill it go? how will it be marked? howwill it be integrated?). At the end, it will

have to remain within certain confines—each attic, once again, is different andsubject to its unique constraints—butwithin those confines, it can take on anynumber of configurations, depending onhow we learn to approach it.

The attic’s contents, on the other hand,are those things that we’ve taken in fromthe world and that we’ve experienced inour lives. Our memories. Our past. Thebase of our knowledge, the informationwe start with every time we face achallenge. And just like a physical attic’scontents can change over time, so too doesour mind attic continue to take in anddiscard items until the very end. As ourthought process begins, the furniture ofmemory combines with the structure ofinternal habits and external circumstances

to determine which item will be retrievedfrom storage at any given point. Guessingat the contents of a person’s attic from hisoutward appearance becomes one ofSherlock’s surest ways of determiningwho that person is and what he is capableof.

As we’ve already seen, much of theoriginal intake is outside of our control:just like we must picture a pink elephantto realize one doesn’t exist, we can’t helpbut become acquainted—if only for thebriefest of moments—with the workingsof the solar system or the writings ofThomas Carlyle should Watson choose tomention them to us. We can, however,learn to master many aspects of our attic’sstructure, throwing out junk that got in bymistake (as Holmes promises to forget

Copernicus at the earliest opportunity),prioritizing those things we want to andpushing back those that we don’t, learninghow to take the contours of our uniqueattic into account so that they don’t undulyinfluence us as they otherwise might.

While we may never become quite asadept as the master at divining a man’sinnermost thoughts from his exterior, inlearning to understand the layout andfunctionality of our own brain attic wetake the first step to becoming better atexploiting its features to their maximumpotential—in other words, to learninghow to optimize our own thought process,so that we start any given decision oraction as our best, most aware selves. Ourattic’s structure and contents aren’t therebecause we have to think that way, but

because we’ve learned over time and withrepeat practice (often unknown, butpractice nevertheless) to think that way.We’ve decided, on a certain level, thatmindful attention is just not worth theeffort. We’ve chosen efficiency overdepth. It may take just as long, but we canlearn to think differently.

The basic structure may be there forgood, but we can learn to alter its exactlinkages and building blocks—and thatalteration will actually rebuild the attic,so to speak, rewiring our neuralconnections as we change our habits ofthought. Just as with any renovation, someof the major overhauls may take sometime. You can’t just rebuild an attic in aday. But some minor changes will likelybegin to appear within days—and even

hours. And they will do so no matter howold your attic is and how long it has beensince it’s gotten a proper cleaning. Inother words, our brains can learn newskills quickly—and they can continue todo so throughout our lives, not just whenwe are younger. As for the contents: whilesome of those, too, are there to stay, wecan be selective about what we keep inthe future—and can learn to organize theattic so that those contents we do want areeasiest to access, and those we eithervalue less or want to avoid altogethermove further into the corners. We may notcome out with an altogether different attic,but we can certainly come out with onethat more resembles Holmes’s.

Memory’s Furniture

The same day that Watson first learns ofhis new friend’s theories on deduction—all of that Niagara-from-a-drop-of-waterand whatnot—he is presented with a mostconvincing demonstration of their power:their application to a puzzling murder. Asthe two men sit discussing Holmes’sarticle, they are interrupted by a messagefrom Scotland Yard. Inspector TobiasGregson requests Holmes’s opinion on apuzzler of a case. A man has been founddead, and yet, “There had been norobbery, nor is there any evidence as tohow the man met his death. There aremarks of blood in the room, but there is nowound upon his person.” Gregsoncontinues his appeal: “We are at a loss as

to how he came into the empty house;indeed, the whole affair is a puzzler.” Andwithout further ado, Holmes departs forLauriston Gardens, Watson at his side.

Is the case as singular as all that?Gregson and his colleague, InspectorLestrade, seem to think so. “It beatsanything I have seen, and I am nochicken,” offers Lestrade. Not a clue insight. Holmes, however, has an idea. “Ofcourse, this blood belongs to a secondindividual—presumably the murderer, ifmurder has been committed,” he tells thetwo policemen. “It reminds me of thecircumstances attendant on the death ofVan Jansen, in Utrecht, in the year ’34. Doyou remember the case, Gregson?”

Gregson confesses that he does not.“Read it up—you really should,” offers

Holmes. “There is nothing new under thesun. It has all been done before.”

Why does Holmes remember VanJansen while Gregson does not?Presumably, both men had at one pointbeen acquainted with the circumstances—after all, Gregson has had to trainextensively for his current position—andyet the one has retained them for his use,while for the other they have evaporatedinto nonexistence.

It all has to do with the nature of thebrain attic. Our default System Watsonattic is jumbled and largely mindless.Gregson may have once known about VanJansen but has lacked the requisitemotivation and presence to retain hisknowledge. Why should he care about oldcases? Holmes, however, makes a

conscious, motivated choice to remembercases past; one never knows when theymight come in handy. In his attic,knowledge does not get lost. He has madea deliberate decision that these detailsmatter. And that decision has, in turn,affected how and what—and when—heremembers.

Our memory is in large part the startingpoint for how we think, how ourpreferences form, and how we makedecisions. It is the attic’s content thatdistinguishes even an otherwiseidentically structured mind from itsneighbor’s. What Holmes means when hetalks about stocking your attic with theappropriate furniture is the need tocarefully choose which experiences,which memories, which aspects of your

life you want to hold on to beyond themoment when they occur. (He shouldknow: he would not have even existed aswe know him had Arthur Conan Doyle notretrieved his experiences with Dr. JosephBell from memory in creating his fictionaldetective.) He means that for a policeinspector, it would be well to rememberpast cases, even seemingly obscure ones:aren’t they, in a sense, the most basicknowledge of his profession?

In the earliest days of research, memorywas thought to be populated with so-called engrams, memory traces that werelocalized in specific parts of the brain. Tolocate one such engram—for the memoryof a maze—psychologist Karl Lashleytaught rats to run through a labyrinth. He

then cut out various parts of their braintissue and put them right back into themaze. Though the rats’ motor functiondeclined and some had to hobble or crawltheir way woozily through the twists andturns, the animals never altogether forgottheir way, leading Lashley to concludethat there was no single location thatstored a given memory. Rather, memorywas widely distributed in a connectedneural network—one that may look ratherfamiliar to Holmes.

Today, it is commonly accepted thatmemory is divided into two systems, oneshort- and one long-term, and while theprecise mechanisms of the systems remaintheoretical, an atticlike view—albeit avery specific kind of attic—may not be farfrom the truth. When we see something, it

is first encoded by the brain and thenstored in the hippocampus—think of it asthe attic’s first entry point, where youplace everything before you know whetheror not you will need to retrieve it. Fromthere, the stuff that you either activelyconsider important or that your mindsomehow decides is worth storing, basedon past experience and your pastdirectives (i.e., what you normallyconsider important), will be moved to aspecific box within the attic, into aspecific folder, in a specific compartmentin the cortex—the bulk of your attic’sstorage space, your long-term memory.This is called consolidation. When youneed to recall a specific memory that hasbeen stored, your mind goes to the properfile and pulls it out. Sometimes it pulls out

the file next to it, too, activating thecontents of the whole box or whateverhappens to be nearby—associativeactivation. Sometimes the file slips and bythe time you get it out into the light, itscontents have changed from when you firstplaced them inside—only you may not beaware of the change. In any case, you takea look, and you add anything that mayseem newly relevant. Then you replace itin its spot in its changed form. Those stepsare called retrieval and reconsolidation,respectively.

The specifics aren’t nearly as importantas the broad idea. Some things get stored;some are thrown out and never reach themain attic. What’s stored is organizedaccording to some associative system—your brain decides where a given memory

might fit—but if you think you’ll beretrieving an exact replica of what you’vestored, you’re wrong. Contents shift,change, and re-form with every shake ofthe box where they are stored. Put in yourfavorite book from childhood, and ifyou’re not careful, the next time youretrieve it there may be water damage tothe picture you so wanted to see. Throw afew photo albums up there, and thepictures may get mixed together so that theimages from one trip merge with thosefrom another one altogether. Reach for anobject more often, and it doesn’t gatherdust. It stays on top, fresh and ready foryour next touch (though who knows what itmay take with it on its next trip out).Leave it untouched, and it retreats furtherand further into a heap—but it can be

dislodged by a sudden movement in itsvicinity. Forget about something for longenough, and by the time you go to look forit, it may be lost beyond your reach—stillthere, to be sure, but at the bottom of a boxin a dark corner where you aren’t likely toever again find it.

To cultivate our knowledge actively,we need to realize that items are beingpushed into our attic space at everyopportunity. In our default state, we don’toften pay attention to them unless someaspect draws our attention—but thatdoesn’t mean they haven’t found their wayinto our attic all the same. They sneak in ifwe’re not careful, if we just passivelytake in information and don’t make aconscious effort to control our attention(something we’ll learn about a bit further

on)—especially if they are things thatsomehow pique our attention naturally:topics of general interest; things we can’thelp but notice; things that raise someemotion in us; or things that capture us bysome aspect of novelty or note.

It is all too easy to let the world comeunfiltered into your attic space, populatingit with whatever inputs may come its wayor whatever naturally captures yourattention by virtue of its interest orimmediate relevance to you. When we’rein our default System Watson mode, wedon’t “choose” which memories to store.They just kind of store themselves—orthey don’t, as the case may be. Have youever found yourself reliving a memorywith a friend—that time you both orderedthe ice cream sundae instead of lunch and

then spent the afternoon walking aroundthe town center and people-watching bythe river—only to find that the friend hasno idea what you’re talking about? It musthave been someone else, he says. Not me.I’m not a sundae type of guy. Only, youknow it was him. Conversely, have youever been on the receiving end of thatstory, having someone recount anexperience or event or moment that yousimply have no recollection of? And youcan bet that that someone is just as certainas you were that it happened just the wayhe recalls.

But that, warns Holmes, is a dangerouspolicy. Before you know it, your mindwill be filled with so much useless junkthat even the information that happened tobe useful is buried so deeply and is so

inaccessible that it might as well not evenbe there. It’s important to keep one thingin mind: we know only what we canremember at any given point. In otherwords, no amount of knowledge will saveus if we can’t recall it at the moment weneed it. It doesn’t matter if the modernHolmes knows anything about astronomyif he can’t remember the timing of theasteroid that appears in a certain paintingat the crucial moment. A boy will die andBenedict Cumberbatch will upset ourexpectations. It doesn’t matter if Gregsononce knew of Van Jansen and all hisUtrecht adventures. If he can’t rememberthem at Lauriston Gardens, they do him nogood whatsoever.

When we try to recall something, wewon’t be able to do so if there is too much

piled up in the way. Instead, competingmemories will vie for our attention. I maytry to remember that crucial asteroid andthink instead of an evening where I saw ashooting star or what my astronomyprofessor was wearing when she firstlectured to us about comets. It all dependson how well organized my attic is—how Iencoded the memory to begin with, whatcues are prompting its retrieval now, howmethodical and organized my thoughtprocess is from start to finish. I may havestored something in my attic, but whetheror not I have done so accurately and in away that can be accessed in a timelyfashion is another question altogether. It’snot as simple as getting one discrete itemout whenever I want it just because I oncestuffed it up there.

But that need not be the case.Inevitably, junk will creep into the attic.It’s impossible to be as perfectly vigilantas Holmes makes himself out to be.(You’ll learn later that he isn’t quite asstrict, either. Useless junk may end upbeing flea market gold in the right set ofcircumstances.) But it is possible to assertmore control over the memories that doget encoded.

If Watson—or Gregson, as the case maybe—wanted to follow Holmes’s method,he would do well to realize the motivatednature of encoding: we remember morewhen we are interested and motivated.Chances are, Watson was quite capable ofretaining his medical training—and theminutiae of his romantic escapades. Thesewere things that were relevant to him and

captured his attention. In other words, hewas motivated to remember.

Psychologist Karim Kassam calls it theScooter Libby effect: during his 2007trial, Lewis “Scooter” Libby claimed nomemory of having mentioned the identityof a certain CIA employee to anyreporters of government officials. Thejurors didn’t buy it. How could he notremember something so important?Simple. It wasn’t nearly as important atthe time as it was in retrospect—andwhere motivation matters most is at themoment we are storing memories in ourattics to begin with, and not afterward.The so-called Motivation to Remember(MTR) is far more important at the pointof encoding—and no amount of MTR atretrieval will be efficient if the

information wasn’t properly stored tobegin with. As hard as it is to believe,Libby may well have been telling the truth.

We can take advantage of MTR byactivating the same processes consciouslywhen we need them. When we really wantto remember something, we can make apoint of paying attention to it, of saying toourselves, This, I want to remember—and, if possible, solidifying it as soon aswe can, whether it be by describing anexperience to someone else or toourselves, if no one else is available (inessence, rehearsing it to helpconsolidation). Manipulating information,playing around with it and talking itthrough, making it come alive throughstories and gestures, may be much moreeffective in getting it to the attic when you

want it to get there than just trying to thinkit over and over. In one study, forinstance, students who explainedmathematical material after reading itonce did better on a later test than thosewho repeated that material several times.What’s more, the more cues we have, thebetter the likelihood of successfulretrieval. Had Gregson originally focusedon all of the Utrecht details at the momenthe first learned of the case—sights,smells, sounds, whatever else was in thepaper that day—and had he puzzled overthe case in various guises, he would be farmore likely to recall it now. Likewise,had he linked it to his existing knowledgebase—in other words, instead of moving afresh box or folder into his attic, had heintegrated it into an existing, related one,

be it on the topic of bloody crime sceneswith bloodless bodies, or cases from1834, or whatever else—the associationwould later facilitate a prompt response toHolmes’s question. Anything todistinguish it and make it somehow morepersonal, relatable, and—crucially—memorable. Holmes remembers thedetails that matter to him—and not thosethat don’t. At any given moment, you onlythink you know what you know. But whatyou really know is what you can recall.

So what determines what we can andcan’t remember at a specific point intime? How is the content of our atticactivated by its structure?

The Color of Bias: The Attic’s Default

Structure

It is autumn 1888, and Sherlock Holmes isbored. For months, no case of note hascrossed his path. And so the detectivetakes solace, to Dr. Watson’s greatdismay, in the 7 percent solution: cocaine.According to Holmes, it stimulates andclarifies his mind—a necessity when nofood for thought is otherwise available.

“Count the cost!” Watson tries to reasonwith his flatmate. “Your brain may, as yousay, be roused and excited, but it is apathological and morbid process whichinvolves increased tissue-change and mayat least leave a permanent weakness. Youknow, too, what a black reaction comesupon you. Surely the game is hardly worththe candle.”

Holmes remains unconvinced. “Giveme problems, give me work, give me themost abstruse cryptogram, or the mostintricate analysis,” he says, “and I am inmy own proper atmosphere. I candispense then with artificial stimulant. ButI abhor the dull routine of existence.” Andnone of Dr. Watson’s best medicalarguments will make a jot of difference (atleast not for now).

Luckily, however, in this particularinstance they don’t need to. A crisp knockon the door, and the men’s landlady, Mrs.Hudson, enters with an announcement: ayoung lady by the name of Miss MaryMorstan has arrived to see SherlockHolmes. Watson describes Mary’sentrance:

Miss Morstan entered the room with afirm step and an outward composure ofmanner. She was a blonde young lady,small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed inthe most perfect taste. There was,however, a plainness and simplicity abouther costume which bore with it asuggestion of limited means. The dresswas a sombre grayish beige, untrimmedand unbraided, and she wore a smallturban of the same dull hue, relieved onlyby a suspicion of white feather in the side.Her face had neither regularity of featurenor beauty of complexion, but herexpression was sweet and amiable, andher large blue eyes were singularlyspiritual and sympathetic. In an experienceof women which extends over manynations and three separate continents, I

have never looked upon a face which gavea clearer promise of a refined andsensitive nature. I could not but observethat as she took the seat which SherlockHolmes placed for her, her lip trembled,her hand quivered, and she showed everysign of intense inward agitation.

Who might this lady be? And whatcould she want with the detective? Thesequestions form the starting point of TheSign of Four, an adventure that will takeHolmes and Watson to India and theAndaman Islands, pygmies and men withwooden legs. But before any of that thereis the lady herself: who she is, what sherepresents, where she will lead. In a fewpages, we will examine the first encounterbetween Mary, Holmes, and Watson and

contrast the two very different ways inwhich the men react to their visitor. Butfirst, let’s take a step back to considerwhat happens in our mind attic when wefirst enter a situation—or, as in the case ofThe Sign of Four, encounter a person.How do those contents that we’ve justexamined actually become activated?

From the very first, our thinking isgoverned by our attic’s so-calledstructure: its habitual modes of thoughtand operation, the way in which we’velearned, over time, to look at and evaluatethe world, the biases and heuristics thatshape our intuitive, immediate perceptionof reality. Though, as we’ve just seen, thememories and experiences stored in anindividual attic vary greatly from personto person, the general patterns of

activation and retrieval remainremarkably similar, coloring our thoughtprocess in a predictable, characteristicfashion. And if these habitual patternspoint to one thing, it’s this: our minds lovenothing more than jumping to conclusions.

Imagine for a moment that you’re at aparty. You’re standing in a group offriends and acquaintances, chattinghappily away, drink in hand, when youglimpse a stranger angling his way into theconversation. By the time he has openedhis mouth—even before he has even quitemade it to the group’s periphery—youhave doubtless already formed anynumber of preliminary impressions,creating a fairly complete, albeitpotentially inaccurate, picture of who thisstranger is as a person. How is Joe

Stranger dressed? Is he wearing abaseball hat? You love (hate) baseball.This must be a great (boring) guy. Howdoes he walk and hold himself? Whatdoes he look like? Oh, is he starting tobald? What a downer. Does he actuallythink he can hang with someone as youngand hip as you? What does he seem like?You’ve likely assessed how similar ordifferent he is from you—same gender?race? social background? economicmeans?—and have even assigned him apreliminary personality—shy? outgoing?nervous? self-confident?—based on hisappearance and demeanor alone. Or,maybe Joe Stranger is actually JaneStranger and her hair is dyed the sameshade of blue as your childhood bestfriend dyed her hair right before you

stopped talking to each other, and youalways thought the hair was the first signof your impending break, and now all of asudden, all of these memories are cloggingyour brain and coloring the way you seethis new person, innocent Jane. You don’teven notice anything else.

As Joe or Jane start talking, you’ll fillin the details, perhaps rearranging some,amplifying others, even deleting a fewentirely. But you’ll hardly ever alter yourinitial impression, the one that started toform the second Joe or Jane walked yourway. And yet what is that impressionbased on? Is it really anything ofsubstance? You only happened toremember your ex–best friend, forinstance, because of an errant streak ofhair.

When we see Joe or Jane, each questionwe ask ourselves and each detail thatfilters into our minds, floating, so tospeak, through the little attic window,primes our minds by activating specificassociations. And those associationscause us to form a judgment aboutsomeone we have never even met, letalone spoken to.

You may want to hold yourself abovesuch prejudices, but consider this. TheImplicit Association Test (IAT) measuresthe distance between your consciousattitudes—those you are aware of holding—and your unconscious ones—those thatform the invisible framework of your attic,beyond your immediate awareness. Themeasure can test for implicit bias towardany number of groups (though the most

common one tests racial biases) bylooking at reaction times for associationsbetween positive and negative attributesand pictures of group representatives.Sometimes the stereotypical positives arerepresented by the same key: “EuropeanAmerican” and “good,” for instance, areboth associated with, say, the “I” key, and“African American” and “bad” with the“E” key. Sometimes they are representedby different ones: now, the “I” is for“African American” and “good,” while“European American” has moved to the“bad,” “E” key. Your speed ofcategorization in each of thesecircumstances determines your implicitbias. To take the racial example, if youare faster to categorize when “EuropeanAmerican” and “good” share a key and

“African American” and “bad” share akey, it is taken as evidence of an implicitrace bias.2

The findings are robust and replicatedextensively: even those individuals whoscore the absolute lowest on self-reportedmeasures of stereotype attitudes (forexample, on a four-point scale rangingfrom Strongly Female to Strongly Male,do you most strongly associate career withmale or female?) often show a differencein reaction time on the IAT that tells adifferent story. On the race-relatedattitudes IAT, about 68 percent of over 2.5million participants show a biasedpattern. On age (i.e., those who preferyoung people over old): 80 percent. Ondisability (i.e., those who favor peoplewithout any disabilities): 76 percent. On

sexual orientation (i.e., those who favorstraight people over gay): 68 percent. Onweight (i.e., those who favor thin peopleover fat): 69 percent. The list goes on andon. And those biases, in turn, affect ourdecision making. How we see the worldto begin with will impact whatconclusions we reach, what evaluationswe form, and what choices we make atany given point.

This is not to say that we willnecessarily act in a biased fashion; we areperfectly capable of resisting our brains’basic impulses. But it does mean that thebiases are there at a very fundamentallevel. Protest as you may that it’s just notyou, but more likely than not, it is. Hardlyanyone is immune altogether.

Our brains are wired for quick

judgments, equipped with back roads andshortcuts that simplify the task of taking inand evaluating the countless inputs that ourenvironment throws at us every second.It’s only natural. If we truly contemplatedevery element, we’d be lost. We’d bestuck. We’d never be able to move beyondthat first evaluative judgment. In fact, wemay not be able to make any judgment atall. Our world would become far toocomplex far too quickly. As WilliamJames put it, “If we rememberedeverything, we should on most occasionsbe as ill off as if we rememberednothing.”

Our way of looking at and thinkingabout the world is tough to change and ourbiases are remarkably sticky. But toughand sticky doesn’t mean unchangeable and

immutable. Even the IAT, as it turns out,can be bested—after interventions andmental exercises that target the very biasesit tests, that is. For instance, if you showindividuals pictures of blacks enjoying apicnic before you have them take theracial IAT, the bias score decreasessignificantly.

A Holmes and a Watson may both makeinstantaneous judgments—but the shortcutstheir brains are using could not be moredifferent. Whereas Watson epitomizes thedefault brain, the structure of our mind’sconnections in their usual, largely passivestate, Holmes shows what is possible:how we can rewire that structure tocircumvent those instantaneous reactionsthat prevent a more objective and thoroughjudgment of our surroundings.

For instance, consider the use of theIAT in a study of medical bias. First, eachdoctor was shown a picture of a fifty-year-old man. In some pictures, the manwas white. In some, he was black. Thephysicians were then asked to imagine theman in the picture as a patient whopresented with symptoms that resembled aheart attack. How would they treat him?Once they gave an answer, they took theracial IAT.

In one regard, the results were typical.Most doctors showed some degree of biason the IAT. But then, an interesting thinghappened: bias on the test did notnecessarily translate into bias in treatingthe hypothetical patient. On average,doctors were just as likely to say theywould prescribe the necessary drugs to

blacks as to whites—and oddly enough,the more seemingly biased physiciansactually treated the two groups moreequally than the less biased ones.

What our brains do on the level ofinstinct and how we act are not one andthe same. Does this mean that biasesdisappeared, that their brains didn’t leapto conclusions from implicit associationsthat occurred at the most basic level ofcognition? Hardly. But it does mean thatthe right motivation can counteract suchbias and render it beside the point in termsof actual behavior. How our brains jumpto conclusions is not how we are destinedto act. Ultimately, our behavior is ours tocontrol—if only we want to do so.

What happened when you saw JoeStranger at the cocktail party is the exact

same thing that happens even to someoneas adept at observation as Mr. SherlockHolmes. But just like the doctors whohave learned over time to judge based oncertain symptoms and disregard others asirrelevant, Holmes has learned to filter hisbrain’s instincts into those that should andthose that should not play into hisassessment of an unknown individual.

What enables Holmes to do this? Toobserve the process in action, let’s revisitthat initial encounter in The Sign of Four,when Mary Morstan, the mysterious ladycaller, first makes her appearance. Do thetwo men see Mary in the same light? Notat all. The first thing Watson notices is thelady’s appearance. She is, he remarks, arather attractive woman. Irrelevant,counters Holmes. “It is of the first

importance not to allow your judgment tobe biased by personal qualities,” heexplains. “A client is to me a mere unit, afactor in a problem. The emotionalqualities are antagonistic to clearreasoning. I assure you that the mostwinning woman I ever knew was hangedfor poisoning three children for theirinsurance-money, and the most repellentman of my acquaintance is a philanthropistwho has spent nearly a quarter of amillion upon the London poor.”

But Watson won’t have it. “In this case,however—” he interrupts.

Holmes shakes his head. “I never makeexceptions. An exception disproves therule.”

Holmes’s point is clear enough. It’s notthat you won’t experience emotion. Nor

are you likely to be able to suspend theimpressions that form almostautomatically in your mind. (Of MissMorstan, he remarks, “I think she is one ofthe most charming young ladies I evermet”—as high a compliment from Holmesas they come.) But you don’t have to letthose impressions get in the way ofobjective reasoning. (“But love is anemotional thing, and whatever isemotional is opposed to that true coldreason which I place above all things,”Holmes immediately adds to hisacknowledgment of Mary’s charm.) Youcan recognize their presence, and thenconsciously cast them aside. You canacknowledge that Jane reminds you ofyour high school frenemy, and then movepast it. That emotional luggage doesn’t

matter nearly as much as you may think itdoes. And never think that something is anexception. It’s not.

But oh how difficult it can be to applyeither of these principles—the discountingof emotion or the need to never makeexceptions, no matter how much you maywant to—in reality. Watson desperatelywants to believe the best about the womanwho so captivates him, and to attributeanything unfavorable about her to less-than-favorable circumstances. Hisundisciplined mind proceeds to violateeach of Holmes’s rules for properreasoning and perception: from making anexception, to allowing in emotion, tofailing altogether to attain that coldimpartiality 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, happymood, bantering in typical fashion with hisdetective flatmate. And rightly or wrongly,that mood will spill over into hisjudgment. It’s called the affect heuristic:how we feel is how we think. A happyand relaxed state makes for a moreaccepting and less guarded worldview.Before Watson even knows that someoneis soon to arrive, he is already set to likethe visitor.

And once the visitor enters? It’s justlike that party. When we see a stranger,our mind experiences a predictablepattern of activation, which has beenpredetermined by our past experiencesand our current goals—which includes ourmotivation—and state of being. When

Miss Mary Morstan enters 221B BakerStreet, Watson sees, “a blonde young lady,small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed inthe most perfect taste. There was,however, a plainness and simplicity abouther costume which bore with it asuggestion of limited means.” Right away,the image stirs up memories in his head ofother young, dainty blondes Watson hasknown—but not frivolous ones, mind you;ones who are plain and simple andundemanding, who do not throw theirbeauty in your face but smooth it over witha dress that is somber beige, “untrimmedand unbraided.” And so, Mary’sexpression becomes “sweet and amiable,her large blue eyes were singularlyspiritual and sympathetic.” Watsonconcludes his opening paean with the

words, “In an experience of women whichextends over many nations and threeseparate continents, I have never lookedupon a face which gave a clearer promiseof a refined and sensitive nature.”

Right away, the good doctor has jumpedfrom a color of hair and complexion and astyle of dress to a far more reachingcharacter judgment. Mary’s appearancesuggests simplicity; perhaps so. Butsweetness? Amiability? Spirituality?Sympathy? Refinement and sensitivity?Watson has no basis whatsoever for anyof these judgments. Mary has yet to say asingle word in his presence. All she hasdone is enter the room. But already a hostof biases are at play, vying with oneanother to create a complete picture of thisstranger.

In one moment, Watson has called onhis reputedly vast experience, on theimmense stores of his attic that are labeledWOMEN I’VE KNOWN, to flesh out his newacquaintance. While his knowledge ofwomen may indeed span three separatecontinents, we have no reason to believetha t his assessment here is accurate—unless, of course, we are told that in thepast, Watson has always judged awoman’s character successfully from firstglance. And somehow I doubt that’s thecase. Watson is conveniently forgettinghow long it took to get to know his pastcompanions—assuming he ever got toknow them at all. (Consider also thatWatson is a bachelor, just returned fromwar, wounded, and largely friendless.What would his chronic motivational state

likely be? Now, imagine he’d beeninstead married, successful, the toast ofthe town. Replay his evaluation of Maryaccordingly.)

This tendency is a common andpowerful one, known as the availabilityheuristic: we use what is available to themind at any given point in time. And theeasier it is to recall, the more confidentwe are in its applicability and truth. In oneof the classic demonstrations of the effect,individuals who had read unfamiliarnames in the context of a passage laterjudged those names as famous—basedsimply on the ease with which they couldrecall them—and were subsequently moreconfident in the accuracy of theirjudgments. To them, the ease of familiaritywas proof enough. They didn’t stop to

think that availability based on earlierexposure could possibly be the culprit fortheir feelings of effortlessness.

Over and over, experimenters havedemonstrated that when something in theenvironment, be it an image or a person ora word, serves as a prime, individuals arebetter able to access related concepts—inother words, those concepts have becomemore available—and they are more likelyto use those concepts as confidentanswers, whether or not they are accurate.Mary’s looks have triggered a memorycascade of associations in Watson’s brain,which in turn creates a mental picture ofMary that is composed of whateverassociations she happened to haveactivated but does not necessarilyresemble the “real Mary.” The closer

Mary fits with the images that have beencalled up—the representativenessheuristic—the stronger the impressionwill be, and the more confident Watsonwill be in his objectivity.

Forget everything else that Watson mayor may not know. Additional informationis not welcome. Here’s one question thegallant doctor isn’t likely to ask himself:how many actual women does he meetwho end up being refined, sensitive,spiritual, sympathetic, sweet, and amiable,all at once? How typical is this type ofperson if you consider the population atlarge? Not very, I venture to guess—evenif we factor in the blond hair and blueeyes, which are doubtless signs ofsaintliness and all. And how many womenin total is he calling to mind when he sees

Mary? One? Two? One hundred? What isthe total sample size? Again, I’m willingto bet it is not very large—and the samplethat has been selected is inherently abiased one.

While we don’t know what preciseassociations are triggered in the doctor’shead when he first sees Miss Morstan, mybet would be on the most recent ones (therecency effect), the most salient ones (theones that are most colorful andmemorable; all of those blue-eyed blondeswho ended up being uninteresting, drab,and unimpressive? I doubt he is nowremembering them; they may as well havenever existed), and the most familiar ones(the ones that his mind has returned tomost often—again, likely not the mostrepresentative of the lot). And those have

biased his view of Mary from the onset.Chances are, from this point forward, itwill take an earthquake, and perhaps evenmore than that, to shake Watson from hisinitial assessment.

His steadfastness will be all thestronger because of the physical nature ofthe initial trigger: faces are perhaps themost powerful cue we have—and the mostlikely to prompt associations and actionsthat 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 morecompetent?

If I were to flash these pictures at youfor as little as one-tenth of a second, youropinion would already most likely agree

with the judgments of hundreds of othersto whom I’ve shown pictures of these twoindividuals in the same way. But that’s notall: those faces you just looked at aren’trandom. They are the faces of two rivalpolitical candidates, who ran in the 2004U.S. senate election in Wisconsin. And therating you gave for competence (an indexof both strength and trustworthiness) willbe highly predictive of the actual winner(it’s the man on the left; did yourcompetence evaluation match up?). Inapproximately 70 percent of cases,competence ratings given in under asecond of exposure will predict the actualresults of political races. And thatpredictability will hold in elections thatrange from the United States to England,from Finland to Mexico, and from

Germany to Australia. From the strength ofa chin and the trace of a smile, our brainsdecide who will serve us best. (And lookat the result: Warren G. Harding, the mostperfect square-jawed president that everwas.) We are wired to do just what weshouldn’t: jump to conclusions based onsome subtle, subconscious cue that we’renot even aware of—and the repercussionsextend to situations far more serious thanWatson’s trusting too much in a client’spretty face. Unprepared, he never stands achance at that “true cold reason” thatHolmes seems to hold in the tips of hisfingers.

Just as a fleeting impression ofcompetence can form the basis of apolitical vote, so Watson’s initial

overwhelmingly positive assessment ofMary lays the foundation for further actionthat reinforces that initial view. Hisjudgments from here on out will beinfluenced strongly by the effects ofprimacy—the persistent strength of firstimpressions.

With his eyes shaded by a rosy glow,Watson is now much more likely to fallprey to the halo effect (if one element—here, physical appearance—strikes you aspositive, you are likely to see the otherelements as positive as well, andeverything that doesn’t fit will easily—and subconsciously—be reasoned away).He will also be susceptible to the classiccorrespondence bias: everything negativeabout Mary will be seen as a result ofexternal circumstances—stress, strain,

bad luck, whatever it may be—andeverything positive of her character. Shewill get credit for all that’s good, and theenvironment will shoulder blame for allthat’s bad. Chance and luck? Notimportant. The knowledge that we are, asa general rule, extremely bad at makingany sort of prediction about the future, beit for an event or a behavior? Likewiseirrelevant to his judgment. In fact, unlikeHolmes, he likely hasn’t even consideredthat possibility—or evaluated his owncompetence.

All the while, Watson will likelyremain completely unaware of the hoopsthrough which his mind is jumping tomaintain a coherent impression of Mary,to form a narrative based on discreteinputs that makes sense and tells an

intuitively appealing story. And in a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, which couldpotentially have rather perverseconsequences, his own behavior couldprompt Mary to act in a way that seems toconfirm his initial impression of her. Acttoward Mary as if she were a beautifulsaint, and she will likely respond to himwith a saintly smile. Start off thinking thatwhat you see is right; end by getting justwhat you’d expected. And all the while,you remain blissfully unaware that you’vedone anything other than remain perfectlyrational and objective. It’s a perfectillusion of validity, and its impact isincredibly difficult to shake, even incircumstances where all logic is against it.(As an example, consider thatinterviewers tend to make up their minds

about a candidate within the first fewminutes—and sometimes less—of meetingthem. And if the candidate’s subsequentbehavior paints a different picture, theyare still unlikely to alter their opinion—nomatter how damning the evidence may be.)

Let’s imagine that you need to decideon the suitability of a certain person—let’s call her Amy—as a potentialteammate. Let me tell you a bit about Amy.First, she is intelligent and industrious.

Stop right there. Chances are you arealready thinking, Okay, yes, great, shewould be a wonderful person to workwith, intelligent and industrious are boththings I’d love to see in a partner. Butwhat if I was about to continue thestatement with, “envious and stubborn”?No longer as good, right? But your initial

bias will be remarkably powerful. Youwill be more likely to discount the lattercharacteristics and to weigh the formermore heavily—all because of your initialintuition. Reverse the two, and theopposite happens; no amount ofintelligence and industriousness can savesomeone who you saw initially as enviousand stubborn.

Or consider the following twodescriptions of an individual.

intelligent, skillful, industrious, warm,determined, practical, cautiousintelligent, skillful, industrious, cold,determined, practical, cautious

If you look at the two lists, you mightnotice that they are identical, save for one

word: warm or cold. And yet, when studyparticipants heard one of the twodescriptions and were then asked to pickwhich of two traits best described theperson (in a list of eighteen pairs fromwhich they always had to choose one traitfrom each pair), the final impression thatthe two lists produced was markedlydifferent. Subjects were more likely tofind person one generous—and persontwo the opposite. Yes, you might say, butgenerosity is an inherent aspect of warmth.Isn’t it normal to make that judgment?Let’s assume that is the case. Yetparticipants went a step further in theirjudgment: they also rated person one inconsistently more positive terms thanperson two, on traits that had nothingwhatsoever to do with warmth. Not only

did they find person one more sociableand popular (fair enough), but they werealso far more likely to think him wise,happy, good natured, humorous, humane,good looking, altruistic, and imaginative.

That’s the difference a single word canmake: it can color your entire perceptionof a person, even if every otherdescriptive point remains the same. Andthat first impression will last, just asWatson’s captivation with Miss Morstan’shair, eyes, and dress will continue tocolor his evaluation of her as a humanbeing and his perception of what she isand is not capable of doing. We like beingconsistent and we don’t like being wrong.And so, our initial impressions tend tohold an outsized impact, no matter theevidence that may follow.

What about Holmes? Once Mary leavesand Watson exclaims, “What a veryattractive woman!” Holmes’s response issimple: “Is she? I did not observe.” Andthereafter follows his admonition to becareful lest personal qualities overtakeyour judgment.

Does Holmes mean, literally, that hedid not observe? Quite the contrary. Heobserved all of the same physical detailsas did Watson, and likely far more toboot. What he didn’t do was makeWatson’s judgment: that she is a veryattractive woman. In that statement,Watson has gone from objectiveobservation to subjective opinion,imbuing physical facts with emotionalqualities. That is precisely what Holmeswarns against. Holmes may even

acknowledge the objective nature of herattractiveness (though if you’ll recall,Watson begins by saying that Mary’s has“neither regularity of feature nor beauty ofcomplexion”), but he diregards theobservation as irrelevant in almost thesame breath as he perceives it.

Holmes and Watson don’t just differ inthe stuff of their attics—in one attic, thefurniture acquired by a detective and self-proclaimed loner, who loves music andopera, pipe smoking and indoor targetpractice, esoteric works on chemistry andrenaissance architecture; in the other, thatof a war surgeon and self-proclaimedwomanizer, who loves a hearty dinner anda pleasant evening out—but in the waytheir minds organize that furniture to beginwith. Holmes knows the biases of his attic

like the back of his hand, or the strings ofhis violin. He knows that if he focuses ona pleasant feeling, he will drop his guard.He knows that if he lets an incidentalphysical feature get to him, he will run therisk of losing objectivity in the rest of hisobservation. He knows that if he comestoo quickly to a judgment, he will missmuch of the evidence against it and paymore attention to the elements that are inits favor. And he knows how strong thepull to act according to a prejudgment willbe.

And so he chooses to be selective withthose elements that he allows inside hishead to begin with. That means with boththe furniture that exists already and thepotential furniture that is vying to get pastthe hippocampal gateway and make its

way into long-term storage. For we shouldnever forget that any experience, anyaspect of the world to which we bring ourattention is a future memory ready to bemade, a new piece of furniture, a newpicture to be added to the file, a newelement to fit in to our already crowdedattics. We can’t stop our minds fromforming basic judgments. We can’t controlevery piece of information that we retain.But we can know more about the filtersthat generally guard our attic’s entranceand use our motivation to attend more tothe things that matter for our goals—andgive less weight to those that don’t.

Holmes is not an automaton, as the hurtWatson calls him when he fails to sharehis enthusiasm for Mary. (He, too, willone day call a woman remarkable—Irene

Adler. But only after she has bested himin a battle of wits, showing herself to be amore formidable opponent, male orfemale, than he has ever encountered.) Hesimply understands that everything is partof a package and could just as well stemfrom character as from circumstance,irrespective of valence—and he knowsthat attic space is precious and that weshould think carefully about what we addto the boxes that line our minds.

Let’s go back to Joe or Jane Stranger.How might the encounter have played outdifferently had we taken Holmes’sapproach as a guide? You see Joe’sbaseball hat or Jane’s blue streak, theassociations—positive or negative as theymay be—come tumbling out. You’refeeling like this is the person you do or do

not want to spend some time getting toknow . . . but before our Stranger openshis mouth, you take just a moment to stepback from yourself. Or rather, step moreinto yourself. Realize that the judgments inyour head had to come from somewhere—they always do—and take another look atthe person who is making his way towardyou. Objectively, is there anything onwhich to base your sudden impression?Does Joe have a scowl? Did Jane justpush someone out of the way? No? Thenyour dislike is coming from somewhereelse. Maybe if you reflect for just asecond, you will realize that it is thebaseball hat or the blue streak. Maybe youwon’t. In either case, you will haveacknowledged, first off, that you havealready predisposed yourself to either like

or dislike someone you haven’t even met;and second, that you have admitted thatyou must correct your impression. Whoknows, it might have been right. But atleast if you reach it a second time, it willbe based on objective facts and will comeafter you’ve given Joe or Jane a chance totalk. Now you can use the conversation toactually observe—physical details,mannerisms, words. A wealth of evidencethat you will treat with the full knowledgethat you have already decided, on somelevel and at some earlier point, to lendmore weight to some signs than to others,which you will try to reweighaccordingly.

Maybe Jane is nothing like your friend.Maybe even though you and Joe don’tshare the same love of baseball, he is

actually someone you’d want to get toknow. Or maybe you were right all along.The end result isn’t as important aswhether or not you stopped to recognizethat no judgment—no matter how positiveor negative, how convincing or seeminglyuntouchable—begins with an altogetherblank slate. Instead, by the time ajudgment reaches our awareness, it hasalready been filtered thoroughly by theinteraction of our brain attics and theenvironment. We can’t consciously forceourselves to stop these judgments fromforming, but we can learn to understandour attics, their quirks, tendencies, andidiosyncrasies, and to try our best to setthe starting point back to a more neutralone, be it in judging a person or observinga situation or making a choice.

A Prime Environment: The Power ofthe Incidental

In the case of Mary Morstan or Joe andJane Stranger, elements of physicalappearance activated our biases, and theseelements were an intrinsic part of thesituation. Sometimes, however, our biasesare activated by factors that are entirelyunrelated to what we are doing—andthese elements are sneaky little fellows.Even though they may be completelyoutside our awareness—in fact, often forthat very reason—and wholly irrelevant towhatever it is we’re doing, they can easilyand profoundly affect our judgment.

At every step, the environment primesus. In the “Adventure of the CopperBeeches,” Watson and Holmes are aboard

a train to the country. As they passAldershot, Watson glances out thewindow at the passing houses.

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I criedwith all the enthusiasm of a man freshfrom 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 turnlike mine that I must look at everythingwith reference to my own special subject.You look at these scattered houses, andyou are impressed by their beauty. I lookat them, and the only thought which comesto me is a feeling of their isolation and ofthe impunity with which crime may becommitted there.”

Holmes and Watson may indeed belooking at the same houses, but what theysee is altogether different. Even if Watsonmanages to acquire all of Holmes’s skillin observation, that initial experience willstill necessarily differ. For, not only areWatson’s memories and habits whollydistinct from Holmes’s, but so, too, are theenvironmental triggers that catch his eyeand set his mind thinking along a certainroad.

Long before Watson exclaims at thebeauty of the passing houses, his mind hasbeen primed by its environment to think ina certain way and to notice certain things.While he is still sitting silently in the traincar, he notes the appeal of the scenery, an“ideal spring day, a light blue sky, fleckedwith 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.” Andthere, in the middle of the new, brightspring leaves, are the houses. Is it all thatsurprising, then, that Watson sees hisworld bathed in a pink, happy glow? Thepleasantness of his immediatesurroundings is priming him to be in apositive mindset.

But that mindset, as it happens, isaltogether extraneous in forming otherjudgments. The houses would remain thesame even if Watson were sad anddepressed; only his perception of themwould likely shift. (Might they not thenappear lonely and gloomy?) In thisparticular case, it little matters whetherWatson perceives the houses as friendly

or not. But what if, say, he were forminghis judgment as a prelude to approachingone of them, be it to ask to use a phone orto conduct a survey or to investigate acrime? Suddenly, how safe the houses arematters a great deal. Do you really want toknock on a door by yourself if there’s achance that the occupants living behindthat door are sinister and apt to commitcrime with impunity? Your judgment ofthe house had better be correct—and notthe result of a sunny day. Just as we needto know that our internal attics affect ourjudgment outside of our awareness, so,too, must we be aware of the impact thatthe external world has on those judgments.Just because something isn’t in our atticdoesn’t mean that it can’t influence ourattic’s filters in very real ways.

There is no such thing as the“objective” environment. There is onlyour perception of it, a perception thatdepends in part on habitual ways ofthinking (Watson’s disposition) and inpart on the immediate circumstances (thesunny day). But it’s tough for us to realizethe extent of the influence that our attic’sfilters have on our interpretation of theworld. When it comes to giving in to theideal spring day, unprepared Watson ishardly alone—and should hardly beblamed for his reaction. Weather is anextremely powerful prime, one that affectsus regularly even though we may havelittle idea of its impact. On sunny days, totake one example, people reportthemselves to be happier and to havehigher overall life satisfaction than on

rainy days. And they have no awareness atall of the connection—they genuinelybelieve themselves to be more fulfilled asindividuals when they see the sun shiningin a light blue sky, not unlike the one thatWatson sees from his carriage window.

The effect goes beyond simple self-report and plays out in decisions thatmatter a great deal. On rainy days,students looking at potential colleges paymore attention to academics than they doon sunny days—and for every standarddeviation increase in cloud cover on theday of the college visit, a student is 9percent more likely to actually enroll inthat college. When the weather turns gray,financial traders are more likely to makerisk-averse decisions; enter the sun, risk-seeking choice increases. The weather

does much more than set a pretty scene. Itdirectly impacts what we see, what wefocus on, and how we evaluate the world.But do you really want to base a collegechoice, a judgment of your overallhappiness (I’d be curious to see if moredivorces or breakups were initiated onrainy days than on sunny days), or abusiness decision on the state of theatmosphere?

Holmes, on the other hand, is obliviousto the weather—he has been engrossed inhis newspaper for the entire train ride. Orrather, he isn’t entirely oblivious, but herealizes the importance of focusedattention and chooses to ignore the day,much as he had dismissed Mary’sattractiveness 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’scontents change in any way as a result.Who knows how the sun would haveaffected him had he not had a case on hismind and allowed his awareness towander, but as it is, he focuses on entirelydifferent details and a wholly differentcontext. Unlike Watson, he isunderstandably anxious and preoccupied.After all, he has just been summoned by ayoung woman who stated that she hadcome to her wit’s end. He is brooding. Heis entirely consumed by the puzzle that heis about to encounter. Is it any surprisethen that he sees in the houses a reminderof just the situation that has beenpreoccupying his mind? It may not be asincidental 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 sametelegram by the troubled client? Indeed hehas. But for him that matter is far frommind. That’s the thing about primes: theway it primes you and the way it primesme may not be the same. Recall the earlierdiscussion of our internal attic structure,our habitual biases and modes of thought.Those habitual thought patterns have tointeract with the environment for the fulleffect of subtle, preconscious influenceson our thought process to take hold; and itis they that largely impact what we noticeand how that element then works its waythrough our minds.

Imagine that I’ve presented you withsets 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-calledtarget stimuli: words like lonely, careful,Florida, helpless, knits, and gullible. Dothey remind you of anything? If I lumpthem all together, they very well mightremind you of old age. But spread themout over thirty sets of five-wordcombinations, and the effect is far lessstriking—so much less so, in fact, that nota single participant who saw the sentences—of a sample of sixty, in the two originalstudies of thirty participants each—realized that they had any thematiccoherence. But that lack of awarenessdidn’t mean a lack of impact.

If you’re like one of the hundreds ofpeople on whom this particular priming

task has been used since it was originallyintroduced in 1996, several things willhave happened. You will walk slowernow than you did before, and you mayeven hunch just a little (both evidence ofthe ideomotor effect of the prime—or itsinfluence on actual physical action).You’ll perform worse on a series ofcognitive ability tasks. You’ll be slowerto respond to certain questions. You mayeven feel somehow older and wearier thanyou had previously. Why? You’ve justbeen exposed to the Florida effect: aseries of age-related stereotypes that,without your awareness, activated a seriesof nodes and concepts in your brain that inturn prompted you to think and act in acertain fashion. It’s priming at its mostbasic.

Which particular nodes were touched,however, and how the activation spreaddepends on your own attic and its specificfeatures. If, for instance, you are from aculture that values highly the wisdom ofthe elderly, while you would have stilllikely slowed down your walk, you mayhave become slightly faster at the samecognitive tasks. If, on the other hand, youare someone who holds a highly negativeattitude toward the elderly, you may haveexperienced physical effects that were theopposite of those exhibited by the others:you may have walked more quickly andstood up just a bit straighter—to provethat you are unlike the target prime. Andthat’s the point: the prime doesn’t exist ina vacuum. Its effects differ. But althoughindividuals may respond differently, they

will nevertheless respond.That, in essence, is why the same

telegram may mean something different forWatson and for Holmes. For Holmes, ittriggers the expected pattern associatedwith a mindset that is habitually set tosolve crimes. For Watson, it hardlymatters and is soon trumped by the prettysky and the chirping birds. And is thatreally such a surprise? In general, I thinkit’s safe to suppose that Watson sees theworld as a friendlier place than doesHolmes. He often expresses genuineamazement at Holmes’s suspicions, awe atmany of his darker deductions. WhereHolmes easily sees sinister intent, Watsonnotices a beautiful and sympathetic face.Where Holmes brings to bear hisencyclopedic knowledge of past crime,

and at once applies the past to the present,Watson has no such store to call upon andmust rely upon what he does know:medicine, the war, and his brief sojournwith the master detective. Add to thatHolmes’s tendency, when on an activecase and seeking to piece together itsdetails, to drift into the world of his ownmind, closing himself off to externaldistractions that are irrelevant to thesubject at hand, as compared to Watson,who is ever happy to note the beauty of aspring day and the appeal of rolling hills,and you have two attics that differ enoughin structure and content that they willlikely filter just about any input in quitedistinct fashion.

We must never forget to factor in thehabitual mindset. Every situation is a

combination of habitual and in-the-moment goals and motivation—our attic’sstructure and its current state, so to speak.The prime, be it a sunny day or an anxioustelegram or a list of words, may activateour thoughts in a specific direction, butwhat and how it activates depends onwhat is inside our attic to begin with andhow our attic’s structure has been usedover time.

But here’s the good news: a prime stopsbeing a prime once we’re aware of itsexistence. Those studies of weather andmood? The effect disappeared if subjectswere first made explicitly aware of therainy day: if they were asked about theweather prior to stating their happinesslevel, the weather no longer had animpact. In studies of the effect of the

environment on emotion, if a nonemotionalreason is given for a subject’s state, theprime effect is likewise eliminated. Forinstance, in one of the classic studies ofemotion, if you’re given a shot ofadrenaline and then you interact withsomeone who is displaying strong emotion(which could be either positive ornegative), you are likely to mirror thatemotion. However, if you are told the shotyou received will have physicallyarousing effects, the mirroring will bemitigated. Indeed, priming studies can benotoriously difficult to replicate: bring anyattention at all to the priming mechanism,and you’ll likely find the effect go down tozero. When we are aware of the reason forour action, it stops influencing us: we nowhave something else to which to attribute

whatever emotions or thoughts may havebeen activated, and so, we no longer thinkthat the impetus is coming from our ownminds, the result of our own volition.

Activating Our Brain’s Passivity

So, how does Holmes manage to extricatehimself from his attic’s instantaneous, pre-attentional judgments? How does hemanage to dissociate himself from theexternal influences that his environmentexerts on his mind at any given moment?That very awareness and presence are thekey. Holmes has made the passive stage ofabsorbing information like a leaky sponge—some gets in, some goes in one hole andright out the other, and the sponge has no

say or opinion on the process—into anactive process, the same type ofobservation that we will soon discuss indetail. And he has made that activeprocess the brain’s default setting.

At the most basic level, he realizes—asnow you do—how our thought processbegins and why it’s so important to payclose attention right from the start. If Iwere to stop you and explain every reasonfor your impressions, you may not changethem (“But of course I’m still right!”), butat least you will know where they camefrom. And gradually, you may findyourself catching your mind before itleaps to a judgment—in which case youwill be far more likely to listen to itswisdom.

Holmes takes nothing, not a single

impression, for granted. He does notallow just any trigger that happens to catchhis eye to dictate what will or won’t makeit into his attic and how his attic’s contentswill or won’t be activated. He remainsconstantly active and constantly vigilant,lest a stray prime worm its way into thewalls of his pristine mind space. Andwhile that constant attention may beexhausting, in situations that matter theeffort may be well worth it—and withtime, we may find that it is becoming lessand less effortful.

All it takes, in essence, is to askyourself the same questions that Holmesposes as a matter of course. Is somethingsuperfluous to the matter at handinfluencing my judgment at any givenpoint? (The answer will almost always be

yes.) If so, how do I adjust my perceptionaccordingly? What has influenced myfirst impression—and has that firstimpression in turn influenced others? It’snot that Holmes is not susceptible topriming; it’s that he knows its power alltoo well. So where Watson at once passesjudgment on a woman or a country house,Holmes immediately corrects hisimpression with a Yes, but . . . . Hismessage is simple: never forget that aninitial impression is only that, and take amoment to reflect on what caused it andwhat that may signify for your overall aim.Our brains will do certain things as amatter of course, whether or not we wantit to. We can’t change that. But we canchange whether or not we take that initialjudgment for granted—or probe it in

greater depth. And we should never forgetthat potent combination of mindfulness andmotivation.

In other words, be skeptical of yourselfand of your own mind. Observe actively,going beyond the passivity that is ourdefault state. Was something the result ofan actual objective behavior (before youterm Mary saintly, did you ever observeher doing something that would lead youto believe it?), or just a subjectiveimpression (well, she looked soincredibly nice)?

When I was in college, I helped run aglobal model United Nations conference.Each year we would travel to a differentcity and invite university students from allover to join in a simulation. My role was

committee chair: I prepared topics, randebates, and, at the end of the conferences,awarded prizes to the students I felt hadperformed the best. Straightforwardenough. Except, that is, when it came tothe prizes.

My first year I noticed that Oxford andCambridge went home with adisproportionate number of speakerawards. Were those students simply thatmuch better, or was there something elsegoing on? I suspected the latter. After all,representatives from the best universitiesin the world were taking part, and whileOxford and Cambridge were certainlyexceptional schools, I didn’t know thatthey would necessarily and consistentlyhave the best delegates. What was goingon? 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 reactionto each student as he spoke, noting myimpressions, the arguments that wereraised, how convincing the points were,and how persuasively they were argued.And here’s where I found something thatwas rather alarming: to my ear, the Oxfordand Cambridge students sounded smarter.Put two students next to each other, havethem say the exact same thing, and I wouldlike the one with the British accent more.It made no sense whatsoever, but in mymind that accent was clearly activatingsome sort of stereotype that then biasedthe rest of the judgment—until, as weneared the end of the conference and thetime for prize decisions approached, I

was certain that my British delegates werethe best of the lot. It was not a pleasantrealization.

My next step was to actively resist it. Itried to focus on content alone: what waseach student saying and how was hesaying it? Did it add to the discussion?Did it raise points in need of raising? Didit, on the other hand, simply reframesomeone else’s observation or fail to addanything truly substantive?

I’d be lying if I said the process waseasy. Try as I might, I kept finding myselfensnared by the intonation and accent, bythe cadence of sentences and not theircontent. And here it gets truly scary: at theend, I still had the urge to give my Oxforddelegate the prize for best speaker. Shereally was the best, I found myself saying.

And aren’t I correcting too far in theother direction if I fail to acknowledgeas much, in effect penalizing her just forbeing British? I wasn’t the problem. Myawards would be well deserved even ifthey did happen to go to an Oxfordstudent. It was everyone else who wasbiased.

Except, my Oxford delegate wasn’t thebest. When I looked at my painstakingnotes, I found several students who hadconsistently outperformed her. My notesand my memory and impression were atcomplete odds. In the end, I went with thenotes. But it was a struggle up until thelast moment. And even after, I couldn’tquite kick the nagging feeling that theOxford girl had been robbed.

Our intuitions are powerful even when

entirely inaccurate. And so it is essentialto ask, when in the grip of a profoundintuition (this is a wonderful person; abeautiful house; a worthy endeavor; agifted debater): on what is my intuitionbased? And can I really trust it—or is itjust the result of the tricks of my mind? Anobjective external check, like mycommittee notes, is helpful, but it’s notalways possible. Sometimes we just needto realize that even if we are certain wearen’t biased in any way, that nothingextraneous is affecting our judgments andchoices, chances are that we are not actingin an entirely rational or objectivefashion. In that realization—thatoftentimes it is best not to trust your ownjudgment—lies the key to improving yourjudgment to the point where it can in fact

be trusted. What’s more, if we aremotivated to be accurate, our initialencoding may have less opportunity tospiral out of control to begin with.

But even beyond the realization is theconstant practice of the thing. Accurateintuition is really nothing more thanpractice, of letting skill replace learnedheuristics. Just as we aren’t inattentive tobegin with, we aren’t born destined to actin keeping with our faulty thought habits.We just end up doing so because of repeatexposure and practice—and a lack of thesame mindful attention that Holmes makessure to give to his every thought. We maynot realize that we have reinforced ourbrains to think in a certain way, but that isin fact what we have done. And that’s boththe bad news and the good news—if we

taught our brains, we can also unteachthem, or teach them differently. Any habitis a habit that can be changed into anotherhabit. Over time, the skill can change theheuristic. As Herbert Simon, one of thefounders of what we now call the field ofjudgment and decision making, puts it,“Intuition is nothing more and nothing lessthan recognition.”

Holmes has thousands of hours ofpractice on us. His habits have beenformed 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 hispresence—but it might, in the end, bemore productive to simply becomeinspired instead. If he can do it, so canwe. It will just take time. Habits that have

been developed over such an extensiveperiod that they form the very fiber of ourminds don’t change easily.

Being aware is the first step. Holmes’sawareness enables him to avoid many ofthe faults that plague Watson, theinspectors, his clients, and hisadversaries. But how does he go fromawareness to something more, somethingactionable? That process begins withobservation: once we understand how ourbrain attic works and where our thoughtprocess originates, we are in a position todirect our attention to the things that matter—and away from the things that don’t.And it is to that task of mindfulobservation that we now turn.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“What the deuce is [the solar system] tome?” “I consider that a man’s brainoriginally is like an empty attic . . .”from A Study in Scarlet, chapter 2: TheScience of Deduction, p. 15.

“Give me problems, give me work . . .”from The Sign of Four, chapter 1: TheScience of Deduction, p. 5.

“Miss Morstan entered the room . . .”“It is of the first importance not to allowyour judgment to be biased by personalqualities.” from The Sign of Four,chapter 2: The Statement of the Case, p.13.

“ ‘Are they not fresh and beautiful?’ Icried . . .” from The Adventures ofSherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the

Copper Beeches,” p. 292.

PART TWO

CHAPTER THREE

Stocking the Brain Attic: ThePower of Observation

It was Sunday night and time for my dad towhip out the evening’s reading. Earlier inthe week we had finished The Count ofMonte Cristo—after a harrowing journeythat took several months to complete—andthe bar was set high indeed. And there, farfrom the castles, fortresses, and treasuresof France, I found myself face-to-facewith a man who could look at a newacquaintance for the first time andproclaim with utter certainty, “You have

been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” AndWatson’s reply—“How on earth did youknow that?”—was exactly how Iimmediately felt. How in the world did heknow that? The matter, it was clear to me,went beyond simple observation of detail.

Or did it? When Watson wonders howHolmes could have possibly known abouthis wartime service, he posits thatsomeone told the detective beforehand.It’s simply impossible that someone couldtell such a thing just from . . . looking.

“Nothing of the sort,” says Holmes. It isentirely possible. He continues:

I knew you came from Afghanistan. Fromlong habit the train of thoughts ran soswiftly through my mind that I arrived atthe 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. Clearlyan army doctor, then. He has just comefrom the tropics, for his face is dark, andthat is not the natural tint of his skin, forhis wrists are fair. He has undergonehardship and sickness, as his haggard facesays clearly. His left arm has beeninjured. He holds it in a stiff and unnaturalmanner. Where in the tropics could anEnglish army doctor have seen muchhardship and got his arm wounded?Clearly in Afghanistan.” The whole trainof thought did not occupy a second. I thenremarked that you came from Afghanistan,and you were astonished.

Sure enough, the starting point seems tobe observation, plain and simple. Holmeslooks at Watson and gleans at once detailsof his physical appearance, his demeanor,his manner. And out of those he forms apicture of the man as a whole—just as thereal-life Joseph Bell had done in thepresence of the astonished Arthur ConanDoyle.

But that’s not all. Observation with acapital O—the way Holmes uses the wordwhen he gives his new companion a briefhistory of his life with a single glance—does entail more than, well,observation (the lowercase kind). It’s notjust about the passive process of lettingobjects enter into your visual field. It isabout knowing what and how to observeand directing your attention accordingly:

what details do you focus on? Whatdetails do you omit? And how do you takein and capture those details that you dochoose to zoom in on? In other words,how do you maximize your brain attic’spotential? You don’t just throw any olddetail up there, if you remember Holmes’searly admonitions; you want to keep it asclean as possible. Everything we chooseto notice has the potential to become afuture furnishing of our attics—and what’smore, its addition will mean a change inthe attic’s landscape that will affect, inturn, each future addition. So we have tochoose wisely.

Choosing wisely means being selective.It means not only looking but lookingproperly, looking with real thought. Itmeans looking with the full knowledge

that what you note—and how you note it—will form the basis of any futuredeductions you might make. It’s aboutseeing the full picture, noting the detailsthat matter, and understanding how tocontextualize those details within abroader framework of thought.

Why does Holmes note the details hedoes in Watson’s appearance—and whydid his real-life counterpart Bell chooseto observe what he did in the demeanor ofhis new patient? (“You see gentlemen,”the surgeon told his students, “the manwas a respectful man but did not removehis hat. They do not in the army, but hewould have learned civilian ways had hebeen long discharged. He had an air ofauthority,” he continued, “and is obviouslyScottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is

elephantiasis, which is West Indian andnot British, and the Scottish regiments areat present in that particular land.” Andhow did he know which of the manydetails of the patient’s physicalappearance were important? That camefrom sheer practice, over many days andyears. Dr. Bell had seen so many patients,heard so many life stories, made so manydiagnoses that at some point, it all becamenatural—just as it did for Holmes. Ayoung, inexperienced Bell would havehardly been capable of the sameperspicacity.)

Holmes’s explanation is preceded bythe two men’s discussion of the article“The Book of Life” that Holmes hadwritten for the morning paper—the samearticle I referred to earlier, which

explains how the possibility of an Atlanticor a Niagara could emerge from a singledrop of water. After that aqueous start,Holmes proceeds to expand the principleto human interaction.

Before turning to those moral and mentalaspects of the matter which present thegreatest difficulties, let the inquirer beginby mastering more elementary problems.Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learnat a glance to distinguish the history of theman, and the trade or profession to whichhe belongs. Puerile as such an exercisemay seem, it sharpens the faculties ofobservation, and teaches one where tolook and what to look for. By a man’sfinger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by hisboots, by his trouser-knees, by the

callosities of his forefinger and thumb, byhis expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by eachof these things a man’s calling is plainlyrevealed. That all united should fail toenlighten the competent inquirer in anycase is almost inconceivable.

Let’s consider again how Holmesapproaches Watson’s stint in Afghanistan.When he lists the elements that allowedhim to pinpoint the location of Watson’ssojourn, he mentions, in one example ofmany, a tan in London—something that isclearly not representative of that climateand so must have been acquired elsewhere—as illustrating his having arrived from atropical location. His face, however, ishaggard. Clearly then, not a vacation, butsomething that made him unwell. And his

bearing? An unnatural stiffness in one arm,such a stiffness as could result from aninjury.

Tropics, sickness, injury: take themtogether, as pieces of a greater picture,and voilà. Afghanistan. Each observationis taken in context and in tandem with theothers—not just as a stand-alone piece butas something that contributes to an integralwhole. Holmes doesn’t just observe. Ashe looks, he asks the right questions aboutthose observations, the questions that willallow him to put it all together, to deducethat ocean from the water drop. He neednot have known about Afghanistan per seto know that Watson came from a war; hemay not have known what to call it then,but he could have well come up withsomething along the lines of, “You have

just come from the war, I perceive.” Notas impressive sounding, to be sure, buthaving the same intent.

As for profession: the category doctorp r e c e d e s military doctor—categorybefore subcategory, never the other wayaround. And about that doctor: quite aprosaic guess at a man’s profession forsomeone who spends his life dealing withthe spectacular. But prosaic doesn’t meanwrong. As you’ll note if you readHolmes’s other explanations, rarely do hisguesses of professions jump—unless withgood reason—into the esoteric, stickinginstead to more common elements—andones that are firmly grounded inobservation and fact, not based onoverheard information or conjecture. Adoctor is clearly a much more common

profession than, say, a detective, andHolmes would never forget that. Eachobservation must be integrated into anexisting knowledge base. In fact, wereHolmes to meet himself, he wouldcategor ical ly not guess his ownprofession. After all, he is the self-acknowledged only “consulting detective”in the world. Base rates—or the frequencyof something in a general population—matter when it comes to asking the rightquestions.

For now, we have Watson, the doctorfrom Afghanistan. As the good doctorhimself says, it’s all quite simple once yousee the elements that led to the conclusion.But how do we learn to get to thatconclusion on our own?

It all comes down to a single word:

attention.

Paying Attention Is Anything butElementary

When Holmes and Watson first meet,Holmes at once correctly deducesWatson’s history. But what of Watson’simpressions? First, we know he pays littleattention to the hospital—where he isheading 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 isHolmes himself. Watson’s firstimpression is shock at his strength.Holmes grips his hand “with a strength forwhich [Watson] should hardly have given

him credit.” His second is surprise atHolmes’s interest in the chemical test thathe demonstrates for the newcomers. Histhird, the first actual observation ofHolmes physically: “I noticed that [hishand] was all mottled over with similarpieces of plaster, and discoloured withstrong acids.” The first two areimpressions—or preimpressions—morethan observations, much closer to theinstinctive, preconscious judgment of JoeStranger or Mary Morstan in the priorchapter. (Why shouldn’t Holmes bestrong? It seems that Watson has jumpedthe gun by assuming him to be somehowakin to a medical student, and thussomeone who is not associated with greatphysical feats. Why shouldn’t Holmes beexcited? Again, Watson has already

imputed his own views of what does anddoes not qualify as interesting onto hisnew acquaintance.) The third is anobservation in line with Holmes’s ownremarks on Watson, the observations thatlead him to his deduction of service inAfghanistan—except that Watson onlymakes it because Holmes draws hisattention to it by putting a Band-Aid on hisfinger and remarking on that very fact. “Ihave to be careful,” he explains. “I dabblewith poisons a good deal.” The only realobservation, as it turns out, is one thatWatson doesn’t actually make until it ispointed out to him.

Why the lack of awareness, thesuperficial and highly subjectiveassessment? Watson answers for us whenhe enumerates his flaws to Holmes—after

all, shouldn’t prospective flatmates knowthe worst about each other? “I amextremely lazy,” he says. In four words,the essence of the entire problem. As ithappens, Watson is far from alone. Thatfault bedevils most of us—at least when itcomes to paying attention. In 1540, HansLadenspelder, a copperplate engraver,finished work on an engraving that wasmeant to be part of a series of seven: afemale, reclining on one elbow on apillar, her eyes closed, her head resting onher left hand. Peeking out over her rightshoulder, a donkey. The engraving’s title:“Acedia.” The series: The Seven DeadlySins.

Acedia means, literally, not caring.Sloth. A laziness of the mind that theOxford Dictionary defines as “spiritual or

mental sloth; apathy.” It’s what theBenedictines called the noonday demon,that spirit of lethargy that tempted many adevoted monk to hours of idleness wherethere should have rightly been spirituallabor. And it’s what today might pass forattention deficit disorder, easydistractibility, low blood sugar, orwhatever label we choose to put on thatnagging inability to focus on what we needto get done.

Whether you think of it as a sin, atemptation, a lazy habit of mind, or amedical condition, the phenomenon begsthe same question: why is it so damn hardto pay attention?

It’s not necessarily our fault. Asneurologist Marcus Raichle learned afterdecades of looking at the brain, our minds

are wired to wander. Wandering is theirdefault. Whenever our thoughts aresuspended between specific, discrete,goal-directed activities, the brain revertsto a so-called baseline, “resting” state—but don’t let the word fool you, becausethe brain isn’t at rest at all. Instead, itexperiences tonic activity in what’s nowknown as the DMN, the default modenetwork: the posterior cingulate cortex,the adjacent precuneus, and the medialprefrontal cortex. This baseline activationsuggests that the brain is constantlygathering information from both theexternal world and our internal states, andwhat’s more, that it is monitoring thatinformation for signs of something that isworth its attention. And while such a stateof readiness could be useful from an

evolutionary standpoint, allowing us todetect potential predators, to thinkabstractly and make future plans, it alsosignifies something else: our minds aremade to wander. That is their restingstate. Anything more requires an act ofconscious will.

The modern emphasis on multitaskingplays into our natural tendencies quitewell, often in frustrating ways. Every newinput, every new demand that we place onour attention is like a possible predator:Oooh, says the brain. Maybe I should payattention to that instead. And then alongcomes something else. We can feed ourmind wandering ad infinitum. The result?We pay attention to everything and nothingas a matter of course. While our mindsmight be made to wander, they are not

made to switch activities at anythingapproaching the speed of moderndemands. We were supposed to remainever ready to engage, but not to engagewith multiple things at once, or even inrapid succession.

Notice once more how Watson paysattention—or not, as the case may be—when he first meets Holmes. It’s not thathe doesn’t see anything. He notes“countless bottles. Broad, low tableswere scattered about, which bristled withretorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps,with their blue flickering flames.” All thatdetail, but nothing that makes a differenceto the task at hand—his choice of futureflatmate.

Attention is a limited resource. Payingattention to one thing necessarily comes at

the expense of another. Letting your eyesget too taken in by all of the scientificequipment in the laboratory prevents youfrom noticing anything of significanceabout the man in that same room. Wecannot allocate our attention to multiplethings at once and expect it to function atthe same level as it would were we tofocus on just one activity. Two taskscannot possibly be in the attentionalforeground at the same time. One willinevitably end up being the focus, and theother—or others—more akin to irrelevantnoise, something to be filtered out. Orworse still, none will have the focus andall will be, albeit slightly clearer, noise,but degrees of noise all the same.

Think of it this way. I am going topresent you with a series of sentences. For

each sentence, I want you to do twothings: one, tell me if it is plausible or notby writing a P for plausible or a N for notplausible by the sentence; and two,memorize the final word of the sentence(at the end of all of the sentences, you willneed to state the words in order). You cantake no more than five seconds persentence, which includes reading thesentence, deciding if it’s plausible or not,and memorizing the final word. (You canset a timer that beeps at every five-secondinterval, or find one online—or try toapproximate as best you can.) Lookingback at a sentence you’ve alreadycompleted is cheating. Imagine that eachsentence vanishes once you’ve read it.Ready?

She was worried about being too hot soshe took her new shawl.She drove along the bumpy road with aview to the sea.When we add on to our house, we willbuild a wooden duck.The workers knew he was not happy whenthey saw his smile.The place is such a maze it is hard to findthe right hall.The little girl looked at her toys thenplayed with her doll.

Now please write down the final wordof each sentence in order. Again, do nottry to cheat by referring back to thesentences.

Done? You’ve just completed asentence-verification and span task. How

did you do? Fairly well at first, I’mguessing—but it may not have been quiteas simple as you’d thought it would be.The mandatory time limit can make ittricky, as can the need to not only read butunderstand each sentence so that you canverify it: instead of focusing on the lastword, you have to process the meaning ofthe sentence as a whole as well. The moresentences there are, the more complex theybecome, the trickier it is to tell if they areplausible or not, and the less time I giveyou per sentence, the less likely you are tobe able to keep the words in mind,especially if you don’t have enough timeto rehearse.

However many words you can manageto recall, I can tell you several things.First, if I were to have you look at each

sentence on a computer screen—especially at those times when it was themost difficult for you (i.e., when thesentences were more complex or whenyou were nearing the end of a list), so thatyou were keeping more final words inmind at the same time—you would havevery likely missed any other letters orimages that may have flashed on thescreen while you were counting: your eyeswould have looked directly at them, andyet your brain would have been sopreoccupied with reading, processing, andmemorizing in a steady pattern that youwould have failed to grasp them entirely.And your brain would have been right toignore them—it would have distracted youtoo much to take active note, especiallywhen you were in the middle of your

given task.Consider the policeman in A Study in

Scarlet who misses the criminal becausehe’s too busy looking at the activity in thehouse. When Holmes asks him whether thestreet was empty, Rance (the policeman inquestion) says, “Well, it was, as far asanybody that could be of any good goes.”And yet the criminal was right in front ofhis eyes. Only, he didn’t know how tolook. Instead of a suspect, he saw a drunkman—and failed to note any incongruitiesor coincidences that might have told himotherwise, so busy was he trying to focuson his “real” job of looking at the crimescene.

The phenomenon is often termedattentional blindness, a process whereby afocus on one element in a scene causes

other elements to disappear; I myself liketo call it attentive inattention. The conceptwas pioneered by Ulric Neisser, the fatherof cognitive psychology. Neisser noticedhow he could look out a window attwilight and either see the external worldor focus on the reflection of the room inthe glass. But he couldn’t actively payattention to both. Twilight or reflectionhad to give. He termed the conceptselective looking.

Later, in the laboratory, he observedthat individuals who watched twosuperimposed videos in which peopleengaged in distinct activities—forinstance, in one video they were playingcards, and in the other, basketball—couldeasily follow the action in either of thefilms but would miss entirely any

surprising event that happened in theother. If, for example, they were watchingthe basketball game, they would not noticeif the cardplayers suddenly stoppedplaying cards and instead stood up toshake hands. It was just like selectivelistening—a phenomenon discovered inthe 1950s, in which people listening to aconversation with one ear would missentirely something that was said in theirother ear—except, on an apparently muchbroader scale, since it now applied tomultiple senses, not just to a single one.And ever since that initial discovery, ithas been demonstrated over and over,with visuals as egregious as people ingorilla suits, clowns on unicycles, andeven, in a real-life case, a dead deer in theroad 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 ourvisual field without knowingly doing so.Holmes admonished Watson for seeing butnot observing. He could have gone a stepfurther: sometimes we don’t even see.

We don’t even need to be activelyengaged in a cognitively demanding taskto let the world pass us by without somuch as a realization of what we’remissing. For instance, when we are in afoul mood, we quite literally see less thanwhen we are happy. Our visual cortexactually takes in less information from theoutside world. We could look at the exactsame scene twice, once on a day that hasbeen going well and once on a day thathasn’t, and we would notice less—and

our brains would take in less—on thegloomy day.

We can’t actually be aware unless wepay attention. No exceptions. Yes,awareness may require only minimalattention, but it does require someattention. Nothing happens quiteautomatically. We can’t be aware ofsomething if we don’t attend to it.

Let’s go back to the sentence-verification task for a moment. Not onlywill you have missed the proverbialtwilight for focusing too intently at thereflection in the window, but the harderyou were thinking, the more dilated yourpupils will have become. I could probablytell your mental effort—as well as yourmemory 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 theneurotransmitter norepinephrine and anarea implicated in memory retrieval, avariety of anxiety syndromes, andselective attentional processing), whichwill also tell me whether you are likely tokeep going or to give up—just by lookingat the size of your pupils.

But there is one encouraging thing: theimportance—and effectiveness—oftraining, of brute practice, isoverwhelmingly clear. If you were to dothe sentence verification regularly—assome subjects did in fact do—your pupilswould gradually get smaller; your recallwould get more natural; and, miracle ofall miracles, you’d notice those sameletters or images or whatnot that you’d

missed before. You’d probably even askyourself, how in the world did I not seethis earlier? What was previously taxingwill have become more natural, morehabitual, more effortless; in other words,easier. What used to be the purview of theHolmes system would have sneaked intothe Watson system. And all it will havetaken is a little bit of practice, a smalldose of habit formation. Your brain can beone quick study if it wants to be.

The trick is to duplicate that sameprocess, to let your brain study and learnand make effortless what was onceeffortful, in something that lacks thediscrete nature of a cognitive task like thesentence verification, in something that isso basic that we do it constantly, withoutgiving it much thought or attention: the task

of looking and thinking.Daniel Kahneman argues repeatedly

that System 1—our Watson system—ishard to train. It likes what it likes, it trustswhat it trusts, and that’s that. His solution?Make System 2—Holmes—do the workby taking System 1 forcibly out of theequation. For instance, use a checklist ofcharacteristics when hiring a candidate fora job instead of relying on yourimpression, an impression that, as you’llrecall, is formed within the first fiveminutes or less of meeting someone. Writea checklist of steps to follow when makinga diagnosis of a problem, be it a sickpatient, a broken car, writer’s block, orwhatever it is you face in your daily life,instead of trying to do it by so-calledinstinct. Checklists, formulas, structured

procedures: those are your best bet—atleast, according to Kahneman.

The Holmes solution? Habit, habit,habit. That, and motivation. Become anexpert of sorts at those types of decisionsor observation that you want to excel atmaking. Reading people’s professions,following their trains of thought, inferringtheir emotions and thinking from theirdemeanor? Fine. But just as fine are thingsthat go beyond the detective’s purview,like learning to tell the quality of foodfrom a glance or the proper chess movefrom a board or your opponent’s intentionin baseball, poker, or a business meetingfrom a gesture. If you learn first how to beselective accurately, in order toaccomplish precisely what it is you wantto accomplish, you will be able to limit

the damage that System Watson can do bypreemptively teaching it to not muck it up.The important thing is the proper,selective training—the presence of mind—coupled with the desire and themotivation to master your thought process.

No one says it’s easy. When it comesright down to it, there is no such thing asfree attention; it all has to come fromsomewhere. And every time we place anadditional demand on our attentionalresources—be it by listening to musicwhile walking, checking our email whileworking, or following five media streamsat once—we limit the awareness thatsurrounds any one aspect and our abilityto deal with it in an engaged, mindful, andproductive manner.

What’s more, we wear ourselves out.

Not only is attention limited, but it is afinite resource. We can drain it down onlyso much before it needs a reboot.Psychologist Roy Baumeister uses theanalogy of a muscle to talk about self-control—an analogy that is just asappropriate when it comes to attention:just as a muscle, our capacity for self-control has only so many exertions in itand will get tired with too much use. Youneed to replenish a muscle—actually,physically replenish it, with glucose and arest period; Baumeister is not talkingabout metaphorical energy—though apsych-you-up speech never hurt—toremain in peak form. Otherwise,performance will flag. Yes, the musclewill get bigger with use (you’ll improveyour self-control or attentional ability and

be able to exercise it for longer and longerperiods and at more complicated tasks),but its growth, too, is limited. Unless youtake steroids—the exercise equivalent of aRitalin or Adderall for superhumanattention—you will reach your limit, andeven steroids take you only so far. Andfailure to use it? It will shrink right backto its pre-exercise size.

Improving Our Natural AttentionalAbilities

Picture this. Sherlock Holmes and Dr.Watson are visiting New York (not so far-fetched—their creator spent somememorable time in the city) and decide togo to the top of the Empire State Building.

When they arrive at the observation deck,they are accosted by a quirky stranger whoproposes a contest: which of them will bethe first to spot an airplane in flight? Theycan use any of the viewing machines—infact, the stranger even gives them each astack of quarters—and look whereverthey’d like. The only consideration is whosees the plane first. How do the two goabout the task?

It may seem like an easy thing to do: anairplane is a pretty large bird, and theEmpire State Building is a pretty tallhouse, with a pretty commanding 360-degree view. But if you want to be first,it’s not as simple as standing still andlooking up (or over). What if the plane issomewhere else? What if you can’t see itfrom where you’re standing? What if it’s

behind you? What if you could have beenthe first to spot one that was farther awayif only you’d used your quarters on aviewing machine instead of standing therelike an idiot with only your naked eyes?There are a lot of what-ifs—if you want toemerge victorious, that is—but they can bemade manageable what-ifs, if you viewthem as nothing more than a few strategychoices.

Let’s first imagine how Watson wouldgo about the task. Watson, as we know, isenergetic. He is quick to act and quick tomove. And he’s also quite competitivewith Holmes—more than once, he tries toshow that he, too, can play the detectivegame; there’s nothing he likes more thanthinking he can beat Holmes on his ownturf. I’m willing to bet that he’ll do

something like the following. He won’twaste a single moment in thought (Time’sa ticking! Better move quickly). He’ll tryto cover as much ground as possible (Itcould come from anywhere! And I don’twant to be the idiot who’s left behind,that’s for sure!) and will thus likely plopcoins into as many machines as he can findand then run between them, scanning thehorizon in between sprints. He may evenexperience a few false alarms (It’s aplane! Oh, no, it’s a bird) in his desire tospot something—and when he does, he’llgenuinely think that he’s seeing a plane.And in between the running and the falsespotting, he’ll quickly run out of breath.This is horrid, he’ll think. I’m exhausted.And anyway, what’s the point? It’s astupid 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 quickcalculation on the location of the airportsand thus the most likely direction of aplane. He would even, perhaps, factor insuch elements as the relative likelihood ofseeing a plane that’s taking off or landinggiven the time of day and the likeliestapproach or takeoff paths, depending onthe answer to the former consideration. Hewould then position himself so as to focusin on the area of greatest probability,perhaps throwing a coin in a machine forgood measure and giving it a quick once-over to make sure he isn’t missinganything. He would know when a birdwas just a bird, or a passing shadow just alow-hanging cloud. He wouldn’t rush. He

would look, and he would even listen, tosee if a telltale noise might help direct hisattention to a looming jet. He might evensmell and feel the air for changing wind ora whiff of gasoline. All the while, he’d berubbing together his famous long-fingeredhands, thinking, Soon; it will come soon.And I know precisely where it willappear.

Who would win? There’s an element ofchance involved, of course, and eitherman could get lucky. But play the gameenough times, and I’d be willing to bet thatHolmes would come out on top. While hisstrategy may at first glance seem slower,not nearly as decisive, and certainly not asinclusive as Watson’s, at the end it wouldprove to be the superior of the two.

Our brains aren’t stupid. Just as weremain remarkably efficient and effectivefor a remarkable percentage of the timedespite our cognitive biases, so, too, ourWatsonian attentional abilities are as theyare for a reason. We don’t noticeeverything because noticing everything—each sound, each smell, each sight, eachtouch—would make us crazy (in fact, alack of filtering ability is the hallmark ofmany psychiatric conditions). And Watsonhad a point back there: searching for thatairplane? Perhaps not the best use of histime.

You see, the problem isn’t a lack ofattention so much as a lack of mindfulnessand direction. In the usual course ofthings, our brains pick and choose whereto focus without much conscious

forethought on our part. What we need tolearn instead is how to tell our brainswhat and how to filter, instead of lettingthem be lazy and decide for us, based onwhat they think would make for the path ofleast resistance.

Standing on top of the Empire StateBuilding, watching quietly for airplanes,Sherlock Holmes has illustrated the fourelements most likely to allow us to do justthat: selectivity, objectivity, inclusivity,and engagement.

1. Be Selective

Picture the following scene. A man passesby a bakery on his way to the office. Thesweet smell of cinnamon follows him

down the street. He pauses. He hesitates.He looks in the window. The beautifulglaze. The warm, buttery rolls. The rosydoughnuts, kissed with a touch of sugar.He goes in. He asks for a cinnamon roll.I’ll go on my diet tomorrow, he says. Youonly live once. And besides, today is anexception. It’s brutally cold and I have atough meeting in just an hour.

Now rewind and replay. A man passesby a bakery on his way to the office. Hesmells cinnamon. I don’t much care forcinnamon, now that I think about it, hesays. I far prefer nutmeg, and there isn’tany here that I can smell . He pauses. Hehesitates. He looks in the window. Theoily, sugary glaze that has likely causedmore heart attacks and blocked arteriesthan you can count. The dripping rolls,

drenched in butter—actually, it’s probablymargarine, and everyone knows you can’tmake good rolls with that. The burneddoughnuts that will sit like lumps in yourstomach and make you wonder why youever ate them to begin with. Just as Ithought, he says. Nothing here for me. Hewalks on, hurrying to his morning meeting.Maybe I’ll have time to get coffee before,he thinks.

What has changed between scenarioone and scenario two? Nothing visible.The sensory information has remainedidentical. But somehow our hypotheticalman’s mindset has shifted—and that shifthas, quite literally, affected how heexperiences reality. It has changed how heis processing information, what he ispaying attention to, and how his

surroundings interact with his mind.It’s entirely possible. Our vision is

highly selective as is—the retina normallycaptures about ten billion bits per secondof visual information, but only tenthousand bits actually make it to the firstlayer of the visual cortex, and, to top itoff, only 10 percent of the area’s synapsesis dedicated to incoming visualinformation at all. Or, to put it differently,our brains are bombarded by somethinglike eleven million pieces of data—that is,items in our surroundings that come at allof our senses—at once. Of that, we areable to consciously process only aboutforty. What that basically means is that we“see” precious little of what’s around us,and what we think of as objective seeingwould better be termed selective filtering

—and our state of mind, our mood, ourthoughts at any given moment, ourmotivation, and our goals can make it evenmore picky than it normally is.

It’s the essence of the cocktail partyeffect, when we note our name out of thedin of a room. Or of our tendency to noticethe very things we are thinking about orhave just learned at any given moment:pregnant women noticing other pregnantwomen everywhere; people noting thedreams that then seem to come true (andforgetting all of the others); seeing thenumber 11 everywhere after 9/11. Nothingin the environment actually changes—there aren’t suddenly more pregnantwomen or prescient dreams or instancesof a particular number—only your statedoes. That’s why we are so prone to the

feeling of coincidence: we forget all thosetimes we were wrong or nothing happenedand remember only the moments thatmatched—because those are the ones wepaid attention to in the first place. As oneWall Street guru cynically observed, thekey to being seen as a visionary is toalways make your predictions in opposingpairs. People will remember those thatcame true and promptly forget those thatdidn’t.

Our minds are set the way they are for areason. It’s exhausting to have the Holmessystem running on full all the time—andnot very productive at that. There’s areason we’re prone to filter out so muchof our environment: to the brain, it’snoise. If we tried to take it all in, wewouldn’t last very long. Remember what

Holmes said about your brain attic? It’sprecious real estate. Tread carefully anduse it wisely. In other words, be selectiveabout your attention.

At first glance, this may seemcounterintuitive: after all, aren’t we tryingto pay attention to more, not less? Yes, butthe crucial distinction is between quantityand quality. We want to learn to payattention better, to become superiorobservers, but we can’t hope to achievethis if we thoughtlessly pay attention toeverything. That’s self-defeating. What weneed to do is allocate our attentionmindfully. And mindset is the beginning ofthat selectivity.

Holmes knows this better than anyone.True, he can note in an instant the detailsof Watson’s attire and demeanor, the

furnishings of a room down to the mostminute element. But he is just as likely tonot notice the weather outside or the factthat Watson has had time to leave theapartment and return to it. It is notuncommon for Watson to point out that astorm is raging outside, only to haveHolmes look up and say that he hadn’tnoticed—and in Sherlock, you will oftenfind Holmes speaking to a blank wall longafter Watson has retired, or left theapartment altogether.

Whatever the situation, answering thequestion of what, specifically, you want toaccomplish will put you well on your wayto knowing how to maximize your limitedattentional resources. It will help directyour mind, prime it, so to speak, with thegoals and thoughts that are actually

important—and help put those that aren’tinto the background. Does your brainnotice the sweet smell or the grease on thenapkin? Does it focus on Watson’s tan orthe weather outside?

Holmes doesn’t theorize before he hasthe data, it’s true. But he does form aprecise plan of attack: he defines hisobjectives and the necessary elements forachieving them. So in The Hound of theBaskervilles, when Dr. Mortimer entersthe sitting room, Holmes already knowswhat he wants to gain from the situation.His last words to Watson before thegentleman’s entrance are, “What does Dr.James Mortimer, the man of science, askof Sherlock Holmes, the specialist incrime?” Holmes hasn’t yet met the man inquestion, but already he knows what his

observational goal will be. He hasdefined the situation before it even began(and has managed to examine the doctor’swalking stick to boot).

When the doctor does appear, Holmessets at once to ascertain the purpose of hisvisit, asking about every detail of thepotential case, the people involved, thecircumstances. He learns the history of theBaskerville legend, the Baskerville house,the Baskerville family. He inquires to theneighbors, the occupants of theBaskerville estate, the doctor himself,insofar as he relates to the family. He evensends for a map of the area, so that he cangather the full range of elements, eventhose that may have been omitted in theinterview. Absolute attention to everyelement that bears on his original goal: to

solve that which Dr. James Mortimer asksof Sherlock Holmes.

As to the rest of the world in betweenthe doctor’s visit and the evening, it hasceased to exist. As Holmes tells Watson atthe end of the day, “My body has remainedin this armchair and has, I regret toobserve, consumed in my absence twolarge pots of coffee and an incredibleamount of tobacco. After you left I sentdown to Stamford’s for the Ordnance mapof this portion of the moor, and my spirithas hovered over it all day. I flatter myselfthat I could find my way about.”

Holmes has visited Devonshire inspirit. What his body did, he does notknow. He isn’t even being entirelyfacetious. Chances are he really wasn’taware of what he was drinking or smoking

—or even that the air in the room hasbecome so unbreathable that Watson isforced to open all of the windows themoment he returns. Even Watson’sexcursion into the outside world is part ofHolmes’s attentional plan: he expresslyasks his flatmate to leave the apartment soas not to distract him with needless inputs.

So, noticing everything? Far from it,despite the popular conception of thedetective’s abilities. But noticingeverything that matters to the purpose athand. And therein lies the key difference.(As Holmes notes in “Silver Blaze” whenhe finds a piece of evidence that theinspector had overlooked, “I only saw itbecause I was looking for it.” Had he nothad an a priori reason for the search, henever would have noticed it—and it

wouldn’t have really mattered, not forhim, at least.) Holmes doesn’t waste histime on just anything. He allocates hisattention strategically.

So, too, we must determine ourobjective in order to know what we’relooking for—and where we’re looking forit. We already do this naturally insituations where our brains know, withoutour having to tell them, that something isimportant. Remember that party in chaptertwo, the one with that girl with the bluestreak in her hair and that guy whose nameyou can’t be bothered to remember? Well,picture yourself back in that group,chatting away. Look around and you’llnotice many groups just like yours, spreadall around the room. And just like yours,they are all chatting away. Talk, talk, talk,

talk, talk. It’s exhausting if you stop tothink about it, all this talking going onnonstop. That’s why you ignore it. Itbecomes background noise. Your brainknows how to take the environment andtune out most of it, according to yourgeneral goals and needs (specifically,dorsal and ventral regions in the parietaland frontal cortex become involved inboth goal-directed—parietal—andstimulus-driven—frontal—attentionalcontrol). At the party, it’s focusing on theconversation you are having and treatingthe rest of the words—some of which maybe at the exact same volume—asmeaningless chatter.

And all of a sudden one conversationcomes into clear focus. It’s not chatteranymore. You can hear every word. You

turn your head. You snap to attention.What just happened? Someone said yourname, or something that sounded like yourname. That was enough to signal to yourbrain to perk up and focus. Here wassomething that had relevance to you; payattention. It’s what’s known as the classiccocktail party effect: one mention of yourname, and neural systems that were sailingalong snap into action. You don’t evenhave to do any work.

Most things don’t have such nicelybuilt-in flags to alert you to theirsignificance. You need to teach your mindto perk up, as if it were hearing yourname, but absent that oh-so-clear stimulus.You need, in Holmes’s words, to knowwhat 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. Discreteelements to focus on: the sweetsthemselves (find the negative in theirappearance), the smells (why not focus onthe exhaust smell from the street instead ofthe sweet baking? or burnt coffee?), andthe overall environment (think forward tothe meeting, to the wedding and thetuxedo, instead of zoning in on the currentstimuli). I’m not saying that it’s actuallyeasy to do—but at least the top-downprocessing that needs to happen is clear.

But what about making a decision,solving a problem at work, or somethingeven more amorphous? It works the sameway. When psychologist Peter Gollwitzertried to determine how to enable people toset goals and engage in goal-directed

behavior as effectively as possible, hefound that several things helped improvefocus and performance: (1) thinkingahead, or viewing the situation as just onemoment on a larger, longer timeline andbeing able to identify it as just one point toget past in order to reach a better futurepoint; (2) being specific and settingspecific goals, or defining your end pointas discretely as possible and pooling yourattentional resources as specifically asyou can; (3) setting up if/thencontingencies, or thinking through asituation and understanding what you willdo if certain features arise (i.e., if I catchmy mind wandering, then I will close myeyes, count to ten, and refocus); (4)writing everything down instead of justthinking it in your head, so that you

maximize your potential and know inadvance that you won’t have to try to re-create anything from scratch; and (5)thinking of both repercussions—whatwould happen should you fail—and ofpositive angles, the rewards if yousucceed.

Selectivity—mindful, thoughtful, smartselectivity—is the key first step tolearning how to pay attention and make themost of your limited resources. Startsmall; start manageable; start focused.System Watson may take years to becomemore like System Holmes, and even then itmay never get there completely, but bybeing mindfully focused, it can sure getcloser. Help out the Watson system bygiving it some of the Holmes system’stools. On it’s own, it’s got nothing.

One caveat, however: you can set goalsto help you filter the world, but be carefullest you use these goals as blinders. Yourgoals, your priorities, your answer to the“what I want to accomplish” questionmust be flexible enough to adapt tochanging circumstances. If the availableinformation changes, so should you. Don’tbe afraid to deviate from a preset planwhen it serves the greater objective. That,too, is part of the observational process.

Let your inner Holmes show your innerWatson where to look. And don’t be likeInspector Alec MacDonald, or Mac, asHolmes calls him. Listen to what Holmessuggests, be it a change of course or awalk outside when you’d rather not.

2. Be Objective

In “The Adventure of the Priory School,”a valuable pupil goes missing from aboarding school. Also vanished is theschool’s German master. How could sucha calamity occur in a place of such honorand prestige, termed “without exception,the best and most select preparatoryschool in England”? Dr. ThorneycroftHuxtable, the school’s founder andprincipal, is flummoxed in the extreme. Bythe time he makes it from the north ofEngland to London, to consult with Mr.Holmes, he is so overwrought that heproceeds at once to collapse, “prostrateand insensible,” upon the bearskin hearthrug of 221B Baker Street.

Not one but two people missing—and

the pupil, the son of the Duke ofHoldernesse, a former cabinet ministerand one of the wealthiest men in England.It must certainly be the case, Huxtabletells Holmes, that Heidegger, the Germanmaster, was somehow an accomplice tothe disappearance. His bicycle is missingfrom the bicycle shed and his room bearssigns of a hasty exit. A kidnapper? Akidnapper’s accomplice? Huxtable can’tbe sure, but the man can hardly beblameless. It would be too much to chalkthe double disappearance off to somethingas simple as coincidence.

A police investigation is initiated atonce, and when a young man and boy areseen together on an early train at aneighboring station, it seems that thepolicemen have done their duty admirably.

The investigation is duly called off. Quiteto Huxtable’s chagrin, however, it soonbecomes clear that the couple in questionis altogether unrelated to thedisappearance. And so, three days afterthe mysterious events, the principal hascome to consult Mr. Holmes. Not amoment too soon, says the detective—andperhaps, several moments too late.Precious time has been lost. Will thefugitives be found before even greatertragedy occurs?

What makes up a situation like this?Answering that question is not as easy asstating a series of facts—missing boy,missing instructor, missing bike, and thelike—or even delineating each one of theaccompanying details—state of the boy’sroom, state of the instructor’s room,

clothing, windows, plants, etcetera. It alsoentails understanding something veryspecific: a situation (in its broadest sense,be it mental, physical, or something as un-situation-like as an empty room) isinherently dynamic. And you, by the veryaction of entering into it, shift it from whatit was before your arrival to somethingaltogether different.

It’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principlein action: the fact of observing changes thething being observed. Even an empty roomis no longer the same once you’re inside.You cannot proceed as if it hadn’tchanged. This may sound like commonsense, but it is actually much harder tounderstand in practice than it seems intheory.

Take, for instance, a commonly studied

phenomenon known as the white coateffect. Maybe you have an ache or a coughthat you want to check out. Maybe you aresimply overdue for your next physical.You sigh, pick up the phone, and make anappointment with your doctor. The nextday you make your way to his office. Yousit in the waiting room. Your name iscalled. You go in for your appointment.

It’s safe to assume that the you that iswalking in to get the checkup is the sameyou that placed the call, right? Wrong.Study after study has shown that for manypeople, the mere fact of entering adoctor’s office and seeing the physician—hence, the white coat—is enough tosignificantly alter vital signs. Pulse, bloodpressure, even reactions and blood workcan all change simply because you are

seeing a doctor. You may not even feelparticularly anxious or stressed. All thesame, your readings and results will havechanged. The situation has shifted throughmere presence and observation.

Recall Dr. Huxtable’s view of theevents surrounding the disappearance:there is a fugitive (the boy), anaccomplice (the tutor), and a bike stolenfor purposes of flight or deceit. Nothingmore, nothing less. What the principalreports to Holmes is fact (or so hebelieves).

But is it really? It’s psychologist DanielGilbert’s theory about believing what wesee taken a step further: we believe whatw e want to see and what our mind atticdecides to see, encode that belief insteadof the facts in our brains, and then think

that we saw an objective fact when reallywhat we remember seeing is only ourlimited perception at the time. We forgetto separate the factual situation from oursubjective interpretation of it. (One needonly look at the inaccuracy of expertwitness testimonies to see how bad weare at assessing and remembering.)Because the school’s principal at oncesuspected a kidnapping, he has noticedand reported the very details that supporthis initial idea—and hasn’t taken the timeto get the full story in the least. And yet, hehas no clue that he is doing it. As far ashe’s concerned, he remains entirelyobjective. As the philosopher FrancisBacon put it, “The human understandingwhen it has once adopted an opinion(either as being the received opinion or as

being agreeable to itself) draws all thingselse to support and agree with it.” Trueobjectivity can never be achieved—eventhe scientific objectivity of Holmes isn’tever complete—but we need tounderstand just how far we stray in orderto approximate a holistic view of anygiven situation.

Setting your goals beforehand will helpyou direct your precious attentionalresources properly. It should not be anexcuse to reinterpret objective facts tomesh with what you want or expect to see.Observation and deduction are twoseparate, distinct steps—in fact, they don’teven come one right after the other. Thinkback for a moment to Watson’sAfghanistan sojourn. Holmes stuck toobjective, tangible facts in his

observations. There was no extrapolationat first; that happened only after. And healways asked how those facts could fittogether. Understanding a situation in itsfullness requires several steps, but thefirst and most fundamental is to realizethat observation and deduction are not thesame. To remain as objective as youpossibly can.

My mother was quite young—unbelievably young, by today’s standards;average by those of 1970s Russia—whenshe gave birth to my older sister. Mysister was quite young when she gavebirth to my niece. I cannot even begin tolist the number of times that people—fromcomplete strangers to mothers ofclassmates and even waiters in restaurants—have thought they were seeing one thing

and acted according to that thought, whenin reality they were seeing somethingentirely different. My mother has beentaken for my sister’s sister. These days,she is routinely taken for my niece’smother. Not grave errors on theobserver’s part, to be sure, but errorsnonetheless—and errors which have, inmany cases, gone on to affect both theirbehavior and their subsequent judgmentsand reactions. It’s not just a question ofmixing up generations. It’s also a questionof applying modern American values tothe behavior of women in Soviet Russia—an entirely different world. In Americanlingo, Mom was a teenage mother. InRussia, she was married and not even thefirst among her friends to have a child. Itwas just the way things were done.

You think; you judge; and you don’tthink twice about what you’ve just done.

Hardly ever, in describing a person, anobject, a scene, a situation, an interactiondo we see it as just a valueless, objectiveentity. And hardly ever do we consider thedistinction—since, of course, it hardlyever matters. But it’s the rare mind thathas trained itself to separate the objectivefact from the immediate, subconscious,and automatic subjective interpretationthat follows.

The first thing Holmes does when heenters a scene is to gain a sense of whathas been going on. Who has touched what,what has come from where, what is therethat shouldn’t be, and what isn’t there thatshould be. He remains capable of extremeobjectivity 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 socareful.

Consider again the missing boy and theGerman schoolmaster. Unlike Dr.Huxtable, Holmes understands that asituation is colored by his interpretation.And so, unlike the headmaster, heentertains the possibility that the so-calledfacts are not what they seem. Theprincipal is severely limited in his searchby one crucial detail: he—along witheveryone else—is looking for a fugitiveand an accomplice. But what if HerrHeidegger is nothing of the sort? What ifhe isn’t fleeing but doing something elseentirely? The missing boy’s fathersupposes he might be helping the lad flee

to his mother in France. The principal, thathe might be conducting him to anotherlocation. The police, that they haveescaped on a train. But not a single personsave Holmes realizes that the story ismerely that. They are not to look for afleeing schoolmaster, wherever thedestination may be, but for theschoolmaster (no modifier necessary) andthe boy, and not necessarily in the sameplace. Everyone interprets the missingman as somehow involved in thedisappearance, be it as accomplice orinstigator. No one stops to consider thatthe only available evidence points tonothing beside the fact that he’s missing.

No one, that is, except for SherlockHolmes. He realizes that he is looking fora missing boy. He is also looking for a

missing schoolmaster. That is all. He letsany additional facts emerge as and whenthey may. In this more evenhandedapproach, he chances upon a fact that hascompletely passed by the school directorand the police: that the schoolmasterhasn’t fled with the boy at all and isinstead lying dead nearby, “a tall man,full-bearded, with spectacles, one glass ofwhich had been knocked out. The cause ofhis death was a frightful blow upon thehead, which had crushed in part of hisskull.”

To find the body, Holmes doesn’tdiscover any new clues; he just knows tolook at what is there in an objective light,without preconception or preformedtheories. He enumerates the steps that ledto his discovery to Watson:

“Let us continue our reconstruction. Hemeets his death five miles from the school—not by a bullet, mark you, which even alad might conceivably discharge, but by asavage blow dealt by a vigorous arm. Thelad, then, had a companion in his flight.And the flight was a swift one, since ittook five miles before an expert cyclistcould overtake them. Yet we surveyed theground 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 todo with the actual murder, nor were thereany 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 somerespect have stated it wrong. Yet you sawfor yourself. Can you suggest anyfallacy?”

Watson cannot. Instead, he suggests thatthey give up altogether. “I am at my wit’send,” he says.

“Tut, tut,” scolds Holmes. “We havesolved some worse problems. At least wehave plenty of material, if we can only useit.”

In this brief exchange, Holmes hasshown that all of the headmaster’s theorieswere misguided. There were at least threepeople, not at most two. The Germaninstructor was trying to save the boy, nothurt him or flee with him (the most likelyscenario, given his now-dead state and the

fact that he followed the initial tire tracksand had to overtake the fleeing boy;clearly, he could be neither kidnapper noraccomplice). The bike was a means ofpursuit, not stolen property for somesinister motive. And what’s more, theremust have been another bike present to aidthe escape of the boy and unidentifiedother or others. Holmes hasn’t doneanything spectacular; he has just allowedthe evidence to speak. And he hasfollowed it without allowing himself toskew the facts to conform with thesituation. In short, he has behaved with thecoolness and reflection of System Holmes,while Huxtable’s conclusions show everymarking of the hot, reflexive, leap-before-you-look school of System Watson.

To observe, you must learn to separate

situation from interpretation, yourself fromwhat you’re seeing. System Watson wantsto run away into the world of thesubjective, the hypothetical, the deductive.Into the world that would make the mostsense to you. System Holmes knows tohold back the reins.

A helpful exercise is to describe thesituation from the beginning, either outloud or in writing, as if to a stranger whoisn’t aware of any of the specifics—muchlike Holmes talks his theories through outloud to Watson. When Holmes states hisobservations in this way, gaps andinconsistencies that weren’t apparentbefore come to the surface.

It’s an exercise not unlike reading yourown work out loud to catch any errors ingrammar, logic, or style. Just like your

observations are so entwined with yourthoughts and perception that you may findit difficult, if not impossible, todisentangle the objective reality from itssubjective materialization in your mind,when you work on an essay or a story or apaper, or anything else really, you becomeso intimately acquainted with your ownwriting that you are liable to skip overmistakes and to read what the wordsshould say instead of what they do say.The act of speaking forces you to slowdown and catch those errors that areinvisible to your eyes. Your ear notesthem when your eye does not. And while itmay seem a waste of time and effort toreread mindfully and attentively, out loud,it hardly ever fails to yield a mistake orflaw that you would have otherwise

missed.It’s easy to succumb to Watson’s

conflating logic, to Huxtable’s certainty inwhat he says. But every time you findyourself making a judgment immediatelyupon observing—in fact, even if you don’tthink you are, and even if everythingseems to make perfect sense—trainyourself to stop and repeat: It isimpossible as I state it, and therefore Imust in some respect have stated itwrong. Then go back and restate it fromthe beginning and in a different fashionthan you did the first time around. Outloud instead of silently. In writing insteadof in your head. It will save you frommany errors in perception.

3. Be Inclusive

Let’s go back for a moment to The Houndof the Baskervilles. In the early chaptersof the story, Henry Baskerville, the heir tothe Baskerville estate, reports that hisboot has gone missing. But not just oneboot. Henry finds that the missing boot hasmiraculously reappeared the day after itsdisappearance—only to discover that aboot from another pair has vanished in itsstead. To Henry this is annoying butnothing more. To Sherlock Holmes it is akey element in a case that threatens todevolve into a paranormal, voodoo-theory-generating free-for-all. What toothers is a mere curiosity to Holmes isone of the more instructive points in thecase: the “hound” they are dealing with is

an actual animal, not a phantasm. Ananimal who relies on his sense of smell ina fundamental fashion. As Holmes latertells Watson, the exchange of one stolenboot for another was “a most instructiveincident, since it proved conclusively tomy mind that we were dealing with a realhound, as no other supposition couldexplain this anxiety to obtain an old bootand this indifference to a new one.”

But that’s not all. Apart from thevanishing boot, there is the issue of a moreobvious warning. While consulting withHolmes in London, Henry has receivedanonymous notes that urge him to stayaway from Baskerville Hall. Once again,to everyone but Holmes these notes arenothing more than what they seem. ForHolmes they form the second part of the

key to the case. As he tells Watson:

“It may possibly recur to your memory thatwhen I examined the paper upon which theprinted words were fastened I made aclose inspection for the water-mark. Indoing so I held it within a few inches ofmy eyes, and was conscious of a faintsmell of the scent known as whitejessamine. There are seventy-fiveperfumes, which it is very necessary that acriminal expert should be able todistinguish from each other, and caseshave more than once within my ownexperience depended upon their promptrecognition. The scent suggested thepresence of a lady, and already mythoughts began to turn toward theStapletons. Thus I had made certain of the

hound, and had guessed at the criminalbefore we ever went to the west country.”

There it is a second time: smell.Holmes doesn’t just read the note and lookat it. He also smells it. And in the scent,not in the words or the appearance, iswhere he finds the clue that helps himidentify the possible criminal. Absentsmell, two central clues of the case wouldremain unidentified—and so they do toeveryone but the detective. I am notsuggesting you go out and memorizeseventy-five perfumes. But you shouldnever neglect your sense of smell—orindeed any of your other senses—becausethey certainly won’t neglect you.

Consider a scenario where you’rebuying a car. You go to the dealer and

look at all the shining specimens sittingout on the lot. How do you decide whichmodel is the right one for you? If I ask youthat question right now, you will likely tellme that you’d weigh any number offactors, from cost to safety, appearance tocomfort, mileage to gas use. Then you’llpick the vehicle that best matches yourcriteria.

But the reality of the situation is farmore complex. Imagine, for instance, thatat the moment you’re in the lot, a manwalks by with a mug of steaming hotchocolate. You might not even rememberthat he passed, but the smell triggersmemories of your grandfather: he used tomake you hot chocolate when you spenttime together. It was your little ritual. Andbefore you know it, you’re leaving the lot

with a car like the one your grandfatherdrove—and have conveniently forgotten(or altogether failed to note) its less-than-stellar safety rating. And you very likelydon’t even know why exactly you madethe choice you did. You’re not wrong perse, but your selective remembering mightmean a choice that you’ll later regret.

Now imagine a different scenario. Thistime there’s a pervasive smell of gasoline:the lot is across the street from a gasstation. And you remember your motherwarning you to be careful around gas, thatit could catch fire, that you could get hurt.Now you’re focused on safety. You’lllikely be leaving the lot with a car that isquite 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 itis, for the most part. But it is also muchmore. Remember how in the hypotheticalforay to the top of the Empire StateBuilding, our hypothetical Holmeslistened and smelled for planes, as strangeas it seemed? Attention is about every oneof your senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste,touch. It is about taking in as much as wepossibly can, through all of the avenuesavailable to us. It is about learning not toleave anything out—anything, that is, thatis relevant to the goals that you’ve set.And it is about realizing that all of oursenses affect us—and will affect uswhether or not we are aware of theimpact.

To observe fully, to be truly attentive,we must be inclusive and not let anything

slide by—and we must learn how ourattention may shift without our awareness,guided by a sense that we’d thoughtinvisible. That jasmine? Holmes smelledthe letter deliberately. In so doing, he wasable to observe the presence of a femaleinfluence, and a particular female at that.If Watson had picked up the letter, we canbe sure he would have done no such thing.But his nose may very well have graspedthe scent even without his awareness.What then?

When we smell, we remember. In fact,research has shown that the memoriesassociated with smell are the mostpowerful, vivid, and emotional of all ourrecollections. And what we smell affectswhat we remember, how we subsequentlyfeel, and what we might be inclined to

think as a result. But smell is oftenreferred to as the invisible sense: weregularly experience it withoutconsciously registering it. A smell entersour nose, travels to our olfactory bulb, andmakes its way directly to ourhippocampus, our amygdala (an emotion-processing center), and our olfactorycortex (which not only deals with smellsbut is involved in complex memory,learning, and decision-making tasks),triggering a host of thoughts, feelings, andrecollections—yet more likely than not,we note neither smell nor memory.

What if Watson, in all of his multiple-continent-spanning womanizing, happenedto have dated a woman who wore ajasmine perfume? Let’s imagine therelationship a happy one. All of a sudden

he may have found himself seeing withadded clarity (remember, happy moodsequal wider sight), but he may also havefailed to note select details because of acertain rosy glow to the whole thing.Maybe the letter isn’t so sinister. MaybeHenry isn’t in all that much danger. Maybeit would be better to go have a drink andmeet some lovely ladies—after all, ladiesare lovely, aren’t they? And off we go.

And if the relationship had beenviolent, brutish, and short? Tunnel visionwould have set in (bad mood, limitedsight), and along with it a brushing asideof most of the elements of note. Whyshould that matter? Why should I workharder? I am tired; my senses areoverloaded; and I deserve a break. Andwhy is Henry bothering us anyway with

this nonsense? Paranormal dog, my foot.I’ve about had it.

When we are being inclusive, we neverforget that all of our senses are constantlyin play. We don’t let them drive ouremotions and decisions. Instead, weactively enlist their help—as Holmes doeswith both boot and letter—and learn tocontrol them instead.

In either of the Watson scenarios above,all of the doctor’s actions, from themoment of smelling the jasmine, will havebeen affected. And while the precisedirection of the effect is unknowable, onething is certain. Not only would he havefailed to be inclusive in his attention, buthis attention will have been hijacked bythe eponymous System Watson into asubjectivity 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 powerfullot. And if we aren’t aware of themaltogether, as so often happens, they canthreaten to take over the carefullycultivated goals and objectivity that we’vebeen working on.

Smell may be the most glaring culprit,but it is far from alone. When we see aperson, we are likely to experience theactivation of any number of stereotypesassociated with that person—though wewon’t realize it. When we touch somethingwarm or cold, we may become likewisewarm or cold in our disposition; and if weare touched by someone in a reassuringway, we may suddenly find ourselves

taking more risk or being more confidentthan we otherwise would. When we holdsomething heavy, we are more likely tojudge something (or someone) to beweightier and more serious. None of thishas anything to do with observation andattention per se, except that it can throw usoff a carefully cultivated path without ourawareness. And that is a dangerous thingindeed.

We don’t have to be a Holmes andlearn to tell apart hundreds of smells froma single whiff in order to let our senseswork for us, to allow our awareness togive us a fuller picture of a scene that wewould otherwise have. A scented note?You don’t need to know the smell torealize that it is there—and that it might bea potential clue. If you hadn’t paid

attention to the fragrance, you would havemissed the clue’s presence altogether—but you may have had your objectivityundermined nevertheless without evenbeing aware of what has taken place. Amiss ing boot? Another missing boot?Maybe it’s about a quality other than theboot’s appearance—after all, it’s the oldand ugly one that eventually disappearedfor good. You don’t need to know much torealize that there may be another sensoryclue here that would again be missed ifyou had forgotten about your other senses.In both cases, a failure to use all sensesequals a scene not seen to its fullpotential, attention that has not beenallocated properly, and subconscious cuesthat color the attention that is allocated ina way that may not be optimal.

If we actively engage each of oursenses, we acknowledge that the world ismultidimensional. Things are happeningthrough our eyes, our nose, our ears, ourskin. Each of those senses should rightlytell us something. And if it doesn’t, thatshould also tell us something: that a senseis missing. That something lacks smell, oris silent, or is otherwise absent. In otherwords, the conscious use of each sensecan go beyond illuminating the presentpart of scene and show instead that part ofa situation that is often forgotten: thatwhich isn’t there, which is not present inthe environment where by every rightfulmetric it should be. And absence can bejust as important and just as telling aspresence.

Consider the case of Silver Blaze, that

famous missing racehorse that no one cantrack down. When Holmes has had achance to examine the premises, InspectorGregson, who has failed to find somethingas seemingly impossible to miss as ahorse, asks, “Is there any point to whichyou would wish to draw my attention?”Why yes, Holmes responds, “To thecurious incident of the dog in the night-time.” But, protests the inspector, “Thedog did nothing in the night-time.” Towhich Holmes delivers the punch line:“That was the curious incident.”

For Holmes, the absence of barking isthe turning point of the case: the dog musthave known the intruder. Otherwise hewould have made a fuss.

For us, the absence of barking issomething that is all too easy to forget. All

too often, we don’t even dismiss thingsthat aren’t there; we don’t remark on themto begin with—especially if the thinghappens to be a sound, again a sense thatis not as natural a part of attention andobservation as sight. But often thesemissing elements are just as telling andjust as important—and would make just asmuch difference to our thinking—as theirpresent counterparts.

We need not be dealing with a detectivecase for absent information to play animportant role in our thought process.Take, for example, a decision to buy a cellphone. I’m going to show you two options,and I would like you to tell me which ofthem you would rather purchase. Phone A

Phone B

Wi-fi: 802.11 b/g 802.11b/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 youread on, jot down either Phone A or PhoneB. Now I’m going to describe the phonesone more time. No information has beenchanged, but some has been added.

Phone A Phone B

Wi-fi: 802.11 b/g 802.11b/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 ratherpurchase now? Again, write down youranswer. I’m now going to present theoptions a third time, again adding one new

element.

Phone A PhoneB

Wi-fi: 802.11 b/g 802.11b/g

Talk time: 12 hrs 16 hrs

Standby time: 12.5 days 14.5days

Memory: 16.0 GB 32.0GB

Cost: $100 $150

Weight: 135g 300g

Radiation (SAR): 0.79 W/kg 1.4W/kg

Now, which of the two would youprefer?

Chances are, somewhere between thesecond and third lists of data, youswitched your allegiance from Phone B toPhone A. And yet the two phones didn’tchange in the least. All that did was theinformation that you were aware of. Thisis known as omission neglect. We fail tonote what we do not perceive up front,and we fail to inquire further or to take themissing pieces into account as we makeour decision. Some information is alwaysavailable, but some is always silent—andit will remain silent unless we actively

stir it up. And here I used only visualinformation. As we move from two tothree dimensions, from a list to the realworld, each sense comes into play andbecomes fair game. The potential forneglecting the omitted increasescorrespondingly—but so does thepotential for gleaning more about asituation, if we engage actively and strivefor 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 theinspector does, he did nothing at all. Butanother is to say, as Holmes does, that thedog actively chose not to bark. The resultof the two lines of reasoning is identical:a silent dog. But the implications arediametrically opposed: passively doing

nothing, or actively doing something.Nonchoices are choices, too. And they

are very telling choices at that. Eachnonaction denotes a parallel action; eachnonchoice, a parallel choice; eachabsence, a presence. Take the well-knowndefault effect: more often than not, westick to default options and don’t expendthe energy to change, even if anotheroption is in fact better for us. We don’tchoose to contribute to a retirement fund—even if our company will match thecontributions—unless the default is set upfor contributing. We don’t become organdonors unless we are by defaultconsidered donors. And the list goes on.It’s simply easier to do nothing. But thatdoesn’t mean we’ve actually not doneanything. 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 ofour senses, to take in everything aroundus, including those things that don’t appearwhen they rightly should. It means askingquestions and making sure we getanswers. (Before I even go to buy that caror cell phone, I should ask: what are thefeatures I care about most? And then Ishould be sure that I am paying attention tothose features—and not to something elseentirely.) It means realizing that the worldis three-dimensional and multi-sensoryand that, like it or not, we will beinfluenced by our environment, so our bestbet is to take control of that influence bypaying attention to everything thatsurrounds 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 oneafter all. But it won’t be for lack of trying.All we can do is observe to the best of ourabilities and never assume anything,including that absence is the same asnothing.

4. Be Engaged

Even Sherlock Holmes makes theoccasional mistake. But normally theseare mistakes of misestimation—of aperson, in the case of Irene Adler; ahorse’s ability to stay hidden in “SilverBlaze”; a man’s ability to stay the same in“The Case of the Crooked Lip.” It is rare

indeed that the mistake is a morefundamental one: a failure of engagement.Indeed, it is only on one occasion, as faras I’m aware, that the great detective isnegligent in embodying that final elementof attentiveness, an active, present interestand involvement, an engagement in whathe is doing—and it almost costs him hissuspect’s life.

The incident takes place toward the endof “The Stock Broker’s Clerk.” In thestory, the clerk of the title, Hall Pycroft, isoffered a position as the business managerof the Franco-Midland HardwareCompany by a certain Mr. Arthur Pinner.Pycroft has never heard of the firm and isslated to begin work the following weekat a respected stockbrokerage—but thepay is simply too good to pass up. And so

he agrees to begin work the next day. Hissuspicions are aroused, however, whenhis new employer, Mr. Pinner’s brotherHarry, looks suspiciously like Mr. Arthur.What’s more, he finds that his so-calledoffice employs no other man and doesn’teven have a sign on the wall to alertpotential visitors of its existence. To top itoff, Pycroft’s task is nothing like that of aclerk: he is to copy listings out of a thickphone book. When, a week later, he seesthat Mr. Harry has the same gold tooth asdid Mr. Arthur, he can stand thestrangeness no more and so sets theproblem before Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes and Watson proceed toaccompany Hall Pycroft to the Midlands,to the office of his employer. Holmesthinks he knows just what has gone on, and

the plan is to visit the man on the pretenseof looking for work, and then confront himas Holmes is wont to do. Every detail isin place. Every aspect of the situation isclear to the detective. It’s not like thosecases where he actually needs the criminalto fill in major blanks. He knows what toexpect. The only thing he requires is theman himself.

But when the trio enters the offices, Mr.Pinner’s demeanor is not at all asexpected. Watson describes the scene.

At the single table sat the man whom wehad seen in the street, with his eveningpaper spread out in front of him, and as helooked up at us it seemed to me that I hadnever looked upon a face which bore suchmarks of grief, and of something beyond

grief—of a horror such as comes to fewmen in a lifetime. His brow glistened withperspiration, his cheeks were of the dull,dead white of a fish’s belly, and his eyeswere wild and staring. He looked at hisclerk as though he failed to recognize him,and I could see by the astonishmentdepicted upon our conductor’s face thatthis was by no means the usual appearanceof his employer.

But what happens next is even moreunexpected—and threatens to foilHolmes’s plans entirely. Mr. Pinnerattempts to commit suicide.

Holmes is at a loss. This he had notanticipated. Everything up to then is “clearenough, but what is not so clear is why atthe sight of us the rogue should instantly

walk out of the room and hang himself,”he says.

The answer comes soon enough. Theman is revived by the good Dr. Watsonand provides it himself: the paper. He hadbeen reading a newspaper—or rather,something quite specific in that paper,something that has caused him to lose hisemotional equilibrium entirely—when hewas interrupted by Sherlock and company.Holmes reacts to the news withuncharacteristic vigor. “‘The paper! Ofcourse!’ yelled Holmes in a paroxysm ofexcitement. ‘Idiot that I was! I thought somuch of our visit that the paper neverentered my head for an instant.’”

The moment the paper is mentioned,Holmes knows at once what it means andwhy it had the effect that it did. But why

did he fail to note it in the first place,committing an error that even Watsonwould have hung his head in shame atmaking? How did the System Holmesmachine become . . . a System Watson?Simple. Holmes says it himself: he hadlost interest in the case. In his mind, it wasalready solved, down to the last detail—the visit, of which he thought so much thathe decided it would be fine to disengagefrom everything else. And that’s a mistakehe doesn’t normally make.

Holmes knows better than anyone elsehow important engagement is for properobservation and thought. Your mind needsto be active, to be involved in what it’sdoing. Otherwise, it will get sloppy—andlet pass a crucial detail that almost getsthe object of your observation killed.

Motivation matters. Stop being motivated,and performance will drop off, no matterhow well you’ve been doing up until theend—even if you’ve successfully doneeverything you should have been doing upto now, the moment motivation andinvolvement flag, you slip up.

When we are engaged in what we aredoing, all sorts of things happen. Wepersist longer at difficult problems—andbecome more likely to solve them. Weexperience something that psychologistTory Higgins refers to as flow, a presenceof mind that not only allows us to extractmore from whatever it is we are doing butalso makes us feel better and happier: wederive actual, measurable hedonic valuefrom the strength of our activeinvolvement in and attention to an activity,

even if the activity is as boring as sortingthrough stacks of mail. If we have a reasonto do it, a reason that engages us andmakes us involved, we will both do itbetter and feel happier as a result. Theprinciple holds true even if we have toexpand significant mental effort—say, insolving difficult puzzles. Despite theexertion, we will still feel happier, moresatisfied, and more in the zone, so tospeak.

What’s more, engagement and flow tendto prompt a virtuous cycle of sorts: webecome more motivated and arousedoverall, and, consequently, more likely tobe productive and create something ofvalue. We even become less likely tocommit some of the most fundamentalerrors of observation (such as mistaking a

person’s outward appearance for factualdetail of his personality) that can threatento throw off even the best-laid plans of theaspiring Holmesian observer. In otherwords, engagement stimulates SystemHolmes. It makes it more likely thatSystem Holmes will step up, look overSystem Watson’s shoulder, place areassuring hand on it, and say, just as it’sabout to leap into action, Hold off aminute. I think we should look at thismore closely before we act.

To see what I mean, let’s go back for amoment to Holmes—specifically, to hisreaction to Watson’s overly superficial(and unengaged) judgment of their client in“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.”In the story, Dr. Watson demonstrates atypical System Watson approach to

observation: judging too quickly frominitial impressions and failing to correctfor the specific circumstances involved.Though in this particular case thejudgment happens to be about a person—and as it applies to people, it has aspecific name: the correspondence bias, aconcept we’ve already encountered—theprocess it illustrates goes far beyondperson perception.

After Holmes enumerates thedifficulties of the case and stresses theimportance of moving quickly, Watsonremarks, “Surely the man’s appearancewould go far with any jury?” Not so fast,says Holmes. “That is a dangerousargument, my dear Watson. You rememberthat terrible murderer, Bert Stevens, whowanted us to get him off in ’87? Was there

ever a more mild-mannered, Sundayschool young man?” Watson has to agreethat it is, in fact, so. Many times, peopleare not what they may initially be judgedto be.

Person perception happens to be aneasy illustration of the engagementprocess in action. As we go through thefollowing steps, realize that they apply toanything, not just to people, and that weare using people merely to help usvisualize a much more generalphenomenon.

The process of person perception is adeceptively straightforward one. First, wecategorize. What is the individual doing?How is he acting? How does he appear?In Watson’s case, this means thinking backto John Hector McFarlane’s initial

entrance to 221B. He knows at once (byHolmes’s prompting) that their visitor is asolicitor and a Freemason—tworespectable occupations if ever there wereany in nineteenth-century London. He thennotes some further details.

He was flaxen-haired and handsome, in awashed-out negative fashion, withfrightened blue eyes, and a clean-shavenface, with a weak, sensitive mouth. Hisage may have been about twenty-seven,his dress and bearing that of a gentleman.From the pocket of his light summerovercoat protruded the bundle of endorsedpapers which proclaimed his profession.

(Now imagine this process happeningin the exact same way for an object or

location or whatever else. Take somethingas basic as an apple. Describe it: howdoes it look? Where is it? Is it doinganything? Even sitting in a bowl is anaction.)

After we categorize, we characterize.Now that we know what he’s doing orhow he seems, what does that imply? Arethere some underlying traits orcharacteristics that are likely to havegiven rise to my initial impression orobservation? This is precisely whatWatson does when he tells Holmes,“Surely the man’s appearance would gofar with any jury.” He has taken the earlierobservations, loaded as they might be—handsome, sensitive, gentlemanly bearing,papers proclaiming his profession as asolicitor—and decided that taken together,

they imply trustworthiness. A solid,straightforward nature that no jury coulddoubt. (Think you can’t characterize anapple? How about inferring healthiness asan intrinsic characteristic because theapple happens to be a fruit, and one thatappears to have great nutritional valuegiven your earlier observations?)

Finally, we correct: Is there somethingthat may have caused the action otherthan my initial assessment (in thecharacterization phase)? Do I need toadjust my initial impressions in eitherdirection, augmenting some elements ordiscounting others? That sounds easyenough: take Watson’s judgment oftrustworthiness, or your judgment ofhealthiness, and see if it needs to beadjusted.

Except, there’s one major problem:while the first two parts of the process arenearly automatic, the last is far less so—and often never happens at all. Considerthat in the case of John McFarlane, it isnot Watson who corrects his impression.He takes it for what it is and is about tomove on. Instead, it is the ever-engagedHolmes who points out that Watson’sreasoning “is a dangerous argument.”McFarlane may or may not be able to relyon his appearance to go far with any jury.It all depends on the jury—and on theother arguments of the case. Appearancealone can be deceptive. What can youreally tell about McFarlane’strustworthiness from simply looking athim? Back to that apple: can you reallyknow it is healthy by examining its

exterior? What if this particular apple isnot only not organic, but has come from anorchard that is known to use illegalpesticides—and has not been properlywashed or handled since? Appearancescan deceive even here. Because youalready have a schema of an apple set inyour mind, you may deem it too timeconsuming and unnecessary to go anyfurther.

Why do we so often fail at this finalstage of perception? The answer lies inthat very element we were discussing:engagement.

Perception comes in two flavors,passive and active, and the distinction isnot the one you might think. In this case,System Watson is the active one, SystemHolmes, the passive. As passive

perceivers, we just observe. And by that Imean that we do not do anything else. Weare not, in other words, multitasking.Holmes the passive observer focuses allof his faculties on the subject ofobservation, in this case, John HectorMcFarlane. He listens, as is his habit,“with closed eyes and fingertips together.”The word passive can be misleading, inthat there is nothing passive about hisconcentrated perception. What is passiveis his attitude to the rest of the world. Hewill not be distracted by any other task.As passive observers, we are not doinganything else; we are focused onobserving. A better term in my mindwould be engaged passivity: a state that isthe epitome of engagement but happens tobe 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 (andeven when we do, we don’t often chooseto do so). When we are in a socialenvironment, which defines mostsituations, we can’t just stand back andwatch. Instead, we are in a state of defacto multitasking, trying to navigate thecomplexities of social interaction at thesame time as we make attributionaljudgments, be it about people, things, orenvironments. Active perception doesn’tmean active in the sense of present andengaged. Active perception means that theperceiver is, literally, active: doing manythings at once. Active perception isSystem Watson trying to run all over theplace and not miss a thing. It is the Watson

who not only examines his visitor, butworries about the doorbell, thenewspaper, when lunch will be served,how Holmes is feeling, all in the samemoment. A better term here would bedisengaged activity: a state where youseem to be active and productive, but areactually doing nothing to its fullestpotential, spreading thin your attentionalresources.

What separates Holmes from Watson,the passive observer from the active one,engaged passivity from disengagedactivity, is precisely the descriptor I’veused in both cases: engagement. Flow.Motivation. Interest. Call it what you may.That thing that keeps Holmes focusedexclusively on his visitor, that enraptureshim 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 todemonstrate that active perceiverscategorize and characterize on a near-subconscious level, automatically andwithout much thought, but then fail toimplement the final step of correction—even when they have all of the informationto do so—and so end up with animpression of someone that does not takeinto account all of the variables of theinteraction. Like Watson, they rememberonly that a jury would like a man’sappearance; unlike Holmes, they fail totake into account those factors that mightmake that appearance a deceptive one—orthose circumstances under which a jurywould dismiss any appearance, no matter

how trustworthy, as false (like additionalevidence so weighty it renders allsubjective aspects of the case largelyirrelevant).

In the first study, the researchers testedwhether individuals who were cognitively“busy,” or multitasking in the way that weoften are when we juggle numerouselements of a situation, would be able tocorrect initial impressions by making thenecessary adjustment. A group ofparticipants was asked to watch a seriesof seven video clips in which a womanwas having a conversation with a stranger.The clips did not have sound, ostensiblyto protect the privacy of those speaking,but did include subtitles at the bottom ofeach clip that told participants the topic ofconversation. 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 samevideos, two elements differed: thesubtitles and the task that the participantswere expected to perform. In onecondition, the five anxious clips werepaired with anxiety-provoking topics,such as sex life, while in the other, allseven clips were paired with neutraltopics like world travel (in other words,the five clips of anxious behavior wouldseem incongruous given the relaxingsubject). And within each of theseconditions, half of the participants weretold that they would be rating the womanin the video on some personalitydimensions, while the other half wasexpected to both rate personality and be

able to recall the seven topics ofconversation in order.

What the researchers found came as noshock to them, but it did shake up the wayperson perception—the way we viewother people—had always been seen.While those individuals who had to focusonly on the woman adjusted for thesituation, rating her as dispositionallymore anxious in the neutral topic conditionand as less anxious in the anxiety-inducingtopic condition, those who had to recallthe conversation topics completely failedto take those topics into account in theirjudgment of the woman’s anxiety. Theyhad all of the information they needed tomake the judgment, but they never thoughtto use it. So even though they knew that thesituation would make anyone anxious in

theory, in practice they simply decidedthat the woman was a generally anxiousperson. What’s more, they predicted thatshe would continue to be anxious in futurescenarios, regardless of how anxiety-provoking those scenarios were. And thebetter they recalled the topics ofconversation, the more extremely off theirpredictions were. In other words, thebusier their brains were, the less theyadjusted after forming an initialimpression.

The news here is both good and bad.First, the obviously bad: in mostsituations, under most circumstances, weare active observers, and as such, morelikely than not to make the error ofunconsciously, automatically categorizingand characterizing, and then failing to

correct that initial impression. And so wego by appearances; we forget to be subtle;we forget how easily a person can beinfluenced at any given point by myriadforces, internal and external. Incidentally,this works whether or not you tend, asmost Westerners do, to infer stable traitsover passing states, or, as many Easterncultures do, to infer states over traits;whatever direction you err in, you willfail to adjust.

But there’s good news. Study afterstudy shows that individuals who aremotivated correct more naturally—andmore correctly, so to speak—than thosewho are not. In other words, we have toboth realize that we tend to formautopilot-like judgments and then fail toadjust them, and we have to want,

actively, to be more accurate. In onestudy, psychologist Douglas Krull used thesame initial setup as the Harvard anxietyresearch—but gave some participants anadditional goal: estimate the amount ofanxiety caused by the interview questions.Those who regarded the situation were farless likely to decide that the woman wassimply an anxious person—even whenthey were busy with the cognitiverehearsal task.

Or, let’s take another commonly usedparadigm: the political statement that isassigned to a subject rather thandeliberately chosen. Take capitalpunishment (since we’ve mentioned thatsame issue in the past, and it fits nicelyinto Holmes’s criminal world; it’s alsooften used in these experimental settings).

Now, you might have one of three, broadlyspeaking, attitudes toward the deathpenalty: you might be for it, you might beagainst it, or you might not particularlycare, or not really know, or have neverreally given it much thought. If I were togive you a brief article with argumentsthat support capital punishment, howwould you respond to it?

The answer is, it depends. If you don’tparticularly know or care one way or theother—if you are more disinterested ordisengaged—you are more likely than notto take the article at something like facevalue. If you have no real reason to doubtthe source and it seems logical enough,you are likely to let it persuade you. Youwill categorize and characterize, but therewill be little need for correction.

Correction takes effort, and you have nopersonal reason to exert any. Contrast thiswith your reaction if you are a passionateopponent/proponent of the death penalty.In either case, you will pay attention at themere mention of the theme of the article.You will read it much more carefully, andyou will expend the effort necessary forcorrection. The correction may not be thesame if you agree as if you disagree—infact, you may even overcorrect if youoppose the article’s points, going too farin the opposite direction—but whateverthe case, you will engage much moreactively, and you will exert the mentaleffort that is necessary to challenge yourinitial impressions. Because it matters toyou to get it right.

(I chose a political issue on purpose, to

illustrate that the context need not berelated to people, but just think what adifference in perception there would be ifyou met for the first time a random personversus someone you knew was going to beinterviewing or somehow evaluating youshortly. In which case are you more likelyto be careful about your impressions, lestyou be wrong? In which will you expendmore effort to correct and recalibrate?)

When you feel strong personalengagement with something, you will feelit is worth that extra push. And if you areengaged in the process itself—in the ideaof observing more carefully, being moreattentive and alert—you will be that muchmore likely to challenge yourself toaccuracy. Of course, you need to be awareof the process to begin with—but now you

are. And if you realize that you shouldengage but don’t feel up to it?Psychologist Arie Kruglanski has spenthis career studying a phenomenon knownas the Need for Closure: a desire of themind to come to some definitiveknowledge of an issue. Beyond exploringhow individuals differ in that need,Kruglanski has demonstrated that we canmanipulate it in order to be more attentiveand engaged—and to make sure wecomplete the correction stage in ourjudgments.

This can be accomplished in severalways. Most effectively, if we are made tofeel accountable in our judgments, we willspend more time looking at angles andpossibilities before making up our minds—and so will expend the correctional

effort on any initial impressions, to makesure they are accurate. Our minds won’t“close” (or, as Kruglanski calls it,“freeze”) in their search until we arefairly sure we’ve done all we can. Whilethere isn’t always an experimenter there tohold us accountable, we can do it forourselves by setting up each importantjudgment or observation as a challenge.How accurate can I be? How well can Ido? Can I improve my ability to payattention over the last time? Suchchallenges not only engage us in the taskof observation and make it moreintrinsically interesting, but they alsomake us less likely to jump to conclusionsand issue judgments without a lot of priorthought.

The active observer is hampered

because he is trying to do too many thingsat once. If he is in a social psychologyexperiment and forced to remember seventopics in order, or a string of digits, or anynumber of things that psychologists like touse to ensure cognitive busyness, he isbasically doomed. Why? Because theexperiments are forcibly preventingengagement. You cannot engage—unlessyou have eidetic memory or have read upon your memory palace skills—if you aretrying desperately to remember unrelatedinformation (actually, even if it’s relatedinformation; the point is, your resourcesare engaged elsewhere).

But I have news for you: our life is nota social psychology experiment. We arenever required to be active observers. Noone is asking us to recall, in exact order, a

conversation or to make a speech of whichwe hadn’t been aware previously. No oneis forcing us to limit our engagement. Theonly ones that do that is us, ourselves. Beit because we’ve lost interest, as Holmesdid with Mr. Pycroft’s case, or becausewe’re too busy thinking about a jury trialin the future to focus on the man in thepresent, like Watson, when we disengagefrom a person or a situation it is ourprerogative. We can just as well not do it.

When we want to engage, believe me,we can. And not only will we then makefewer mistakes of perception, but we willbecome the types of focused, observantpeople that we may have thought we wereincapable of becoming. Even childrenwho have been diagnosed with ADHD canfind themselves able to focus on certain

things that grab them, that activate andengage their minds. Like video games.Time after time, video games have provenable to bring out the attentional resourcesin people that they never suspected theyhad. And what’s more, the kind ofsustained attention and newfoundappreciation of detail that emerges fromthe process of engagement can thentransfer to other domains, beyond thescreen. Cognitive neuroscientists DaphnéBavelier and C. Shawn Green, forinstance, have found repeatedly that so-called “action” video games—gamescharacterized by high speed, highperceptual and motor load,upredictability, and the need forperipheral processing—enhance visualattention, low-level vision, processing

speed, attentional, cognitive, and socialcontrol, and a number of other facultiesacross domains as varied as the pilotingof unmanned drones and laparoscopicsurgery. The brain can actually change andlearn to sustain attention in a moreprolonged fashion—and all because ofmoments of engagement in something thatactually mattered.

We began the chapter with mindwandering, and that is where we will endit. Mind wandering is anathema toengagement. Be it mind wandering fromlack of stimulation, mind wandering frommultitasking (basically, most of modernexistence), or mind wandering because ofa forced laboratory paradigm, it cannotcoexist with engagement. And so, it cannotcoexist with mindful attention, the

Attention that we need for Observation.And yet we constantly make the active

choice to disengage. We listen to ourheadphones as we walk, run, take thesubway. We check our phones when weare having dinner with our friends andfamily. We think of the next meeting whilewe are in the current one. In short, weoccupy our minds with self-madememorization topics or distracting stringsof numbers. The Daniel Gilberts of theworld don’t need to do it for us. In fact,Dan Gilbert himself tracked a group ofover 2,200 adults in their regular daysthrough iPhone alerts, asking them toreport on how they were feeling, whatthey were doing, and whether or not theywere thinking of something other than theactivity they had been involved in when

they received the alert. And you knowwhat he found? Not only do people thinkabout something other than what they’redoing about as often as they think aboutwhat they are doing—46.9 percent of thetime, to be exact—but what they areactually doing doesn’t seem to make adifference; minds wander about equally nomatter how seemingly interesting andengaging or boring and dull the activity.

An observant mind, an attentive mind,is a present mind. It is a mind that isn’twandering. It is a mind that is activelyengaged in whatever it is that it happens tobe doing. And it is a mind that allowsSystem Holmes to step up, instead ofletting System Watson run around likecrazy, trying to do it all and see it all.

I know a psychology professor who

turns off her email and Internet access fortwo hours every day, to focus exclusivelyon her writing. I think there’s much tolearn from that self-enforced disciplineand distance. It’s certainly an approach Iwish I took more often than I do. Considerthe results of a recent nature interventionby a neuroscientist who wanted todemonstrate what could happen if peopletook three days to be completely wirelessin the wild: creativity, clarity in thought, areboot of sorts of the brain. We can’t allafford a three-day wilderness excursion,but maybe, just maybe, we can afford afew hours here and there where we canmake a conscious choice: focus.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“I noticed that [his hand] was allmottled over . . .” “You have been inAfghanistan, I perceive.” from A Study inScarlet, chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes,p. 7.

“I knew you came from Afghanistan.”“Before turning to those moral andmental aspects . . .” from A Study inScarlet, chapter 2: The Science ofDeduction, p. 15.

“What does Dr. James Mortimer, theman of science, ask of Sherlock Holmes,the specialist in crime?” from TheHound of the Baskervilles, chapter 1: Mr.Sherlock Holmes, p. 5.

“My body has remained in thisarmchair . . .” from The Hound of theBaskervilles, 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 memorythat when I examined the paper uponwhich the printed words were fastened . ..” from The Hound of the Baskervilles,chapter 15: A Retrospection, p. 156.

“Is there any point to which you wouldwish to draw my attention?” from TheMemoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “SilverBlaze,” p. 1.

“At the single table sat the man whomwe had seen in the street . . .” from TheMemoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “TheStockbroker’s Clerk,” p. 51.

“Surely the man’s appearance wouldgo far with any jury?” from The Return

of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure ofthe Norwood Builder,” p. 829.

CHAPTER FOUR

Exploring the Brain Attic: TheValue of Creativity and

Imagination

A young solicitor, John HectorMcFarlane, wakes up one morning to findhis life upended: overnight he has becomethe single most likely suspect in themurder of a local builder. He barely hastime to reach Sherlock Holmes to tell hisstory before he is swept off to ScotlandYard, so damning is the evidence againsthim.

As he explains to Holmes before he is

whisked away, he had first met the victim,a certain Jonas Oldacre, only the priorafternoon. The man had arrived atMcFarlane’s offices and asked him tocopy and witness his will—and to Mr.McFarlane’s surprise, that will left himall of the builder’s property. He waschildless and alone, explained Oldacre.And once upon a time, he had knownMcFarlane’s parents well. He wanted tocommemorate the friendship with theinheritance—but, he urged, McFarlanewas not to breathe a word of thetransaction to his family until thefollowing day. It was to be a surprise.

That evening the builder asked thesolicitor to join him for dinner, so thatthey might afterward go over someimportant documents in connection with

the estate. McFarlane obliged. And that, itseems, was that. Until, that is, thefollowing morning’s papers describedOldacre’s death—and the burning of hisbody in the timber yard at the back of hishouse. The most likely suspect: youngJohn Hector McFarlane, who not onlystood to inherit the dead man’s estate, buthad also left his walking stick (bloodied)at the scene of the crime.

McFarlane is summarily arrested byInspector Lestrade, leaving Holmes withhis strange tale. And though the arrestseems to make sense—the inheritance, thestick, the nighttime visit, all theindications that point to McFarlane’s guilt—Holmes can’t help but feel thatsomething 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 preponderanceof evidence. As far as Scotland Yard isconcerned, the case is as close to airtightas they come. All that remains is to put thefinal touches on the police report. WhenHolmes insists that all is not yet clear,Inspector Lestrade begs to differ. “Notclear? Well, if that isn’t clear, what couldbe clear?” he interjects.

“Here is a young man who learns suddenlythat, if a certain older man dies, he willsucceed to a fortune. What does he do? Hesays nothing to anyone, but he arrangesthat he shall go out on some pretext to seehis client that night. He waits until the onlyother person in the house is in bed, and

then in the solitude of a man’s room hemurders 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 onthe stick are very slight. It is probable thathe imagined his crime to be a bloodlessone, and hoped that if the body wereconsumed it would hide all traces of themethod of his death—traces which, forsome reason, must have pointed to him. Isnot all this obvious?”

Holmes remains unconvinced. He tellsthe inspector:

“It strikes me, my good Lestrade, as beingjust a trifle too obvious. You do not addimagination to your other great qualities,

but if you could for one moment putyourself in the place of this young man,would you choose the very night after thewill had been made to commit yourcrime? Would it not seem dangerous toyou to make so very close a relationbetween the two incidents? Again, wouldyou choose an occasion when you areknown to be in the house, when a servanthas let you in? And, finally, would youtake the great pains to conceal the body,and yet leave your own stick as a sign thatyou 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 arethe lynchpins of detective work. But

imagination? Isn’t that just a flimsy retreatof the less hard-minded and scientificprofessions, those artistic dalliers whocouldn’t be further from Scotland Yard?

Lestrade doesn’t understand just howwrong he is—and just how central a roleimagination plays, not just to thesuccessful inspector or detective but toany person who would hold himself as asuccessful thinker. If he were to listen toHolmes for more than clues as to asuspect’s identity or a case’s line ofinquiry, he would find that he might haveless need of turning to him in the future.For, if imagination does not enter into thepicture—and do so before any deductiontakes place—all of those observations, allof that understanding of the prior chapterswill have little value indeed.

Imagination is the essential next step ofthe thought process. It uses the buildingblocks of all of the observations thatyou’ve collected to create the material thatcan then serve as a solid base for futurededuction, be it as to the events of thatfateful Norwood evening when JonasOldacre met his death or the solution to apesky problem that has been gnawing atyou at home or at work. If you think thatyou can skip it, that it is somethingunscientific and frivolous, you’ll findyourself having wasted much effort only toarrive at a conclusion that, as clear andobvious as it may seem to you, could notbe further from the truth.

What is imagination, and why is it soimportant? Why, of all things to mention to

Lestrade, does Holmes focus on thisparticular feature, and what is it doing insomething as strict-sounding as thescientific method of the mind?

Lestrade isn’t the first to turn his noseup at the thought of imagination playing arole in good old scientific reason, nor isHolmes alone in his insistence to thecontrary. One of the greatest scientificthinkers of the twentieth century, Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman,frequently voiced his surprise at the lackof appreciation for what he thought was acentral quality in both thinking andscience. “It is surprising that people donot believe that there is imagination inscience,” he once told an audience. Notonly is that view patently false, but “it is avery interesting kind of imagination,

unlike that of the artist. The great difficultyis in trying to imagine something that youhave never seen, that is consistent in everydetail with what has already been seen,and that is different from what has beenthought of; furthermore, it must be definiteand not a vague proposition. That isindeed difficult.”

It’s tough to find a better summation anddefinition of the role of imagination in thescientific process of thought. Imaginationtakes the stuff of observation andexperience and recombines them intosomething new. In so doing, it sets thestage for deduction, the sifting through ofimaginative alternatives to decide: out ofall of the possibilities you’ve imagined,which is the definite one that best explainsall of the facts?

In imagining, you bring into beingsomething hypothetical, something thatmay or may not exist in actuality but thatyou have actively created in your ownmind. As such, what you imagine “isdifferent from what has been thought of.”It’s not a restatement of the facts, nor is ita simple line from A to B that can bedrawn without much thought. It is yourown synthesis and creation. Think ofimagination as a kind of essential mentalspace in your attic, where you have thefreedom to work with various contents butdon’t yet have to commit to any storage ororganizational system, where you can shiftand combine and recombine and messaround at will and not be afraid ofdisturbing the main attic’s order orcleanliness in any way.

That space is essential in the sense ofthere not being a functional attic withoutit: you can’t have a storage space that isfilled to the brim with boxes. How wouldyou ever come inside? Where would youpull out the boxes to find what you need?How would you even see what boxeswere available and where they might befound? You need space. You need light.You need to be able to access your attic’scontents, to walk inside and look aroundand see what is what.

And within that space, there is freedom.You can temporarily place there all of theobservations you’ve gathered. Youhaven’t yet filed them away or placedthem in your attic’s permanent storage.Instead, you lay them all out, where youcan see them, and then you play around.

What patterns emerge? Can somethingfrom permanent storage be added to makea different picture, something that makessense? You stand in that open space andyou examine what you’ve gathered. Youpull out different elements, try outdifferent combinations, see what worksand what doesn’t, what feels right andwhat doesn’t. And you come away with acreation that is unlike the facts orobservations that have fed into it. It has itsroots in them, true, but it is its own uniquething, which exists only in thathypothetical state of your mind and may ormay not be real or even true.

But that creation isn’t coming out of theblue. It is grounded in reality. It isdrawing upon all those observationsyou’ve gathered up to that point,

“consistent in every detail with what hasalready been seen.” It is, in other words,growing organically out of those contentsthat you’ve gathered into your attic throughthe process of observation, mixed withthose ingredients that have always beenthere, your knowledge base and yourunderstanding of the world. Feynmanphrases it thus: “Imagination in a tightstraightjacket.” To him, the straightjacketis the laws of physics. To Holmes, it isessentially the same thing: that base ofknowledge and observation that you’veacquired to the present time. Never is itsimply a flight of fancy; you can’t think ofimagination in this context as identical tothe creativity of a fiction writer or anartist. It can’t be. First, for the simplereason that it is grounded in the factual

reality that you’ve built up, and second,because it “must be definite and not avague proposition.” Your imaginings haveto be concrete. They have to be detailed.They don’t exist in reality, but theirsubstance must be such that they couldtheoretically jump from your head straightinto the world with little adjustment. PerFeynman, they are in a straightjacket—or,in Holmes’s terms, they are confined anddetermined by your unique brain attic.Your imaginings must use it as their baseand they must play by its rules—and thoserules include the observations you’ve sodiligently gathered. “The game is,”continues Feynman, “to try to figure outwhat we know, what’s possible? Itrequires an analysis back, a checking tosee whether it fits, it’s allowed according

to what is known.”And in that statement lies the final piece

of the definition. Yes, imagination mustcome from a basis in real, hardknowledge, from the concreteness andspecificity of your attic. And yes, it servesa greater purpose: a setup for deduction,be it of a scientific truth, a solution to amurder, or a decision or problem in yourown life that is far removed from both.And in all these instances, it must dealwith certain constraints. But it is also free.It is fun. It is, in other words, a game. It isthe most playful part of a seriousendeavor. Not for nothing does Holmesutter the famed refrain “The game isafoot,” in the opening lines of “TheAdventure of the Abbey Grange.” Thatsimple phrase conveys not only his

passion and excitement but his approachto the art of detection and, more generally,of thought: it is a serious thing indeed, butit never loses the element of play. Thatelement is necessary. Without it, noserious endeavor stands a chance.

We tend to think of creativity as an all-or-nothing, you-have-it-or-you-don’tcharacteristic of the mind. But thatcouldn’t be further from the truth.Creativity can be taught. It is just likeanother muscle—attention, self-control—that can be exercised and grow strongerwith use, training, focus, and motivation.In fact, studies have shown that creativityis fluid and that training enables people tobecome more creative: if you think yourimagination can grow with practice, youwill become better at imaginative

pursuits. (There, again, is that persistentneed for motivation.) Believing you canbe as creative as the best of them andlearning creativity’s essential componentsis crucial to improving your overallability to think, decide, and act in a waythat would more befit a Holmes than aWatson (or a Lestrade).

Here we explore that mind space, thatstage for synthesis, recombination, andinsight. That deceptively lightheartedarena that will allow Holmes to solve thecase of the Norwood builder—for solve ithe will; and as you’ll see, Lestrade’sconfidence in the obvious will prove bothmisguided and short-lived.

Learning to Overcome Imaginative

Doubt

Picture the following. You are led into aroom with a table. On the table are threeitems: a box of tacks, a book of matches,and a candle. You are told that you haveonly one assignment: attach the candle tothe wall. You can take as much time asyou need. How do you proceed?

If you are like over 75 percent of theparticipants in the now-classic study bythe Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker,you would likely try one of two routes.You might try to tack the candle onto thewall—but you’ll quickly find that methodto be futile. Or you might try to light thecandle and use the dripping wax to attachit to the wall, foregoing the box of tacksentirely (after all, you might think, it could

be a distracter!). Again, you’d fail. Thewax is not strong enough to hold thecandle, and your contraption willcollapse. What now?

For the real solution you need someimagination. No one sees it at once. Somepeople find it after only a minute or two ofthought. Others see it after falteringthrough several unsuccessful attempts.And others fail to solve it without someoutside help. Here’s the answer. Take thetacks out of the box, tack the box to thewall, and light the candle. Soften thebottom of the candle with a match, so thatthe wax begins to drip into the box, andplace the candle inside the box, on top ofthe soft pillow of wax. Secure. Run out ofthe room before the candle burns lowenough to set the box on fire. Voilà.

Why don’t so many people see thatalternative? They forget that betweenobservation and deduction there lies animportant mental moment. They take thehot System Watson route—action, action,action—underestimating the crucial needfor the exact opposite: a moment of quietreflection. And so they understandably goat once for the most natural or mostobvious solutions. The majority of peoplein this situation do not see that somethingobvious—a box of tacks—might actuallybe something less obvious: a box andtacks.

This is known as functional fixedness.We tend to see objects the way they arepresented, as serving a specific functionthat is already assigned. The box and tacksgo together as a box of tacks. The box

holds the tacks; it does not have anotherfunction. To go past that and actuallybreak the object into two component parts,to realize that the box and matches are twodifferent things, takes an imaginative leap(Duncker, coming from the Gestalt school,was studying precisely this question, ofour tendency to see the whole over theparts).

Indeed, in follow-ups to Duncker’soriginal study, one experiment showedthat if the objects were presentedseparately, with the tacks sitting besidethe box, the percentage of people whosolved the problem rose dramatically.Ditto with a simple linguistic tweak: ifparticipants were primed, prior toencountering the candle problem, with aseries of words connected with and

instead of of, as in, “a box and tacks,”they were much more likely to see thesolution. And even if the words were justunderlined separately, as five items(candle, book of matches, and box oftacks), participants were also much morelikely to solve the problem.

But the original problem requires somethought, a shift away from the obviouswithout any external help. It’s not assimple as looking at everything you’veobserved and right away acting or tryingto deduce the most likely scenario thatwould satisfy your objective. Thosepeople who were able to solve it knew theimportance of not acting, the value ofletting their minds take the situation in andgive it some internal, quiet thought. Inshort, they realized that between

observation and deduction lies the crucial,irreplaceable step of imagination.

It’s easy to see Sherlock Holmes as ahard, cold reasoning machine: the epitomeof calculating logic. But that view ofHolmes the Logical Automaton couldn’tbe further from the truth. Quite thecontrary. What makes Holmes who he is,what places him above detectives,inspectors, and civilians alike, is hiswillingness to engage in the nonlinear,embrace the hypothetical, entertain theconjecture; it’s his capacity for creativethought and imaginative reflection.

Why then do we tend to miss this softer,almost artistic side and focus instead onthe detective’s computer-like powers ofrational calculation? Simply put, that view

is both easier and safer. It is a line ofthinking that is well ingrained into ourpsychology. We have been trained to do itfrom an early age. As Albert Einstein putit, “Certainly we should take care not tomake the intellect our god; it has, ofcourse, powerful muscles, but nopersonality. It cannot lead, it can onlyserve; and it is not fastidious in its choiceof a leader.” We live in a society thatglorifies the computer model, that idolizesthe inhuman Holmes, who can take incountless data points as a matter ofcourse, analyze them with startlingprecision, and spit out a solution. Asociety that gives short shrift to the powerof something as unquantifiable asimagination and focuses instead on thepower of the intellect.

But wait, you might think, that’scompletely bogus. We also thrive on theidea of innovation and creativity. We areliving in the age of the entrepreneur, of theman of ideas, of Steve Jobs and the “ThinkDifferent” motto. Well, yes and no. Thatis, we value creativity on the surface, butin our heart of hearts, imagination canscare us like crazy.

As a general rule, we dislikeuncertainty. It makes us uneasy. A certainworld is a much friendlier place. And sowe work hard to reduce whateveruncertainty we can, often by makinghabitual, practical choices, which protectthe status quo. You know the saying,“Better the devil you know”? That aboutsums it up.

Creativity, on the other hand, requires

novelty. Imagination is all about newpossibilities, eventualities that don’t exist,counterfactuals, a recombination ofelements in new ways. It is about theuntested. And the untested is uncertain. Itis frightening—even if we aren’t aware ofjust how much it frightens us personally. Itis also potentially embarrassing (after all,there’s never a guarantee of success). Whydo you think Conan Doyle’s inspectors arealways so loath to depart from standardprotocol, to do anything that might in theleast endanger their investigation or delayit by even an instant? Holmes’simagination frightens them.

Consider a common paradox:organizations, institutions, and individualdecision makers often reject creativeideas even as they state openly that

creativity is an important and sometimescentral goal. Why? New research suggeststhat we may hold an unconscious biasagainst creative ideas much like we do incases of racism or phobias.

Remember the Implicit AssociationTest from chapter two? In a series ofstudies, Jennifer Mueller and colleaguesdecided to modify it for something thathad never appeared in need of testing:creativity. Participants had to completethe same good/bad category pairing as inthe standard IAT, only this time with twowords that expressed an attitude that waseither practical (functional, constructive,or useful) or creative (novel, inventive, ororiginal). The result indicated that eventhose people who had explicitly rankedcreativity as high on their list of positive

attributes showed an implicit bias againstit relative to practicality under conditionsof uncertainty. And what’s more, they alsorated an idea that had been pretested ascreative (for example, a running shoe thatuses nanotechnology to adjust fabricthickness to cool the foot and reduceblisters) as less creative than their morecertain counterparts. So not only werethey implicitly biased, but they exhibited afailure to see creativity for what it waswhen directly faced with it.

True, that effect was seen only inuncertain conditions—but doesn’t thatdescribe most decision-makingenvironments? It certainly applies todetective work. And corporations. Andscience. And business. And basicallyanything else you can think of.

Great thinkers have gotten over thathump, that fear of the void. Einstein hadfailures. So did Abraham Lincoln,probably one of the few men to go to wara captain and return a private—and to filetwice for bankruptcy before assuming thepresidency. So did Walt Disney, gettingfired from a newspaper for “lack ofimagination” (the creativity paradox, ifever there was one, in full force). So didThomas Edison, inventing over onethousand failed specimens before he cameup with a lightbulb that worked. And sodid Sherlock Holmes (Irene Adler,anyone? Man with the twisted lip? Or howabout that Yellow Face, to which we’llsoon return in greater detail?).

What distinguishes them isn’t a lack offailure but a lack of fear of failure, an

openness that is the hallmark of thecreative mind. They may have had thatsame anticreative bias as most of us at onepoint in their lives, but one way oranother, they managed to squelch it intosubmission. Sherlock Holmes has oneelement that a computer lacks, and it isthat very element that both makes himwhat he is and undercuts the image of thedetective as nothing more than logicianpar excellence: imagination.

Who hasn’t dismissed a problembecause no obvious answer presenteditself at once? And which of us hasn’tmade a wrong decision or taken a wrongturn because we never stopped to thinkthat clear and obvious might be a trifle tooobvious? Who hasn’t persisted in a less-than-ideal setup just because that’s the

way things were always done—andthough better ways may exist, they woulddepart too much from the tried and true?Better the devil you know.

Our fear of uncertainty keeps us incheck when we’d do better to accompanyHolmes on one of his imaginativewanderings and play out scenarios thatmay exist—for the time being, at least—only in our heads. Einstein, for one, hadnothing but intuition to go on when heproposed his grand theory of generalrelativity. When George Sylvester Viereckasked him, in 1929, whether hisdiscoveries were the result of intuition orinspiration, Einstein replied, “I’m enoughof an artist to draw freely on myimagination, which I think is moreimportant than knowledge. Knowledge is

limited. Imagination encircles the world.”Absent imagination, the great scientistwould have been stuck in the certainty ofthe linear and the easily accessible.

What’s more, many problems don’teven have an obvious answer to turn to. Inthe case of our Norwood mystery,Lestrade had a ready-made story andsuspect. But what if that didn’t exist?What if there was no linear narrative, andthe only way to get to the answer was bycircuitous and hypothetical meanderingsof the mind? (One such case appears inThe Valley of Fear , when the victim isn’tat all who he seems to be—and neither isthe house. A lack of imagination in thatinstance equals a lack of solution.) And ina world far removed from detectives andinspectors and builders, what if there’s no

obvious job path or better romanticprospect or choice that would make ushappier? What if the answer insteadrequires digging and some creative self-exploration? Not many would change aknown devil for an unknown one—andfewer still would exchange it for none atall.

Without imagination we would never beable to reach the heights of thought that weare capable of; we’d be doomed, at thevery best, to become very good atspewing back details and facts—but we’dfind it difficult to use those facts in anyway that could meaningfully improve ourjudgment and decision making. We’d havean attic stacked with beautifully organizedboxes, folders, and materials. And wewouldn’t know where to begin to go

through them all. Instead, we’d have tothumb through the stacks over and over,maybe finding the right approach, maybenot. And if the right element wasn’t therefor the taking but had to actually comefrom two, or even three, different files?Good luck to us.

Let’s go back for a moment to the caseof the Norwood builder. Why is it that,lacking imagination, Lestrade can’t comenear solving the mystery and, indeed,comes close to sentencing an innocentman? What does imagination provide herethat straightforward analysis does not?Both the inspector and the detective haveaccess to identical information. Holmesdoesn’t have some secret knowledge thatwould enable him to see something thatLestrade does not—or at least any

knowledge that Lestrade, too, couldn’teasily apply in much the same fashion. Butnot only do the two men choose to usedifferent elements of their sharedknowledge; they then interpret what theydo know in altogether different lights.Lestrade follows the straightforwardapproach, and Sherlock a moreimaginative one that the inspector does noteven conceive to be possible.

At the beginning of the investigation,Holmes and Lestrade start from the exactsame point, as John Hector McFarlanegives the entirety of his statement in theirjoint presence. In fact, it’s Lestrade whohas an edge of a sort. He has already beento the scene of the crime, while Holmes isonly now hearing of it for the first time.And yet, right away, their approaches

diverge. When Lestrade, prior to arrestingMcFarlane and leading him away, asksHolmes whether he has any furtherquestions, Holmes replies, “Not until Ihave been to Blackheath.” Blackheath?But the murder took place in Norwood.“You mean Norwood,” Lestrade correctsthe detective. “Oh, yes, no doubt that iswhat I must have meant,” replies Holmes,and proceeds, of course, to Blackheath,the home of the unfortunate Mr.McFarlane’s parents.

“And why not Norwood?” asks Watson,just as Lestrade had wondered before him.

“Because,” replies Holmes, “we havein this case one singular incident comingclose to the heels of another singularincident. The police are making themistake of concentrating their attention

upon the second, because it happens to bethe one which is actually criminal.” Strikeone, as you’ll see in a moment, againstLestrade’s overly straightforwardapproach.

Holmes is disappointed in his trip. “Itried one or two leads,” he tells Watsonupon his return, “but could get at nothingwhich would help our hypothesis, andseveral points which would make againstit. I gave it up at last, and off I went toNorwood.” But, as we’ll soon see, thetime wasn’t wasted—nor does Holmesthink it was. For, you never know how themost straightforward-seeming events willunfold once you use that attic space ofimagination to its fullest potential. Andyou never know just what piece ofinformation 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 somelucky chance comes our way I fear that theNorwood Disappearance Case will notfigure in that chronicle of our successeswhich I foresee that a patient public willsooner or later have to endure.”

And then, from the most unlikely ofplaces, that very lucky chance appears.Lestrade calls it “important freshevidence” that definitively establishesMcFarlane’s guilt. Holmes is stricken—until he realizes just what that freshevidence is: McFarlane’s bloodyfingerprint on the hallway wall. What toLestrade is proof positive of guilt toHolmes is the very epitome of

McFarlane’s innocence. And what’s more,it confirms a suspicion that has, to thatpoint, been nothing more than a naggingfeeling, an “intuition,” as Holmes calls it,that there has been no crime to begin with.Jonas Oldacre is, as a matter of fact, aliveand well.

How can that be? How can the exactsame piece of information serve, for theinspector, to condemn a man and, forHolmes, to free him—and to cast doubt onthe nature of the entire crime? It all comesdown to imagination.

Let’s go through it step-by-step. Firstoff, there’s Holmes’s initial response tothe story: not to rush immediately to thescene of the supposed crime but rather toacquaint himself with all possible angles,which may or may not prove useful. And

so, a trip to Blackheath, to those veryparents who are supposed to have knownJonas Oldacre when young and who, ofcourse, know McFarlane. While this maynot seem to be particularly imaginative, itdoes entail a more open-minded and lesslinear approach than the one espoused byLestrade: straight to the scene of thecrime, and the scene of the crime only.Lestrade has, in a way, closed off allalternate possibilities from the get-go.Why bother to look if everything you needis right in one place?

Much of imagination is about makingconnections that are not entirely obvious,between elements that may appeardisparate at first. When I was younger, myparents gave me a toy of sorts: a woodenpole with a hole in the middle and a ring

at the base. Through the hole was threadeda thick string, with two wooden circles oneither end. The point of the toy was to getthe ring off the pole. It seemed like a pieceof cake at first—until I realized that thestring with its circles prevented the ringfrom coming off the obvious way, over thetop of the pole. I tried force. And moreforce. And speed. Maybe I could trick it? Itried to get the string and circles tosomehow detach. The ring to slide overthe circles that it hadn’t slid over in thepast. Nothing worked. None of thesolutions that seemed most promisingwere actually solutions at all. Instead, toremove the ring, you had to take a path socircuitous that it took me hours of trying—with days in between—to finally have thepatience to reach it. For you had to, in a

sense, stop trying to take the ring off. I’dalways begun with that ring, thinking thatit had to be the right way to go. After all,wasn’t the whole point to remove it? Itwasn’t until I forgot the ring and took astep back to look at the overall picture andto explore its possibilities that I cameupon the solution.

I, too, had to go to Blackheath before Icould figure out what was going on inNorwood. Unlike Lestrade, I had a strictguide: I would know when I had solvedthe puzzle correctly. And so I didn’t needHolmes’s nudging. I realized I was wrongbecause I would know without a doubtwhen I was right. But most problemsaren’t so clear-cut. There’s no stubbornring that gives you only two answers, rightand wrong. Instead, there’s a whole mass

of misleading turns and false resolutions.And absent Holmes’s reminder, you maybe tempted to keep tugging at that ring toget it off—and think that it has beenremoved when all you’ve really done islodged it farther up the pole.

So, Holmes goes to Blackheath. Butthat’s not the end to his willingness toengage in the imaginative. In order toapproach the case of the Norwood builderas the detective does—and accomplishwhat he accomplishes—you need to beginfrom a place of open-minded possibility.You cannot equate the most obviouscourse of events with the only possiblecourse of events. If you do so, you run therisk of never even thinking of any numberof possibilities that may end up being thereal answer. And, more likely than not,

you will fall prey to that nastyconfirmation bias that we’ve seen in playin previous chapters.

In this instance, not only does Holmeshold very real the chance that McFarlaneis innocent, but he maintains and plays outa number of hypothetical scenarios thatexist only in his mind, whereby each pieceof evidence, including the central one ofthe very death of the builder, is not what itappears to be. In order to realize the truecourse of events, Holmes must firstimagine the possibility of that course ofevents. Otherwise he’d be like Lestrade,left saying, “I don’t know whether youthink that McFarlane came out of jail inthe dead of the night in order to strengthenthe evidence against himself,” andfollowing up that seemingly rhetorical

statement with, “I am a practical man, Mr.Holmes, and when I have got my evidenceI come to my conclusions.”

Lestrade’s rhetorical certainty is somisplaced precisely because he is apractical man who goes straight fromevidence to conclusions. He forgets thatcrucial step in between, that space thatgives you time to reflect, to think of otherpossibilities, to consider what may haveoccurred, and to follow those hypotheticallines out inside your mind, instead ofbeing forced to use only what is in front ofyou. (But never underestimate the crucialimportance of that observational stage thathas come before, the filling up of thestaging area with pieces of information foryour use: Holmes can come to hisconclusions about the thumbprint only

because he knows that he did not miss itbefore. “I know that that mark was notthere when I examined the hall yesterday,”he tells Watson. He trusts in hisobservations, in his attention, in theessential soundness of his attic and itscontents both. Lestrade, lacking histraining and ruled as he is by SystemWatson, knows no such certainty.)

A lack of imagination can thus lead tofaulty action (the arrest or suspicion of thewrong man) and to the lack of properaction (looking for the actual culprit). Ifonly the most obvious solution is sought,the correct one may never be found at all.

Reason without imagination is akin toSystem Watson at the controls. It seems tomake sense and it’s what we want to do,but it’s too impulsive and quick. You

cannot possibly assess and see the wholepicture—even if the solution ends upbeing rather prosaic—if you don’t take astep back to let imagination have its say.

Consider this counterexample to theconduct of Lestrade. In “The Adventure ofWisteria Lodge,” Holmes pays one of hisrare compliments to Inspector Baynes:“You will rise high in your profession.You have instinct and intuition.” Whatdoes Baynes do differently from hisScotland Yard counterparts to earn suchpraise? He anticipates human natureinstead of dismissing it, arresting thewrong man on purpose with the goal oflulling the real criminal into falsecomplacency. (The wrong man, of course,has a preponderance of evidence againsthim, more than enough for an arrest, and to

a Lestrade would seem to be the rightman. In fact, Holmes initially mistakesBaynes’s arrest as nothing more than aLestrade-like blunder.) And in thisanticipation lies one of the main virtues ofan imaginative approach: going beyondsimple logic in interpreting facts andinstead using that same logic to createhypothetical alternatives. A Lestradewould never think to do something sononlinear. Why in the world expend theenergy to arrest someone if that someoneis not who should be arrested according tothe law? Lacking imagination, he can thinkonly in a straight line.

In 1968, the high jump was a well-established sport. You would run, youwould jump, and you would make your

way over a pole in one of several ways. Inolder days you’d likely use the scissors,scissoring out your legs as you glidedover, but by the sixties you’d probably beusing the straddle or the belly roll, facingdown and basically rolling over the bar.Whichever style you used, one thing wascertain: you’d be facing forward when youmade your jump. Imagine trying to jumpbackward. That would be ridiculous.

Dick Fosbury, however, didn’t think so.To him, jumping backward seemed likethe way to go. All through high school,he’d been developing a backward-facingstyle, and now, in college, it was takinghim higher than it ever had. He wasn’tsure why he did it, but if he thought aboutit, he would say that his inspiration camefrom the East: from Confucius and Lao

Tzu. He didn’t care what anyone else wasdoing. He just jumped with the feeling ofthe thing. People joked and laughed.Fosbury looked just as ridiculous as theythought he would (and his inspirationssounded a bit ridiculous, too. When askedabout his approach, he told SportsIllustrated, “I don’t even think about thehigh jump. It’s positive thinking. I just letit happen”). Certainly, no one expectedhim to make the U.S. Olympics team—letalone win the Olympics. But win he did,setting American and Olympic recordswith his 7-foot-4.25-inch (2.24-meter)jump, only 1.5 inches short of the worldrecord.

With his unprecedented technique,dubbed the Fosbury Flop, Fosbury didwhat many other more traditional athletes

had never managed to accomplish: herevolutionized, in a very real way, anentire sport. Even after his win,expectations were that he would remain alone bird, jumping in his esoteric stylewhile the rest of the world looked on. Butsince 1978 no world record has been setby anyone other than a flopper; and by1980, thirteen of sixteen Olympic finalistswere flopping across the bar. To this day,the flop remains the dominant high jumpstyle. The straddle looks old andcumbersome in comparison. Why hadn’tanyone thought of replacing it earlier?

Of course, everything seems intuitive inretrospect. But what seems perfectly clearnow was completely inventive andunprecedented at the time. No one thoughtyou could possibly jump backward. It

seemed absurd. And Fosbury himself? Hewasn’t even a particularly talentedjumper. As his coach, Berny Wagner, putit, “I have a discus thrower who can jump-reach higher than Dick.” It was all in theapproach. Indeed, Fosbury’s height palesin comparison to the current record—8feet (2.45 meters), held by JavierSotomayor—and his accomplishmentdoesn’t even break the top twenty. But thesport has never been the same.

Imagination allows us to see things thataren’t so, be it a dead man who is actuallyalive, a way of jumping that, whilebackward, couldn’t be more forwardlooking, or a box of tacks that can also bea simple box. It lets us see what mighthave been and what might be even in theabsence of firm evidence. When all of the

details are in front of you, how do youarrange them? How do you know whichare important? Simple logic gets you partof the way there, it’s true, but it can’t do italone—and it can’t do it without somebreathing space.

In our resistance to creativity, we areLestrades. But here’s the good news: ourinner Holmes isn’t too far away. Ourimplicit bias may be strong but it’s notimmutable, and it doesn’t need to affectour thinking as much as it does.

Look at the following picture:

Try to connect these dots with threelines, without lifting your pencil from thepaper or retracing any of the lines youdraw. You must also end the drawingwhere you began it. You can take up tothree minutes.

Have you finished? If you haven’t, fearnot; you’re far from being alone. In fact,you’re like 78 percent of studyparticipants who were given the problemto solve. If you have, how long did it takeyou?

Consider this: if I had turned on alightbulb in your line of sight while youwere working on the problem, you wouldhave been more likely to solve it if youhadn’t solved it already—a full 44 percentof people who saw a lit lightbulb solvedthe puzzle, as contrasted with the 22

percent in the original condition (the onethat you just experienced)—and youwould have solved it faster than you mighthave otherwise. The bulb will haveactivated insight-related concepts in yourmind, and in so doing will have primedyour mind to think in a more creativefashion than it would as a matter ofcourse. It is an example of priming inaction. Because we associate the lightbulbwith creativity and insight, we are morelikely to persist at difficult problems andto think in a creative, nonlinear fashionwhen we see it turn on. All of the conceptsthat are stored in our attic next to the ideaof “lightbulb moment” or “insight” or“eureka” become activated, and thatactivation in turn helps us become morecreative in our own approaches.

By the way, here’s the solution to thedot problem.

Our natural mindset may well beholding us back, but a simple prime isenough to cue it in a very differentdirection indeed. And it need not be alightbulb. Works of art on the walls do thetrick, too. The color blue. Pictures offamous creative thinkers. Happy faces.

Happy music. (In fact, almost all positivecues.) Plants and flowers and scenes ofnature. All of these tend to boost ourcreativity with or without our awareness.That’s cause for celebration.

Whatever the stimulus, as soon as yourmind begins to reflect on the idea, youbecome more likely to embody that veryidea. There are even studies that show thatwearing a white coat will make you morelikely to think in scientific terms and bebetter at solving problems—the coatlikely activates the concept of researchersand doctors, and you begin to take on thecharacteristics you associate with thosepeople.

But short of lighting bulbs in our blueroom with portraits of Einstein and Jobson the walls while listening to happy

music, wearing a white coat, and wateringour beautiful roses, how can we best makeour way to Holmes’s capacity forimaginative thinking?

The Importance of Distance

One of the most important ways tofacilitate imaginative thinking, to makesure that we don’t move, like Lestrade,straight from evidence to conclusion, isthrough distance, in multiple senses of theword. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” a case that comes quitelate in the Holmes-Watson partnership,Watson observes:

One of the most remarkable

characteristics of Sherlock Holmes washis power of throwing his brain out ofaction and switching all his thoughts on tolighter things whenever he had convincedhimself that he could no longer work toadvantage. I remember that during thewhole of that memorable day he losthimself in a monograph which he hadundertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets ofLassus. For my own part I had none of thispower of detachment, and the day, inconsequence appeared to be interminable.

Forcing your mind to take a step back isa tough thing to do. It seemscounterintuitive to walk away from aproblem that you want to solve. But inreality, the characteristic is not soremarkable either for Holmes or for

individuals who are deep thinkers. Thefact that it is remarkable for Watson (andthat he self-admittedly lacks the skill)goes a long way to explaining why he sooften fails when Holmes succeeds.

Psychologist Yaacov Trope argues thatpsychological distance may be one of thesingle most important steps you can take toimprove thinking and decision making. Itcan come in many forms: temporal, ordistance in time (both future and past);spatial, or distance in space (howphysically close or far you are fromsomething); social, or distance betweenpeople (how someone else sees it); andhypothetical, or distance from reality(how things might have happened). Butwhatever the form, all of these distanceshave something in common: they all

require you to transcend the immediatemoment in your mind. They all require youto take a step back.

Trope posits that the further we move indistance, the more general and abstractour perspective and our interpretationbecome; and the further we move from ourown perspective, the wider the picture weare able to consider. Conversely, as wemove closer once more, our thoughtsbecome more concrete, more specific,more practical—and the closer we remainto our egocentric view, the smaller andmore limited the picture that confronts us.Our level of construal influences, in turn,how we evaluate a situation and how weultimately choose to interact with it. Itaffects our decisions and our ability tosolve problems. It even changes how our

brains process information on a neurallevel (specifically, it tends to engage ourprefrontal cortex and medial temporallobe; more on that later).

In essence, psychological distanceaccomplishes one major thing: it engagesSystem Holmes. It forces quiet reflection.Distancing has been shown to improvecognitive performance, from actualproblem solving to the ability to exerciseself-control. Children who usepsychological distancing techniques (forexample, visualizing marshmallows aspuffy clouds, a technique we’ll discussmore in the next section) are better able todelay gratification and hold out for alarger later reward. Adults who are toldto take a step back and imagine a situationfrom a more general perspective make

better judgments and evaluations, andhave better self-assessments and loweremotional reactivity. Individuals whoemploy distancing in typical problem-solving scenarios emerge ahead of theirmore immersed counterparts. And thosewho take a distanced view of politicalquestions tend to emerge with evaluationsthat are better able to stand the test oftime.

You can think of the exercise as a large,complicated puzzle; the box has been lost,so you don’t know what exactly you’reputting together, and pieces from othersimilar puzzles have gotten mixed in overthe years, so you’re not even sure whichpieces belong. To solve the puzzle, youmust first have a sense of the picture as awhole. Some pieces will jump out right

away: the corners, the edges, the colorsand patterns that obviously go together.And before you know it, you have aclearer sense of where the puzzle isheading and where and how the remainingpieces should fit. But you’ll never solve itif you don’t take the time to lay the piecesout properly, identify those telling startermoves, and try to form an image in yourmind of the complete picture. Trying toforce individual pieces at random willtake forever, cause needless frustration,and perhaps lead to your never being ableto solve the thing at all.

You need to learn to let the twoelements, the concrete, specific pieces(their details and colors, what they tellyou, and what they suggest) and the broad,overall picture (the general impression

that gives you a sense of the tableau as awhole), work together to help you put thepuzzle together. Both are essential. Thepieces have been gathered already throughclose observation; seeing how they fit canbe accomplished only by the distance ofimagination. It can be any of Trope’sdistances—temporal, spatial, social, orhypothetical—but distance it must be.

When I was little, I used to love yes-or-no riddle games. One person holds theanswer to a simple riddle (one of myfavorites as a child: Joe and Mandy arelying on the floor, dead; around them arebroken glass, a pool of water, and abaseball. What happened?); the rest try toguess the solution by asking questions thatrequire only a yes or no answer. I couldplay these for hours and forced many a

hapless companion to share the somewhatstrange pastime.

Back then I didn’t see the riddles asmuch more than a fun way to pass the timeand test my detective prowess—and partof the reason I loved them was becausethey made me feel up to the task. Onlynow do I understand fully how ingeniousthat forced-question method really is: itforces you to separate observation fromdeduction, whether you want to or not. In away, the riddles have a built-in road mapfor how to get to the solution:incrementally, taking frequent breaks to letyour imagination consolidate and re-formwhat it has learned. You can’t just barrelon through. You observe, you learn, andyou take the time to consider thepossibilities, look at the angles, try to

place the elements in their proper context,see if you might have come to a mistakenconclusion at an earlier point. The yes-or-no riddle forces imaginative distance.(The solution to Joe and Mandy’sdilemma: they are goldfish. The baseballflew in through a window and broke theirbowl.)

But absent such an inbuilt cue, howdoes one go about creating distance? Howcan one resist Watson’s lack ofdetachment and be able, like Holmes, toknow when and how to throw his brain outof action and turn it to lighter things? As ithappens, even something as seeminglyinborn as creativity and imagination canbe broken down into steps that traversethat 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 ofcommon problem types in the psychologyliterature. And yet perhaps it’s time itshould.

In “The Red-Headed League,” SherlockHolmes is presented with an unusualconundrum, which at first glance has noreasonable solution. Why in the worldwould someone be singled out for thecolor of his hair, and then be paid to donothing but sit around, along with the hairin question, in a closed room for hours onend?

When Mr. Wilson, the man of theflaming-red hair, leaves Holmes aftertelling his story, Holmes tells Watson that

he must give his prompt attention to thematter. “What are you going to do, then?”asks Watson, anxious as ever to knowhow the case will be resolved. Holmes’sreply may come as somewhat of asurprise:

“To smoke,” he answered. “It is quite athree-pipe problem, and I beg that youwon’t speak to me for fifty minutes.” Hecurled himself up in his chair, with histhick knees drawn up to his hawk-likenose, and there he sat with his eyes closedand his black clay pipe thrusting out likethe bill of some strange bird. I had cometo the conclusion that he had droppedasleep, and indeed was nodding myself,when he suddenly sprang out of his chairwith the gesture of a man who has made

up his mind, and put his pipe down uponthe mantel-piece.

A three-pipe problem, then: one thatrequires doing something other thanthinking directly about the problem—i.e.,smoking a pipe—in concentrated silence(and, one expects, smoke), for the timethat it takes to smoke three pipes.Presumably, one of a subset of problemsranging from the single-pipe problem tothe largest number you can smoke withoutmaking yourself sick and so putting theentire effort to waste.

Holmes, of course, means somethingquite a bit more by his response. For him,the pipe is but a means—and one means ofmany—to an end: creating psychologicaldistance between himself and the problem

at hand, so that he can let his observations(in this case, what he has learned from thevisitor’s story and appearance) percolatein his mind, mixing with all of the matterin his brain attic in leisurely fashion, inorder to know what the actual next step inthe case should be. Watson would havehim do something at once, as suggested byhis question. Holmes, however, puts apipe in between himself and the problem.He gives his imagination time to do itsthing undisturbed.

The pipe is but a means to an end, yes,but it is an important, physical means aswell. It’s significant here that we aredealing with an actual object and an actualactivity. A change in activity, to somethingseemingly unrelated to the problem inquestion, is one of the elements that is

most conducive to creating the requisitedistance for imagination to take hold.Indeed, it is a tactic that Holmes employsoften and to good effect. He smokes hispipe, but he also plays his violin, visitsthe opera, and listens to music; these arehis preferred distancing mechanisms.

The precise activity isn’t as importantas its physical nature and its ability totrain your thoughts in a different direction.It needs to have several characteristics: itneeds to be unrelated to what you aretrying to accomplish (if you are solving acrime, you shouldn’t switch to solvinganother crime; if you are deciding on animportant purchase, you shouldn’t goshopping for something else; and so on); itneeds to be something that doesn’t take toomuch effort on your part (if you’re trying

to learn a new skill, for instance, yourbrain will be so preoccupied that it won’tbe able to free up the resources needed toroot through your attic; Holmes’s violinplaying—unless you are, like him, avirtuoso, you need not apply thatparticular route); and yet it needs to besomething that engages you on some level(if Holmes hated pipe smoking, he wouldhardly benefit from a three-pipe problem;likewise, if he found pipe smoking boring,his mind might be too dulled to do anyreal thinking, on whatever level—or mightfind itself unable to detach, in the mannerthat so afflicts Watson).

When we switch gears, we in effectmove the problem that we have beentrying to solve from our conscious brain toour unconscious. While we may think we

are doing something else—and indeed,our attentional networks become engagedin something else—our brains don’tactually stop work on the originalproblem. We may have left our attic tosmoke a pipe or play a sonata, but ourstaging area remains a place of busyactivity, with various items being draggedinto the light, various combinations beingtried, and various approaches beingevaluated.

The key to diagnosing Watson’sinability to create distance betweenhimself and a case may well be that hehasn’t found a suitably engaging yet notoverwhelming activity as a substitute. Insome instances he tries reading. Toodifficult of a task: not only does he fail toconcentrate on the reading, thereby losing

the intent of the activity, but he can’t stophis mind from returning to the very thinghe shouldn’t be thinking about. (And yetfor Holmes, reading is indeed a suitabledistancing method. “Polyphonic Motets ofLassus” anyone?) Other times, Watsontries sitting in contemplation. Too boring,as he himself puts it; he soon finds himselfalmost nodding off.

In either case, the distancing fails. Themind is simply not doing what it issupposed to—dissociating itself from thepresent environment and thus engaging itsmore diffuse attentional network (thatsame default network that is active whenour brains are at rest). It’s the opposite oft h e distraction problem that weencountered in the last chapter. Watsonnow can’t be distracted enough. What he

should be doing is distracting himselffrom the case, but instead he is letting thecase distract him from his chosendistraction and so failing to get the benefitof either concentrated thought or diffuseattention. Distraction isn’t always a badthing. It all depends on the timing andtype. (Interesting fact: we get better atsolving insight problems when we aretired or intoxicated. Why? Our executivefunction is inhibited, so information thatwould normally be deemed distracting isallowed to filter in. We thus becomebetter at seeing remote associations.) Thelast chapter was all about mindlessdistraction; this, on the contrary, ismindful distraction.

But for it to work it’s essential tochoose the right activity, be it the pipe or

the violin or an opera or something elseentirely. Something that is engagingenough that it distracts you properly—andyet not so overwhelming that it preventsreflection from taking place in thebackground. Once you find your sin ofchoice, you can term the problems anddecisions you face accordingly: three-pipe, two-movement, one-museum visit,you get the idea.

In fact, there’s one activity that isalmost tailor-made to work. And it is asimple one indeed: walking (the very thingthat Holmes was doing when he had hisinsight in “The Lion’s Mane”). Walkshave been shown repeatedly to stimulatecreative thought and problem solving,especially if these walks take place innatural surroundings, like the woods,

rather than in more urbanizedenvironments (but both types are betterthan 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; andthey become more likely to be able tograsp an insightful solution (like beingable to connect those four dots you sawearlier). And all from walking past sometrees and some sky.

Indeed, being surrounded by naturetends to increase feelings of well-being,and such feelings, in turn, tend to facilitateproblem solving and creative thinking,modulating attention and cognitive controlmechanisms in the brain in a way thatpredisposes us to engage in more Holmes-like imagination. Even the walk can—at

times when the pressure seems just toohigh to handle so that, like Watson, youcan’t even begin to contemplate doingsomething else—be forfeited in favor oflooking at screen shots of natural scenes.It’s not ideal but it just might do the trickin a pinch.

Showers are likewise often associatedwith imaginative thought, facilitating thesame type of distance as Holmes’s pipe ora walk in the park. (You can shower foronly so long, however. A three-pipeproblem would signify quite the showerahead of you. In such cases, the walkmight be the better solution.) Dittolistening to music—Holmes’s violin andopera in action—and engaging in visuallystimulating activities, such as looking atvisual illusions or abstract art.

In every case, that diffuse attentionalnetwork is able to do its thing. As ourinhibition is lowered, the attentionalnetwork takes over whatever is botheringus. It ramps up, so to speak, for whatevercomes next. It makes us more likely tograsp remote connections, to activateunrelated memories, thoughts, andexperiences that may help in this instance,to synthesize the material that needs to besynthesized. Our unconscious processingis a powerful tool, if only we give it thespace and time to work.

Consider a classic problem-solvingparadigm known as compound remoteassociates. Look at these words:

CRAB PINE SAUCE

Now, try to think of a single word thatcan be added to each of these to form acompound or a two-word phrase.

Done? How long did it take? And howdid you come about your solution?

There are two ways to solve thisproblem. One comes from insight, orseeing the right word after a few secondsof searching, and the other comes from ananalytical approach, or trying out wordafter word until one fits. Here, the properanswer is apple (crab apple, pineapple,applesauce), and one can arrive at iteither by seeing the solution or goingthrough a list of possible candidates(Cake? Works for crab but not pine.Grass? Ditto. Etcetera). The former is theequivalent of picking out those items in theopposite corners of your attic and making

them into a third related, yet unrelated,thing that makes complete sense themoment you see it. The latter is theequivalent of rummaging through your atticslowly and painfully, box by box, anddiscarding object after object that does notmatch until you find the one that does.

Absent imagination, you’re stuck withthat second not very palatable alternative,as Watson would be. And while Watsonmight get to the right answer eventually inthe case of a puzzle like the wordassociates, in the real world there’s noguarantee of his success, since he doesn’thave the elements laid out in front of himas nicely as those three words, crab, pine,sauce. He hasn’t created the requisitemind space for insight to even bepossible. He has no idea which elements

may need to come together. He has, inother words, no conception of theproblem.

Even his brain will be different fromHolmes’s as he approaches the problem,be it the word association or the case ofthe builder. At first glance, if Watsonwere to come to the right answer on hisown, we might not see an immediatedifference. In either Holmes or Watson’scase, a brain scan would show us that asolution has been reached approximatelythree hundred milliseconds before thesolver realizes it himself. Specifically, wewould see a burst of activity from the rightanterior temporal lobe (an area just abovehis right ear that is implicated in complexcognitive processing), and an increasedactivation in the right anterior superior

temporal gyrus (an area that has beenassociated with perceiving emotionalprosody—or the rhythm and intonation oflanguage that conveys a certain feeling—and bringing together disparateinformation in complex languagecomprehension).

But Watson may well never reach thatpoint of solution—and we’d likely knowhe’s doomed long before he himself does.While he’s struggling with the puzzle, wewould be able to predict if he washeading in the right direction by looking atneural activity in two areas: the left andright temporal lobes, associated with theprocessing of lexical and semanticinformation, and the mid-frontal cortex,including the anterior cingulate,associated with attention switching and

the detection of inconsistent andcompeting activity. That latter activationwould be particularly intriguing, as itsuggests the process by which we’re ableto gain insight into a preciouslyinscrutable problem: the anterior cingulateis likely waiting to detect disparatesignals from the brain, even weak onesthat we are unaware of sending, andturning its attention to them to gain apossible solution, amplifying, so to speak,information that already exists but thatneeds a little push to be integrated andprocessed as a general whole. InWatson’s brain, we’re not likely to seemuch action. But Holmes’s would tell adifferent story.

In fact, were we to simply compareWatson’s brain to Holmes’s, we would

find telltale signs of Holmes’spredisposition to such insights—andWatson’s lack thereof—even absent atarget for his mind to latch on to.Specifically, we would discover that thedetective’s brain was more active in theright-hemisphere regions associated withlexical and semantic processing than youraverage Watson brain, and that itexhibited greater diffuse activation of thevisual system.

What would these differences mean?The right hemisphere is more involved inprocessing such loose or remoteassociations as often come together inmoments of insight, while the left tends tofocus on tighter, more explicitconnections. More likely than not, thespecific patterns that accompany insight

signal a mind that is ever ready to processassociations that, at first glance, don’tseem to be associations at all. In otherwords, a mind that can find connectionsbetween the seemingly unconnected canaccess its vast network of ideas andimpressions and detect even faint linksthat can then be amplified to recognize abroader significance, if such asignificance exists. Insight may seem tocome from nowhere, but really, it comesfrom somewhere quite specific: from theattic and the processing that has beentaking place while you’ve been busy doingother things.

The pipe, the violin, the walk, theconcert, the shower, they all havesomething else in common, beyond theearlier criteria we used to nominate them

as good potential activities for creatingdistance. They allow your mind to relax.They take the pressure off. In essence, allof the mentioned characteristics—unrelated, not too effortful, and yeteffortful enough—come together to offerthe proper environment for neuralrelaxation. You can’t relax if you’resupposed to be working on a problem;hence the unrelatedness. Nor can you relaxif you’re finding something effortful. Andtoo lax, well, you may not be stimulated todo anything, or you might relax a bit toomuch and fall asleep.

Even if you don’t come to anyconclusions or gain any perspective inyour time off from a problem, chances areyou will return to it both reenergized andready to expend more effort. In 1927,

Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarniknoticed a funny thing: waiters in a Viennarestaurant could remember only ordersthat were in progress. As soon as theorder was sent out and complete, theyseemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnikthen did what any good psychologistwould do: she went back to the lab anddesigned a study. A group of adults andchildren was given anywhere betweeneighteen and twenty-two tasks to perform(both physical ones, like making clayfigures, and mental ones, like solvingpuzzles), but half of those tasks wereinterrupted so that they couldn’t becompleted. At the end, the subjectsremembered the interrupted tasks farbetter than the completed ones—over twotimes better, in fact.

Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a stateof tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending.Your mind wants to know what comesnext. It wants to finish. It wants to keepworking—and it will keep working evenif you tell it to stop. All through thoseother tasks, it will subconsciously beremembering the ones it never got tocomplete. It’s the same Need for Closurethat we’ve encountered before, a desire ofour minds to end states of uncertainty andresolve unfinished business. This needmotivates us to work harder, to workbetter, and to work to completion. And amotivated mind, as we already know, is afar more powerful mind.

Distancing Through Actual Distance

And what if, like Watson, you simplycan’t fathom doing something that wouldenable you to think of something else,even if you have all of these suggestions tochoose from? Luckily, distance isn’tlimited to a change in activity (though thatdoes happen to be one of the easierroutes). Another way to cue psychologicaldistance is to acquire literal distance. Tophysically move to another point. ForWatson, that would be the equivalent ofgetting up and walking out of Baker Streetinstead of sitting there looking at hisflatmate. Holmes may be able to changelocation mentally, but an actual physicalchange may help the lesser willed—andcould even aid the great detective himselfwhen imaginative inspiration is nototherwise forthcoming.

I n The Valley of Fear , Holmesproposes to return in the evening to thescene of the crime under investigation,leaving the hotel where he has been doingmost of his thinking.

“An evening alone!” Watson exclaims.Surely, that would be more morbid thananything else. Nonsense, Holmes counters.It could actually be quite illustrative. “Ipropose to go up there presently. I havearranged it with the estimable Ames, whois by no means whole-hearted aboutBarker. I shall sit in that room and see ifits atmosphere brings me inspiration. I’ma believer in the genius loci. You smile,Friend Watson. Well, we shall see.” Andwith 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 thatpossible? Could the genius loci havereally brought the inspiration that Holmeshad hoped?

Indeed it could have. Location affectsthought in the most direct way possible—in fact, it even affects us physically. It allgoes back to one of the most famousexperiments in psychology: Pavlov’sdogs. Ivan Pavlov wanted to show that aphysical cue (in this case it was a sound,but it can just as easily be somethingvisual or a smell or a general location)could eventually elicit the same responseas an actual reward. So, he would ring abell and then present his dogs with food.At the sight of the food, the dogs would—naturally—salivate. But soon enough, theybegan to salivate at the bell itself, before

any sight or smell of food was present.The bell triggered the anticipation of foodand with it, a physical reaction.

We now know that this type of learnedassociation goes far beyond dogs andbells and meat. Humans tend to build suchpatterns as a matter of course, eventuallyleading innocuous things like bells totrigger predictable reactions in our brains.When you enter a doctor’s office, forexample, the smell alone may be enough totrigger butterflies—not because you knowthere will be something painful (you mightbe coming in to drop off some forms, forall that) but because you have learned toassociate that environment with theanxiety of a medical visit.

The power of learned associations isubiquitous. We tend, for instance, to

remember material better in the locationwhere we first learned it. Students whotake tests in the room where they did theirstudying tend to do better than if they takethose same tests in a new environment.And the opposite is true: if a particularlocation is tied to frustration or boredomor distraction, it doesn’t make for a goodstudy choice.

At every level, physical and neural,locations get linked to memories. Placestend to get associated with the type ofactivity that occurs there, and the patterncan 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 whilewatching TV). Sitting at the same desk allday 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 workfrom home and need to go to a specifiedoffice. At home, they are not used toworking, and they find themselves beingdistracted by the same types of things thatthey would normally do around the house.Those neural associations are not the onesthat would be conducive to getting things—work-related things, that is—done. Thememory traces simply aren’t there, and theones that are there aren’t the ones youwant to activate. It also illustrates whywalking might be so effective. It’s muchmore difficult to fall into acounterproductive thought pattern if yourscenery is changing all the time.

Location affects thought. A change in

location cues us, so to speak, to thinkdifferently. It renders our ingrainedassociations irrelevant and, in so doingfrees us to form new ones, to exploreways of thinking and paths of thought thatwe hadn’t previously considered.Whereas our imagination may be stymiedby our usual locations, it is set loose whenwe separate it from learned constraints.We have no memories, no neural links thatkick in to tie us down. And in that lies thesecret link between imagination andphysical distance. The most importantthing that a change in physical perspectivecan do is to prompt a change in mentalperspective. Even Holmes, who unlikeWatson doesn’t need to be led by the handand forcibly removed from Baker Street inorder 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 tospend his night alone in the room where amurder has taken place. In light of the linkbetween location, memory, andimaginative distance, his belief in thegenius loci no longer seems nearly asstrange. Holmes doesn’t actually think thathe can re-create events by being in theroom where they took place; instead, hebanks on doing precisely what we’ve justdiscussed. He wants to trigger a change ofperspective by a literal change oflocation, in this case a very specificlocation and a very specific perspective,that of the people involved in the crime athand. In doing so, he frees up hisimagination to take not the path of his own

experiences, memories, and connectionsbut that of the people involved in theevents themselves. What associationsmight the room have triggered for them?What might it have inspired?

Holmes realizes both the necessity ofgetting into the mindset of the actorsinvolved in the drama and the immediatedifficulty of doing so, with all of theelements that could at any point go wrong.And what better way to push alldistracting information to the side andfocus on the most basic particulars, in away that is most likely to recall that of theoriginal actors, than to request a solitaryevening in the room of the crime? Ofcourse, Holmes still needs all of hisobservational and imaginative skills oncehe is there—but he now has access to the

tableau and elements that presentedthemselves to whomever was present atthe original scene of the crime. And fromthere he can proceed on a much more surefooting.

Indeed, it is in that room that he firstnotices a single dumbbell, surmising atonce that the missing member of the pairmust have somehow been involved in theunfolding events, and from that room thathe deduces the most likely location of thedumbbell’s pair: out the only windowfrom which it could reasonably have beendropped. And when he emerges from thestudy, he has changed his mind from hisoriginal conjectures as to the propercourse of events. While there, he wasbetter able to get into the mindset of theactors in question and in so doing clarify

the elements that had previously beenhazy.

And in that sense, Sherlock Holmesinvokes the same contextual memoryprinciple as we just explored, usingcontext to cue perspective taking andimagination. Given this specific room, atthis specific time of day, what wouldsomeone who was committing or had justcommitted the crime in question be mostlikely to do or think?

Absent the physical change anddistance, however, even Holmes may havefound his imagination faltering, as indeedhe did prior to that evening, in failing toconceive of the actual course of events asone of the possibilities. We are not oftentrained to look at the world from another’spoint of view in a more basic, broad

fashion that transcends simple interaction.How might someone else interpret asituation differently from us? How mighthe act given a specific set ofcircumstances? What might he think givencertain inputs? These are not questionsthat we often find ourselves asking.

Indeed, so poorly trained are we atactually taking someone else’s point ofview that when we are explicitlyrequested to do so, we still proceed froman egocentric place. In one series ofstudies, researchers found that peopleadopt the perspective of others by simplyadjusting from their own. It’s a question ofdegree rather than type: we tend to beginwith our own view as an anchoring point,and then adjust slightly in one directioninstead of altering the view altogether.

Moreover, once we reach an estimate thatsounds satisfactory to us, we stop thinkingand consider the problem resolved.We’ve successfully captured the requiredpoint of view. That tendency is known assatisficing, a blend of sufficing andsatisfying: a response bias that errs on theegocentric side of plausible answers to agiven question. As soon as we find ananswer that satisfies, we stop looking,whether or not the answer is ideal or evenremotely accurate. (In a recent study ofonline behavior, for instance, individualswere profoundly influenced by existingpersonal preferences in their evaluationsof websites—and they used thosepreferences as an anchor to reduce thenumber of sites they considered and toterminate their online search. As a result,

they returned often to already known sites,instead of taking the time to evaluatepotential new sources of information, andthey chose to focus on search enginesummaries instead of using actual sitevisits to make their decisions.) Thetendency toward an egocentric bias insatisficing is especially strong when aplausible answer is presented early on inthe search process. We then tend toconsider our task complete, even if it’s farfrom being so.

A change in perspective, in physicallocation, quite simply forces mindfulness.It forces us to reconsider the world, tolook at things from a different angle. Andsometimes that change in perspective canbe the spark that makes a difficult decisionmanageable, or that engenders creativity

where none existed before.Consider a famous problem-solving

experiment, originally designed byNorman Maier in 1931. A participant wasplaced in a room where two strings werehanging from the ceiling. The participant’sjob was to tie the two strings together.However, it was impossible to reach onestring while holding the other. Severalitems were also available in the room,such as a pole, an extension cord, and apair of pliers. What would you havedone?

Most participants struggled with thepole and the extension cord, trying theirbest to reach the end while holding on tothe other string. It was tricky business.

The most elegant solution? Tie thepliers to the bottom of one string, then use

it as a pendulum and catch it as it floatstoward you while you hold the otherstring. Simple, insightful, quick.

But very few people could visualize thechange in object use (here, imagining thepliers as something other than pliers, aweight that could be tied to a string) whileembroiled in the task. Those that did didone thing differently: they stepped back.They looked at it from a literal distance.They saw the whole and then tried toenvision how they could make the detailswork. Some did this naturally; some hadto be prompted by the experimenter, whoseemingly by accident brushed one of thestrings to induce a swinging motion (thataction was enough to get participants tospontaneously think of the pliers solution).But none did it without a shift, however

slight, of point of view, or, to speak inTrope’s terms, a move from the concrete(pliers) to the abstract (pendulum weight),from those puzzle pieces to the overallpuzzle. Never underestimate howpowerful a cue physical perspective canbe. As Holmes puts it in “The Problem ofThor Bridge,” “When once your point ofview is changed, the very thing which wasso damning becomes a clue to the truth.”

Distancing Through Mental Techniques

Let’s return for a moment to a scene thatwe’ve visited once before, in The Houndof the Baskervilles. After Dr. Mortimer’sinitial visit, Dr. Watson leaves BakerStreet to go to his club. Holmes, however,

remains seated in his armchair, which iswhere Watson finds him when he returnsto the flat around nine o’clock in theevening. Has Holmes been a fixture thereall day? Watson inquires. “On thecontrary,” responds Holmes. “I have beento Devonshire.” Watson doesn’t miss abeat. “In spirit?” he asks. “Exactly,”responds the detective.

What is it, exactly, that Holmes does ashe sits in his chair, his mind far away fromthe physicality of the moment? Whathappens in his brain—and why is it suchan effective tool of the imagination, suchan important element of his thoughtprocess that he hardly ever abandons it?Holmes’s mental journeying goes by manynames, but most commonly it is calledmeditation.

When I say meditation, the imagesinvoked for most people will includemonks or yogis or some other spiritual-sounding monikers. But that is only a tinyportion of what the word means. Holmesis neither monk nor yoga practitioner, buthe understands what meditation, in itsessence, actually is—a simple mentalexercise to clear your mind. Meditation isnothing more than the quiet distance thatyou need for integrative, imaginative,observant, and mindful thought. It is theability to create distance, in both time andspace, between you and all of theproblems you are trying to tackle, in yourmind alone. It doesn’t even have to be, aspeople often assume, a way ofexperiencing nothing; directed meditationcan take you toward some specific goal or

destination (like Devonshire), as long asyour mind is clear of every otherdistraction—or, to be more precise, aslong as your mind clears itself of everydistraction and continues to do so as thedistractions continue to arise (as theyinevitably will).

In 2011, researchers from theUniversity of Wisconsin studied a groupof people who were not in the habit ofmeditating and instructed them in thefollowing manner: relax with your eyesclosed and focus on the flow of yourbreath at the tip of your nose; if a randomthought arises, acknowledge the thoughtand then simply let it go by gently bringingyour attention back to the flow of yourbreath. For fifteen minutes, theparticipants attempted to follow these

guidelines. Then they were broken up intotwo groups: one group had the option ofreceiving nine thirty-minute sessions ofmeditation instruction over the course offive weeks, and the other group had thatoption at the conclusion of the experiment,but not before. At the end of the fiveweeks, everyone completed the earlierthought assignment a second time.

During each session, the researchersmeasured participants’electroencephalographic (EEG) activity—a recording of electrical activity along thescalp—and what they found presents atantalizing picture. Even such a shorttraining period—participants averagedbetween five and sixteen minutes oftraining and practice a day—can causechanges at the neural level. The

researchers were particularly interested infrontal EEG asymmetry, toward a patternthat has been associated with positiveemotions (and that had been shown tofollow seventy or more hours of trainingin mindfulness meditation techniques).While prior to training the two groupsshowed no differences, by the end of thestudy, those who had received additionaltraining showed a leftward shift inasymmetry, which means a move toward apattern that has been associated withpositive and approach-oriented emotionalstates—such states as have been linkedrepeatedly to increased creativity andimaginative capacity.

What does that mean? First, unlike paststudies of meditation that asked for a veryreal input of time and energy, this

experiment did not require extensiveresource commitment, and yet it stillshowed striking neural results. Moreover,the training provided was extremelyflexible: people could choose when theywould want to receive instruction andwhen they would want to practice. And,perhaps more important, participantsreported a spike in spontaneous passivepractice, when, without a consciousdecision to meditate, they foundthemselves in unrelated situations thinkingalong the lines of the instructions they hadbeen provided.

True, it is only one study. But there’smore to the brain story than that. Earlierwork suggests that meditation training canaffect the default network—that diffuseattentional network that we’ve already

talked about, that facilitates creativeinsights and allows our brains to work onremote connections while we’re doingsomething else entirely. Individuals whomeditate regularly show increased resting-state functional connectivity in thenetwork compared to nonmeditators.What’s more, in one study of meditation’seffects over a period of eight weeks,researchers found changes in gray-matterdensity in a group of meditation-naiveparticipants (that is, they hadn’t practicedmeditation before the beginning of thestudy) as compared to a control group.There were increases in concentration inthe left hippocampus, the posteriorcingulate cortex (PCC), the tempero-parietal junction (TPJ), and thecerebellum—areas involved in learning

and memory, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspectivetaking. Together, the hippocampus, PCC,and TPJ form a neural network thatsupports both self-projection—includingthinking about the hypothetical future—and perspective taking, or conceivingothers’ point of view—in other words,precisely the type of distancing that we’vebeen discussing.

Meditation is a way of thinking. A habitof distance that has the fortunateconsequence of being self-reinforcing.One tool in the arsenal of mentaltechniques that can help you create theright frame of mind to attain the distancenecessary for mindful, imaginativethought. It is far more attainable, and farmore widely applicable, than the

connotations of the word might have youbelieve.

Consider the case of someone like RayDalio. Almost every morning, Daliomeditates. Sometimes he does it beforework. Sometimes in his office, right at hisdesk: he leans back, closes his eyes,clasps his hands in a simple grip. Nothingmore is necessary. “It’s just a mentalexercise in which you are clearing yourmind,” he once told the New Yorker in aninterview.

Dalio isn’t the person that comes tomind most readily when you think ofpractitioners of meditation. He isn’t amonk or a yoga fanatic or a hippie NewAger, and he isn’t doing this just for theinterest in participating in a psych study.He happens to be the founder of the

world’s biggest hedge fund, BridgewaterAssociates, someone who has little time towaste and many ways to spend the time hedoes have. And yet he chooses, actively,to devote a portion of each day tomediation, in its broadest, most classicsense.

When Dalio meditates, he clears hismind. He prepares it for the day byrelaxing and trying to keep all of thethoughts that will proceed to bother himfor the next however many hours at bay.Yes, it may seem like a waste to spendany time at all doing, well, nothing thatlooks productive. But spending thoseminutes in the space of his mind willactually make Dalio more productive,more flexible, more imaginative, and moreinsightful. In short, it will help him be a

better decision maker.But is it for everyone? Meditation, that

mental space, is not nothing; it requiresreal energy and concentration (hence theeasier route of physical distance). Whilesomeone like Holmes or Dalio may wellbe able to dive right into blankness togreat effect, I’m willing to bet that Watsonwould struggle. With nothing else tooccupy his mind, his breathing alonewould likely not be enough to keep allthose thoughts in check. It’s far easier todistance yourself with physical cues thanit is to have to rely on your mind alone.

Luckily, as I mentioned in passing,meditation need not be blank. Inmeditation, we can indeed be focusing onsomething as difficult to capture as breathor emotion or the sensations of the body to

the exclusion of everything else. But wecan also use what’s known asvisualization: a focus on a specific mentalimage that will replace that blanknesswith something more tangible andaccessible. Go back for a moment to TheHound of the Baskervilles, where we leftHolmes floating above the Devonshiremoors. That, too, is meditation—and itwasn’t at all aimless or blank or devoid ofmental imagery. It requires the same focusas any meditation, but is in some waysmore approachable. You have a concreteplan, something with which to occupyyour mind and keep intrusive thoughts atbay, something on which you can focusyour energy that is more vibrant andmultidimensional than the rise and fall ofyour breath. And what’s more, you can

focus on attaining the distance that Tropewould call hypotheticality, to beginconsidering the ifs and what-ifs.

Try this exercise. Close your eyes(well, close them once you finish readingthe instructions). Think of a specificsituation where you felt angry or hostile,your most recent fight with a close friendor significant other, for instance. Do youhave a moment in mind? Recall it asclosely as you can, as if you were goingthrough it again. Once you’re done, tell mehow you feel. And tell me as far as youcan what went wrong. Who was to blame?Why? Do you think it’s something that canbe fixed?

Close your eyes again. Picture the samesituation. Only now, I want you to imaginethat it is happening to two people who are

not you. You are just a small fly on thewall, looking down at the scene and takingnote of it. You are free to buzz around andobserve from all angles and no one willsee you. Once again, as soon as you finish,tell me how you feel. And then respond tothe same questions as before.

You’ve just completed a classicexercise in mental distancing throughvisualization. It’s a process of picturingsomething vividly but from a distance, andso, from a perspective that is inherentlydifferent from the actual one you havestored in your memory. From scenario oneto scenario two, you have gone from aconcrete to an abstract mindset; you’velikely become calmer emotionally, seenthings that you missed the first timearound, and you may have even come

away with a slightly modified memory ofwhat happened. In fact, you may have evenbecome wiser and better at solvingp r o b l e ms overall, unrelated to thescenario in question. (And you will havealso been practicing a form of meditation.Sneaky, isn’t it?)

Psychologist Ethan Kross hasdemonstrated that such mental distancing(the above scenario was actually takenfrom one of his studies) is not just goodfor emotional regulation. It can alsoenhance your wisdom, both in terms ofdialectism (i.e., being cognizant of changeand contradictions in the world) andintellectual humility (i.e., knowing yourown limitations), and make you better ableto solve problems and make choices.When you distance yourself, you begin to

process things more broadly, seeconnections that you couldn’t see from acloser vantage point. In other words,being wiser also means being moreimaginative. It might not lead to a eurekamoment, but it will lead to insight. Youthink as if you had actually changed yourlocation, while you remain seated in yourarmchair.

Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer,was one of the most talented and prolificinventors of the twentieth century. Amonghis 230 U.S. patents is the automaticletter-sorting machine that the postalservice still uses to sort the mail, amagnetic memory device that served as aprecursor to the hard disk drive, and thestraight-arm phonograph. One of the tricks

that helped sustain his remarkablecreativity and productivity? None otherthan visualization. As he once toldpsychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,whenever a task proves difficult or takestime or doesn’t have an obvious answer,“I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail, time isof no consequence. In other words, if ittakes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week.What else have I got to do? I’m going tobe here for twenty years. See? This is akind of mental trick. Otherwise you say,‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then youmake mistakes. My way, you say time is ofabsolutely no consequence.” Visualizationhelped Rabinow to shift his mindset to onewhere he was able to tackle things thatwould 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 gameor move before they actually performthem, acting them out in their minds beforethey do so in reality: a tennis playerenvisions a serve before the ball has lefthis hand; a golfer sees the path of the ballbefore he lifts his club. Cognitivebehavioral therapists use the technique tohelp people who suffer from phobias orother conditions to relax and be able toexperience situations without actuallyexperiencing them. Psychologist MartinSeligman urges that it might even be thesingle most important tool towardfostering a more imaginative, intuitivemindset. He goes as far as to suggest thatby repeated, simulated visual enactment,

“intuition may be teachable virtually andon a massive scale.” How’s that forendorsement.

It is all about learning to create distancewith the mind by actually picturing aworld as if you were seeing andexperiencing it for real. As thephilosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once putit, “To repeat: don’t think, but look!” Thatis the essence of visualization: learning tolook internally, to create scenarios andalternatives in your mind, to play outnonrealities as if they were real. It helpsyou see beyond the obvious, to not makethe mistakes of a Lestrade or a Gregson byplaying through only the scenario that is infront of you, or the only one you want tosee. It forces imagination because itnecessitates the use of imagination.

It’s easier than you might think. In fact,all it is really is what we do naturallywhen we try to recall a memory. It evenuses the same neural network—the MPFC,lateral temporal cortex, medial and lateralparietal lobes, and the medial temporallobe (home of the hippocampus). Except,instead of recalling a memory exactly, weshuffle around details from experience tocreate something that never actuallyoccurred, be it a not-yet-extant future or acounterfactual past. We test it in our mindsinstead of having to experience it inreality. And by so doing, we attain thevery same thing we do by way of physicaldistance: we separate ourselves from thesituation we are trying to analyze.

It is all meditation of one form oranother. When we saw Holmes in The

Valley of Fear , he asked for a physicalchange in location, an actual prompt forhis mind from the external world. But thesame effect can be accomplished withouthaving to go anywhere—from behind yourdesk, if you’re Dalio, or your armchair, ifyou’re Holmes, or wherever else youmight find yourself. All you have to do isbe able to free up the necessary space inyour mind. Let it be the blank canvas. Andthen the whole imaginative world can beyour palette.

Sustaining Your Imagination:The Importance of Curiosity and Play

Once upon a time, Sherlock Holmes urgedus to maintain a crisp and clean brain

attic: out with the useless junk, in withmeticulously organized boxes that areuncluttered by useless paraphernalia. Butit’s not quite that simple. Why on earth,for instance, did Holmes, in “The Lion’sMane,” know about an obscure species ofjellyfish in one warm corner of the ocean?Impossible to explain it by virtue of thestark criteria he imposes early on. As withmost things, it is safe to assume thatHolmes was exaggerating for effect.Uncluttered, yes, but not stark. An atticthat contained only the bare essentials foryour professional success would be a sadlittle attic indeed. It would have hardlyany material to work with, and it would bepractically incapable of any great insightor imagination.

How did the jellyfish make its way into

Holmes’s pristine palace? It’s simple. Atsome point Holmes must have gottencurious. Just like he got curious about theMotets. Just like he gets curious about artlong enough to try to convince ScotlandYard that his nemesis, Professor Moriarty,can’t possibly be up to any good. Just ashe says to Inspector MacDonald in TheValley of Fear , when the inspectorindignantly refuses Holmes’s offer ofreading a book on the history of ManorHouse, “Breadth of view, my dear Mr.Mac, is one of the essentials of ourprofession. The interplay of ideas and theoblique uses of knowledge are often ofextraordinary interest.” Time and timeagain, Holmes gets curious, and hiscuriosity leads him to find out more. Andthat “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 thatyou need to access regularly and as amatter of course and those that you mayneed to reach one day but don’tnecessarily look to on a regular basis.Holmes isn’t asking that we stop beingcurious, that we stop acquiring thosejellyfish. No. He asks that we keep theactive knowledge clean and clear—andthat we store the passive knowledgecleanly and clearly, in properly labeledboxes and bins, in the right folders and theright drawers.

It’s not that we should all of a suddengo against his earlier admonition and take

up our precious mental real estate withjunk. Not at all. Only, we don’t alwaysknow when something that may at firstglance appear to be junklike is not junk atall but an important addition to our mentalarsenal. So, we must tuck those itemsaway securely in case of future use. Wedon’t even need to store the full item; justa trace of what it was, a reminder that willallow us to find it again—just as Holmeslooks up the jellyfish particulars in an oldbook rather than knowing them as a matterof course. All he needs to do is rememberthat the book and the reference exist.

An organized attic is not a static attic.Imagination allows you to make more outof your mind space than you otherwisecould. And the truth is you never quiteknow what element will be of most use

and when it might end up being moreuseful than you ever thought possible.

Here, then, is Holmes’s all-importantcaveat: the most surprising of articles canend up being useful in the most surprisingof ways. You must open your mind to newinputs, however unrelated they may seem.

And that is where your general mindsetcomes in. Is there a standing openness toinputs no matter how strange orunnecessary they might seem, as opposedto a tendency to dismiss anything that ispotentially distracting? Is that open-minded stance your habitual approach, theway that you train yourself to think and tolook at the world?

With practice, we might become betterat sensing what may or may not proveuseful, what to store away for future

reference and what to throw out for thetime being. Something that at first glancemay seem like simple intuition is actuallyfar more—a knowledge that is actuallybased on countless hours of practice, oftraining yourself to be open, to integrateexperiences in your mind until youbecome familiar with the patterns anddirections those experiences tend to take.

Remember those remote-associationexperiments, where you had to find aword that could complete all threemembers of a set? In a way, thatencapsulates most of life: a series ofremote associations that you won’t seeunless you take the time to stop, toimagine, and to consider. If your mindsetis one that is scared of creativity, scaredto go against prevailing customs and

mores, it will only hold you back. If youfear creativity, even subconsciously, youwill have more difficulty being creative.You will never be like Holmes, try as youmay. Never forget that Holmes was arenegade—and a renegade that was as farfrom a computer as it gets. And that iswhat makes his approach so powerful.

Holmes gets to the very heart of thematter in The Valley of Fear , when headmonishes Watson that “there should beno combination of events for which thewit of man cannot conceive anexplanation. Simply as a mental exercise,without any assertion that it is true, let meindicate a possible line of thought. It is, Iadmit, mere imagination; but how often isimagination the mother of truth?”

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“Here is a young man who learnssuddenly . . .” “Not until I have been toBlackheath.” from The Casebook ofSherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of theNorwood Builder,” p. 829.

“You will rise high in yourprofession.” from His Last Bow, “TheAdventure of Wisteria Lodge,” p. 1231.

“One of the most remarkablecharacteristics of Sherlock Holmes washis power of throwing his brain out ofaction . . .” from His Last Bow, “TheAdventure 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 TheHound of the Baskervilles, chapter 3: TheProblem, p. 22.

“I’m a believer in the genius loci.”“Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, isone of the essentials of our profession.”from chapter 6: A Dawning Light, p. 51;chapter 7: The Solution, p. 62 The Valleyof Fear.

PART THREE

CHAPTER FIVE

Navigating the Brain Attic:Deduction from the Facts

Imagine you are Holmes, and I, Maria, apotential client. You’ve spent the lasthundred-odd pages being presented withinformation, much as you would if youwere to observe me in your sitting roomfor some time. Take a minute to think, toconsider what you may know about me asa person. What can you infer based onwhat I’ve written?

I won’t go down the list of all possibleanswers, but here’s one to make you

pause: the first time I ever heard the nameSherlock Holmes was in Russian. Thosestories my dad read by the fire? Russiantranslations, not English originals. Yousee, we had only recently come to theUnited States, and when he read to us, itwas in the language that my family uses tothis day with one another at home.Alexandre Dumas, Sir H. Rider Haggard,Jerome K. Jerome, Sir Arthur ConanDoyle: all men whose voices I first heardin Russian.

What does this have to do withanything? Simply this: Holmes wouldhave known without my having to tell him.He would have made a simple deductionbased on the available facts, infused withjust a bit of that imaginative quality wespoke about in the last chapter. And he

would have realized that I couldn’t havepossibly had my first encounter with hismethods in any language but Russian.Don’t believe me? All of the elements arethere, I promise. And by the end of thischapter, you, too, should be in a positionto follow Holmes in putting them togetherinto the only explanation that would suitall of the available facts. As the detectivesays over and over, when all avenues areexhausted, whatever remains, howeverimprobable, must be the truth.

And so we turn finally to that most flashyof steps: deduction. The grand finale. Thefireworks at the end of a hard day’s work.The moment when you can finallycomplete your thought process and cometo your conclusion, make your decision,

do whatever it was that you had set out todo. Everything has been gathered andanalyzed. All that remains is to see what itall means and what that meaning impliesfor you, to draw the implications out totheir logical conclusion.

It’s the moment when Sherlock Holmesutters that immortal line in “The CrookedMan,” elementary.

“I have the advantage of knowing yourhabits, my dear Watson,” said he. “Whenyour round is a short one you walk, andwhen it is a long one you use a hansom.As I perceive that your boots, althoughused, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubtthat you are at present busy enough tojustify the hansom.”

“Excellent!” I cried.

“Elementary,” said he. “It is one ofthose instances where the reasoner canproduce an effect which seems remarkableto his neighbour, because the latter hasmissed the one little point which is thebasis of the deduction.”

What does deduction actually entail?Deduction is that final navigation of yourbrain attic, the moment when you puttogether all of the elements that camebefore in a single, cohesive whole thatmakes sense of the full picture, the atticyielding in orderly fashion what it hasgathered so methodically. What Holmesmeans by deduction and what formal logicmeans by deduction are not one and thesame. In the purely logical sense,deduction is the arrival at a specific

instance from a general principle. Perhapsthe most famous example:

All men are mortal.Socrates is a man.Socrates is mortal.

But for Holmes, this is but one possibleway to reach the conclusion. Hisdeduction includes multiple ways ofreasoning—as long as you proceed fromfact and reach a statement that mustnecessarily be true, to the exclusion ofother alternatives.3

Whether it’s solving a crime, making adecision, or coming to some personaldetermination, the process remainsessentially the same. You take all of yourobservations—those attic contents that

you’ve decided to store and integrate intoyour existing attic structure and thatyou’ve already mulled over andreconfigured in your imagination—you putthem in order, starting from the beginningand leaving nothing out, and you see whatpossible answer remains that will bothincorporate all of them and answer yourinitial question. Or, to put it in Holmesianterms, you lay out your chain of reasoningand test possibilities until whateverremains (improbability aside) is the truth:“That process starts upon the suppositionthat when you have eliminated all which isimpossible, then whatever remains,however improbable, must be the truth,”he tells us. “It may well be that severalexplanations remain, in which case onetries 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 commonsense.” But the common sense is not ascommon, or as straightforward, as onemight hope. Whenever Watson himselftries to emulate Holmes, he often findshimself in error. And it’s only natural.Even if we’ve been accurate up to thispoint, we have to push back one more timelest System Watson leads us astray at theeleventh hour.

Why is deduction far more difficult thanit appears? Why is it that Watson so oftenfalters when he tries to follow in hiscompanion’s footsteps. What gets in theway of our final reasoning? Why is it sooften so difficult to think clearly, evenwhen we have everything we need to do

so? And how can we circumvent thosedifficulties so that, unlike Watson, who isstuck to repeat his mistakes over and over,we can use System Holmes to help us outof the quagmire and deduce properly?

The Difficulty of Proper Deduction:Our Inner Storyteller at the Wheel

A trio of notorious robbers sets its sightson Abbey Grange, the residence of SirEustace Brackenstall, one of the richestmen in Kent. One night, when all arepresumed to be sleeping, the three menmake their way through the dining roomwindow, preparing to ransack the wealthyresidence much as they did a nearby estatea fortnight prior. Their plan, however, is

foiled when Lady Brackenstall enters theroom. Quickly, they hit her over the headand tie her to one of the dining roomchairs. All would seem to be well, were itnot for Sir Brackenstall, who comes in toinvestigate the strange noises. He is not solucky as his wife: he is knocked over thehead with a poker and he collapses, dead,onto the floor. The robbers hastily clearthe sideboard of its silver but, too agitatedby the murder to do much else, exitthereafter. But first they open a bottle ofwine to calm their nerves.

Or so it would seem, according to thetestimony of the only living witness, LadyBrackenstall. But in “The Adventure of theAbbey Grange,” few things are what theyappear to be.

The story seems sound enough. The

lady’s explanation is confirmed by hermaid, Theresa, and all signs point toevents unfolding much in the manner shehas described. And yet, something doesn’tfeel right to Sherlock Holmes. “Everyinstinct that I possess cries out against it,”he tells Watson. “It’s wrong—it’s allwrong—I’ll swear that it’s wrong.” Hebegins enumerating the possible flaws,and as he does so, details that seementirely plausible, when taken one by one,now together begin to cast doubt on thelikelihood of the story. It is not, however,until he comes to the wineglasses thatHolmes knows for sure he is correct.“And now, on the top of this, comes theincident of the wineglasses,” he says tohis 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 thatfact. What does that suggest to yourmind?”

“That last glass filled would be mostlikely to contain beeswing.”

“Not at all. The bottle was full of it,and it is inconceivable that the first twoglasses were clear and the third heavingcharged with it. There are two possibleexplanations, and only two. One is thatafter the second glass was filled the bottlewas violently agitated, and so the third

glass received the beeswing. That doesnot appear probable. No, no, I am surethat I am right.”

“What, then, do you suppose?”“That only two glasses were used, and

that the dregs of both were poured into athird glass, so as to give the falseimpression that three people had beenthere.”

What does Watson know about thephysics of wine? Not much, I venture toguess, but when Holmes asks him aboutthe beeswing, he at once comes up with aready answer: it must have been the lastglass to be poured. The reason seemssensible enough, and yet comes fromnowhere. I’d bet that Watson hadn’t evengiven it so much as a second thought until

Holmes prompted him to do so. But whenasked, he is only too happy to create anexplanation that makes sense. Watsondoesn’t even realize that he has done it,and were Holmes not to stop him for amoment, he would likely hold it as futurefact, as further proof of the veracity of theoriginal story rather than as a potentialhole in the story’s fabric.

Absent Holmes, the Watson storytellingapproach is the natural, instinctive one.And absent Holmes’s insistence, it isincredibly difficult to resist our desire toform narratives, to tell stories even if theymay not be altogether correct, or correct atall. We like simplicity. We like concretereasons. We like causes. We like thingsthat make intuitive sense (even if thatsense happens to be wrong).

On the flip side, we dislike any factorthat stands in the way of that simplicityand causal concreteness. Uncertainty,chance, randomness, nonlinearity: theseelements threaten our ability to explain,and to explain quickly and (seemingly)logically. And so, we do our best toeliminate them at every turn. Just like wedecide that the last glass of wine to bepoured is also most likely to contain allthe beeswing if we see glasses of unevenclarity, we may think, to take one example,that someone has a hot hand in basketballif we see a number of baskets in a row(the hot-hand fallacy). In both cases, weare using too few observations to reachour conclusions. In the case of the glasses,we rely only on that bottle and not on thebehavior of other similar bottles under

various circumstances. In the case ofbasketball, we rely only on the shortstreak (the law of small numbers) and noton the variability inherent in any player’sgame, which includes long-run streaks.Or, to take another example, we think acoin is more likely to land on heads if ithas fallen on tails for a number of times(the gambler’s fallacy), forgetting thatshort sequences don’t necessarily have tohave the fifty-fifty distribution that wouldappear in the long term.

Whether we’re explaining whysomething has happened or concluding asto the likely cause of an event, ourintuition often fails us because we preferthings to be much more controllable,predictable, and causally determined thanthey are in reality.

From these preferences stem the errorsin thinking that we make without so muchas a second thought. We tend to deduce aswe shouldn’t, arguing, as Holmes wouldput it, ahead of the data—and often inspite of the data. When things just “makesense” it is incredibly difficult to see themany other way.

W.J. was a World War II veteran. He wasgregarious, charming, and witty. He alsohappened to suffer from a form of epilepsyso incapacitating that, in 1960, he electedto have a drastic form of brain surgery.The connecting fabric between the left andright hemispheres of the brain that allowsthe two halves to communicate—hiscorpus collosum—would be severed. Inthe past, this form of treatment had been

shown to have a dramatic effect on theincidence of seizures. Patients who hadbeen unable to function could all of asudden lead seizure-free lives. But didsuch a dramatic change to the brain’snatural connectivity come at a cost?

At the time of W.J.’s surgery, no onereally knew the answer. But Roger Sperry,a neuroscientist at Caltech who would goon to win a Nobel Prize in medicine forhis work on hemispheric connectictivity,suspected that it might. In animals, at least,a severing of the corpus collosum meantthat the hemispheres became unable tocommunicate. What happened in onehemisphere was now a complete mysteryto the other. Could this effective isolationoccur in humans as well?

The pervasive wisdom was an

emphatic no. Our human brains were notanimal brains. They were far morecomplicated, far too smart, far tooevolved, really. And what better proofthan all of the high-functioning patientswho had undergone the surgery. This wasno frontal lobotomy. These patientsemerged with IQ intact and reasoningabilities aplenty. Their memory seemedunaffected. Their language abilities werenormal.

The resounding wisdom seemedintuitive and accurate. Except, of course,it was resoundingly wrong. No one hadever figured out a way to test itscientifically: it was a Watson just-sostory that made sense, founded on thesame absence of verified factualunderpinnings. Until, that is, the scientific

equivalent of Holmes arrived at the scene:Michael Gazzaniga, a young neuroscientistin Sperry’s lab. Gazzaniga found a way totest Sperry’s theory—that a severedcorpus collosum rendered the brainhemispheres unable to communicate—with the use of a tachistoscope, a devicethat could present visual stimuli forspecific periods of time, and, crucially,could do this to the right side or the leftside of each eye separately. (This lateralpresentation meant that any informationwould go to only one of the twohemispheres.)

When Gazzaniga tested W.J. after thesurgery, the results were striking. Thesame man who had sailed through his testsweeks earlier could no longer describe asingle object that was presented to his left

visual field. When Gazzaniga flashed animage of a spoon to the right field, W.J.named it easily, but when the same picturewas presented to the left, the patientseemed to have, in essence, gone blind.His eyes were fully functional, but hecould neither verbalize nor recall havingseen a single thing.

What was going on? W.J. wasGazzaniga’s patient zero, the first in a longline of initials who all pointed in onedirection: the two halves of our brains arenot created equal. One half is responsiblefor processing visual inputs—it’s the onewith the little window to the outsideworld, if you recall the Shel Silversteinimage—but the other half is responsiblefo r verbalizing what it knows—it’s theone with the staircase to the rest of the

house. When the two halves have beensplit apart, the bridge that connects thetwo no longer exists. Any informationavailable to one side may as well not existas far as the other is concerned. We have,in effect, two separate mind attics, eachwith its unique storage, contents, and, tosome extent, structure.

And here’s where things get reallytricky. If you show a picture of, say, achicken claw to just the left side of the eye(which means the picture will beprocessed only by the right hemisphere ofthe brain—the visual one, with thewindow) and one of a snowy driveway tojust the right side of the eye (which meansit will be processed only by the lefthemisphere—the one with thecommunicating staircase), and then ask the

individual to point at an image mostclosely related to what he’s seen, the twohands don’t agree: the right hand (tied tothe left input) will point to a shovel, whilethe left hand (tied to the right input) willpoint to a chicken. Ask the person whyhe’s pointing to two objects, and insteadof being confused he’ll at once create anentirely plausible explanation: you need ashovel to clean out the chicken coop. Hismind has created an entire story, anarrative that will make plausible sense ofhis hands’ discrepancy, when in reality itall goes back to those silent images.

Gazzaniga calls the left hemisphere ourleft-brain interpreter, driven to seekcauses and explanations—even for thingsthat may not have them, or at least notreadily available to our minds—in a

natural and instinctive fashion. But whilethe interpreter makes perfect sense, he ismore often than not flat-out wrong, theWatson of the wineglasses taken to anextreme.

Split-brain patients provide some of thebest scientific evidence of our proficiencyat narrative self-deception, at creatingexplanations that make sense but are inreality far from the truth. But we don’teven need to have our corpus collosumsevered to act that way. We do it all thetime, as a matter of course. Remember thatpendulum study of creativity, wheresubjects were able to solve the problemafter the experimenter had casually set oneof the two cords in motion? When subjectswere then asked where their insight hadcome from, they cited many causes. “It

was the only thing left.” “I just realizedthe cord would swing if I fastened aweight to it.” “I thought of the situation ofswinging across a river.” “I had imageryof monkeys swinging from trees.”

All plausible enough. None correct. Noone mentioned the experimenter’s ploy.And even when told about it later, overtwo-thirds continued to insist that they hadnot noted it and that it had had no impactat all on their own solutions—althoughthey had reached those solutions, onaverage, within forty-five seconds of thehint. What’s more, even the one-third thatadmitted the possibility of influenceproved susceptible to false explanation.When a decoy cue (twirling the weight ona cord) was presented, which had noimpact on the solution, they cited that cue,

and not the actual one that helped them, ashaving prompted their behavior.

Our minds form cohesive narratives outof disparate elements all the time. We’renot comfortable if something doesn’t havea cause, and so our brains determine acause one way or the other, without askingour permission to do so. When in doubt,our brains take the easiest route, and theydo so at every stage of the reasoningprocess, from forming inferences togeneralizations.

W.J. is but a more extreme example ofthe exact thing that Watson does with thewineglasses. In both instances there is thespontaneous construction of story, andthen a firm belief in its veracity, evenwhen it hinges on nothing more than itsseeming cohesiveness. That is deductive

problem number one.Even though all of the material is there

for the taking, the possibility of ignoringsome of it, knowingly or not, is real.Memory is highly imperfect, and highlysubject to change and influence. Even ourobservations themselves, while accurateenough to begin with, may end up affectingour recall and, hence, our deductivereasoning more than we think. We must becareful lest we let something that caughtour attention, whether because it is out ofall proportion (salience) or because it justhappened (recency) or because we’vebeen thinking about something totallyunrelated (priming or framing), weigh tooheavily in our reasoning and make usforget other details that are crucial forproper deduction. We must also be sure

that we answer the same question weposed in the beginning, the one that wasinformed by our initial goals andmotivation, and not one that somehowseems more pertinent or intuitive oreasier, now that we’ve reached the end ofthe thought process. Why do Lestrade andthe rest of the detectives so often persist inwrongful arrests, even when all evidencepoints to the contrary? Why do they keeppushing their original story, as if failing tonote altogether that it is coming apart atthe seams? It’s simple, really. We don’tlike to admit our initial intuition to befalse and would much rather dismiss theevidence that contradicts it. It is perhapswhy wrongful arrests are so sticky evenoutside the world of Conan Doyle.

The precise mistakes or the names we

give them don’t matter as much as thebroad idea: we often aren’t mindful in ourdeduction, and the temptation to glossover and jump to the end becomes everstronger the closer we get to the finishline. Our natural stories are so incrediblycompelling that they are tough to ignore orreverse. They get in the way of Holmes’sdictate of systematized common sense, ofgoing through all alternatives, one by one,sifting the crucial from the incidental, theimprobable from the impossible, until wereach the only answer.

As a simple illustration of what I mean,consider the following questions. I wantyou to write down the first answer thatcomes to your mind. Ready?

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

bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. Howmuch does the ball cost?2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make5 widgets, how long would it take 100machines to make 100 widgets?3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads.Every day, the patch doubles in size. If ittakes 48 days for the patch to cover theentire lake, how long would it take for thepatch to cover half of the lake?

You have just taken Shane Frederick’sCognitive Reflection Test (CRT). If youare like most people, chances are youwrote down at least one of the following:$0.10 for question one; 100 minutes forquestion two; and 24 days for questionthree. In each case, you would have beenwrong. But you would have been wrong in

good company. When the questions wereasked of Harvard students, the averagescore was 1.43 correct (with 57 percentof students getting either zero or oneright). At Princeton, a similar story: 1.63correct, and 45 percent scoring zero orone. And even at MIT, the scores were farfrom perfect: 2.18 correct on average,with 23 percent, or near to a quarter, ofstudents getting either none or one correct.These “simple” problems are not asstraightforward as they may seem at firstglance.

The correct answers are $0.05, 5minutes, and 47 days, respectively. If youtake a moment to reflect, you will likelysee why—and you’ll say to yourself, Ofcourse, how did I ever miss that? Simple.Good old System Watson has won out

once again. The initial answers are theintuitively appealing ones, the ones thatcome quickly and naturally to mind if wedon’t pause to reflect. We let the salienceof certain elements (and they were framedto be salient on purpose) draw us awayfrom considering each element fairly andaccurately. We use mindless verbatimstrategies—repeating an element in theprior answer and not reflecting on theactual best strategy to solve the presentproblem—instead of mindful ones (inessence, substituting an intuitive questionfor the more difficult and time-consumingalternative, just because the two happen toseem related). Those second answersrequire you to suppress System Watson’seager response and let Holmes take alook: to reflect, inhibit your initial

intuition, and then edit it accordingly,which is not something that we are overlyeager to do, especially when we are tiredfrom all the thinking that came before. It’stough to keep that motivation andmindfulness going from start to finish, andfar easier to start conserving our cognitiveresources by letting Watson take the helm.

While the CRT may seem far removedfrom any real problems we mightencounter, it happens to be remarkablypredictive of our performance in anynumber of situations where logic anddeduction come into play. In fact, this testis often more telling than are measures ofcognitive ability, thinking disposition, andexecutive function. Good performance onthese three little questions predictsresistance to a number of common logical

fallacies, which, taken together, areconsidered to predict adherence to thebasic structures of rational thought. TheCRT even predicts our ability to reasonthrough the type of formal deductiveproblem—the Socrates one—that we sawearlier in the chapter: if you do poorly onthe test, you are more likely to say that ifall living things need water and rosesneed water, it follows that roses are livingthings.

Jumping to conclusions, telling aselective story instead of a logical one,even with all of the evidence in front ofyou and well sorted, is common (thoughavoidable, as you’ll see in just a moment).Reasoning through everything up until thelast moment, not letting those mundanedetails bore you, not letting yourself peter

out toward the end of the process: that isaltogether rare. We need to learn to takepleasure in the lowliest manifestations ofreason. To take care that deduction notseem boring, or too simple, after all of theeffort that has preceded it. That is adifficult task. In the opening lines of “TheAdventure of the Copper Beeches,”Holmes reminds us, “To the man wholoves art for its own sake, it is frequentlyin its least important and lowliestmanifestations that the keenest pleasure isto be derived. . . . If I claim full justice formy art, it is because it is an impersonalthing—a thing beyond myself. Crime iscommon. Logic is rare.” Why? Logic isboring. We think we’ve already figured itout. In pushing past this preconception liesthe challenge.

Learning to Tell the Crucial from theIncidental

So how do you start from the beginningand make sure that your deduction is goingalong the right track and has not veeredfabulously off course before it has evenbegun?

In “The Crooked Man,” SherlockHolmes describes a new case, the death ofSergeant James Barclay, to Watson. Atfirst glance the facts are strange indeed.Barclay and his wife, Nancy, were heardto be arguing in the morning room. Thetwo were usually affectionate, and so theargument in itself was something of anevent. But it became even more strikingwhen the housemaid found the door to theroom locked and its occupants

unresponsive to her knocks. Add to that astrange name that she heard several times—David—and then the most remarkablefact of all: after the coachman succeededin entering the room from outside throughthe open French doors, no key was to befound. The lady was lying insensible onthe couch, the gentleman dead, with ajagged cut on the back of his head and hisface twisted in horror. And neither onepossessed the key that would open thelocked door.

How to make sense of these multipleelements? “Having gathered these facts,Watson,” Holmes tells the doctor, “Ismoked several pipes over them, trying toseparate those which were crucial fromothers which were merely incidental.”And that, in one sentence, is the first step

toward successful deduction: theseparation of those factors that are crucialto your judgment from those that are justincidental, to make sure that only the trulycentral elements affect your decision.

Consider the following descriptions oftwo people, Bill and Linda. Eachdescription is followed by a list ofoccupations and avocations. Your task isto rank the items in the list by the degreethat Bill or Linda resembles the typicalmember of the class.

Bill is thirty-four years old. He isintelligent but unimaginative, compulsive,and generally lifeless. In school he wasstrong in mathematics but weak in socialstudies 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 majoredin philosophy. As a student, she wasdeeply concerned with issues ofdiscrimination and social justice, and alsoparticipated in antinuclear demonstrations.

Linda is a teacher in an elementaryschool.

Linda works in a bookstore and takesyoga classes.

Linda is active in the feministmovement.

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 alook at two pairs of statements inparticular: Bill plays jazz for a hobby andBill is an accountant who plays jazz for ahobby, and Linda is a bank teller andLinda is a bank teller and is active in thefeminist movement. Which of the twostatements have you ranked as more likelyin each pair?

I am willing to bet that it was thesecond one in both cases. If it was, you’dbe with the majority, and you would bemaking a big mistake.

This exercise was taken verbatim froma 1983 paper by Amos Tversky andDaniel Kahneman, to illustrate our presentpoint: when it comes to separating crucialdetails from incidental ones, we oftendon’t fare particularly well. When theresearchers’ subjects were presented withthese lists, they repeatedly made the samejudgment that I’ve just predicted youwould make: that it was more likely thatBill was an accountant who plays jazz fora hobby than it was that he plays jazz for ahobby, and that it was more likely thatLinda was a feminist bank teller than thatshe was a bank teller at all.

Logically, neither idea makes sense: aconjunction cannot be more likely thaneither of its parts. If you didn’t think itlikely that Bill played jazz or that Lindawas a bank teller to begin with, youshould not have altered that judgment justbecause you did think it probable that Billwas an accountant and Linda, a feminist.An unlikely element or event whencombined with a likely one does notsomehow magically become any morelikely. And yet 87 percent and 85 percentof participants, for the Bill scenario andthe Linda scenario, respectively, madethat exact judgment, in the processcommitting the infamous conjunctionfallacy.

They even made it when their choiceswere limited: if only the two relevant

options (Linda is a bank teller or Linda isa feminist bank teller) were included, 85percent of participants still ranked theconjunction as more likely than the singleinstance. Even when people were giventhe logic behind the statements, they sidedwith the incorrect resemblance logic(Linda seems more like a feminist, so Iwill say it’s more likely that she’s afeminist bank teller) over the correctextensional logic (feminist bank tellers areonly a specific subset of bank tellers, soLinda must be a bank teller with a higherlikelihood than she would be a feministone in particular) in 65 percent of cases.We can all be presented with the same setof facts and features, but the conclusionswe draw from them need not matchaccordingly.

Our brains weren’t made to assessthings in this light, and our failings hereactually make a good amount of sense.When it comes to things like chance andprobability, we tend to be naive reasoners(and as chance and probability play alarge part in many of our deductions, it’sno wonder that we often go astray). It’scalled probabilistic incoherence, and it allstems from that same pragmaticstorytelling that we engage in so naturallyand readily—a tendency that may go backto a deeper, neural explanation; to, insome sense, W.J. and the split brain.

Simply put, while probabilisticreasoning seems to be localized in the lefthemisphere, deduction appears to activatemostly the right hemisphere. In otherwords, the neural loci for evaluating

logical implications and those for lookingat their empirical plausibility may be inopposite hemispheres—a cognitivearchitecture that isn’t conducive tocoordinating statement logic with theassessment of chance and probability. Asa result, we aren’t always good atintegrating various demands, and we oftenfail to do so properly, all the whileremaining perfectly convinced that wehave succeeded admirably.

The description of Linda and feminist(and Bill and accountant) coincides sowell that we find it hard to dismiss thematch as anything but hard fact. What iscrucial here is our understanding of howfrequently something occurs in real life—and the logical, elementary notion that awhole simply can’t be more likely than the

sum of its parts. And yet we let theincidental descriptors color our minds somuch that we overlook the crucialprobabilities.

What we should be doing is somethingmuch more prosaic. We should be gauginghow likely any separate occurrenceactually is. In chapter three, I introducedthe concept of base rates, or howfrequently something appears in thepopulation, and promised to revisit itwhen we discussed deduction. And that’sbecause base rates, or our ignorance ofthem, are at the heart of deductive errorslike the conjunction fallacy. They hamperobservation, but where they really throwyou off is in deduction, in moving from allof your observations to the conclusionsthey imply. Because here, selectivity—

and selective ignorance—will throw youoff completely.

To accurately cast Bill and Linda’slikelihood of belonging to any of theprofessions, we need to understand theprevalence of accountants, bank tellers,amateur jazz musicians, active feminists,and the whole lot in the population atlarge. We can’t take our protagonists outof context. We can’t allow one potentialmatch to throw off other information wemight have.

So, how does one go about resisting thistrap, sorting the details properly instead ofbeing swept up in irrelevance?

Perhaps the pinnacle of Holmes’sdeductive prowess comes in a case that isless traditional than many of his London

pursuits. Silver Blaze, the prize-winninghorse of the story’s title, goes missingdays before the big Wessex Cup race, onwhich many a fortune ride. That samemorning, his trainer is found dead somedistance from the stable. His skull lookslike it has been hit by some large, bluntobject. The lackey who had been guardingthe horse has been drugged andremembers precious little of the night’sevents.

The case is a sensational one: SilverBlaze is one of the most famous horses inEngland. And so, Scotland Yard sendsInspector Gregson to investigate. Gregson,however, is at a loss. He arrests the mostlikely suspect—a gentleman who had beenseen around the stable the evening of thedisappearance—but admits that all

evidence is circumstantial and that thepicture may change at any moment. Andso, three days later, with no horse in sight,Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson maketheir way to Dartmoor.

Will the horse run the race? Will thetrainer’s murderer be brought to justice?Four more days pass. It is the morning ofthe race. Silver Blaze, Holmes assures theworried owner, Colonel Ross, will run.Not to fear. And run he does. He not onlyruns, but wins. And his trainer’s murdereris identified soon thereafter.

We’ll be returning to “Silver Blaze”several times for its insights into thescience of deduction, but first let’sconsider how Holmes introduces the caseto Watson.

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

“where the art of the reasoner should beused rather for the sifting of details thanfor the acquiring of fresh evidence. Thetragedy has been so uncommon, socomplete, and of such personalimportance to so many people that we aresuffering from a plethora of surmise,conjecture, and hypothesis.” In otherwords, there is too much information tobegin with, too many details to be able tostart making them into any sort of coherentwhole, separating the crucial from theincidental. When so many facts are piledtogether, the task becomes increasinglyproblematic. You have a vast quantity ofyour own observations and data but alsoan even vaster quantity of potentiallyincorrect information from individualswho may not have observed as mindfully

as you have.Holmes puts the problem this way:

“The difficulty is to detach the frameworkof fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists andreporters. Then, having establishedourselves upon this sound basis, it is ourduty to see what inferences may be drawnand what are the special points uponwhich the whole mystery turns.” In otherwords, in sorting through the morass ofBill and Linda, we would have done wellto set clearly in our minds what were theactual facts, and what were theembellishments or stories of our minds.

When we pry the incidental and thecrucial apart, we have to exercise thesame care that we spent on observing tomake sure that we have recorded

accurately all of the impressions. If we’renot careful, mindset, preconception, orsubsequent turns can affect even what wethink we observed in the first place.

In one of Elizabeth Loftus’s classicstudies of eyewitness testimony,participants viewed a film depicting anautomobile accident. Loftus then askedeach participant to estimate how fast thecars were going when the accidentoccurred—a classic deduction fromavailable data. But here’s the twist: eachtime she asked the question, she subtlyaltered the phrasing. Her description ofthe accident varied by verb: the carssmashed, collided, bumped, contacted, orhit. What Loftus found was that herphrasing had a drastic impact on subjects’memory. Not only did those who viewed

the “smashed” condition estimate a higherspeed than those who viewed the otherconditions, but they were also far morelikely to recall, one week later, havingseen broken glass in the film, even thoughthere was actually no broken glass at all.

It’s called the misinformation effect.When we are exposed to misleadinginformation, we are likely to recall it astrue and to take it into consideration in ourdeductive process. (In the Loftusexperiment, the subjects weren’t evenexposed to anything patently false, justmisleading.) All the specific word choicedoes is act as a simple frame that impactsour line of reasoning and even ourmemory. Hence the difficulty, and theabsolute necessity, that Holmes describesof learning to sift what is irrelevant (and

all that is media conjecture) from the real,objective, hard facts—and to do sothinkingly and systematically. If you don’t,you may find yourself rememberingbroken glass instead of the intactwindshield you actually saw.

In fact, it’s when we have more, notless, information that we should be mostcareful. Our confidence in our deductionstends to increase along with the number ofdetails on which we base them—especially if one of those details makessense. A longer list somehow seems morereasonable, even if we were to judgeindividual items on that list as less thanprobable given the information at hand. Sowhen we see one element in a conjunctionthat seems to fit, we are likely to acceptthe full conjunction, even if it makes little

sense to do so. Linda the feminist bankteller. Bill the jazz-playing accountant. It’sperverse, in a way. The better we’veobserved and the more data we’vecollected, the more likely we are to be ledastray by a single governing detail.

Similarly, the more incidental detailswe see, the less likely we are to home inon the crucial, and the more likely we areto give the incidental undue weight. If weare told a story, we are more likely to findit compelling and true if we are also givenmore details, even if those details areirrelevant to the story’s truth. PsychologistRuma Falk has noted that when a narratoradds specific, superfluous details to astory of coincidence (for instance, thattwo people win the lottery in the samesmall town), listeners are more likely to

find the coincidence surprising andcompelling.

Usually when we reason, our mindshave a tendency to grab any informationthat seems to be related to the topic, in theprocess retrieving both relevant cues andthose that seem somehow to be connectedbut may not actually matter. We may dothis for several reasons: familiarity, or asense that we’ve seen this before orshould know something even when wecan’t quite put our finger on it; spreadingactivation, or the idea that the activationof one little memory node triggers others,and over time the triggered memoriesspread further away from the original; orsimple accident or coincidence—we justhappen to think of something whilethinking about something else.

If, for example, Holmes were tomagically emerge from the book and askus, not Watson, to enumerate theparticulars of the case at hand, we’drummage through our memory (What did Ijust read? Or was that the other case?),take certain facts out of storage (Okay:horse gone, trainer dead, lackeydrugged, possible suspect apprehended.Am I missing anything?), and in theprocess, likely bring up others that maynot matter all that much (I think I forgot toeat lunch because I was so caught up inthe drama; it’s like that time I wasreading The Hound of the Baskervillesfor the first time, and forgot to eat, andthen my head hurt, and I was in bed, and. . .).

If the tendency to over-activate and

over-include isn’t checked, the activationcan spread far wider than is useful for thepurpose at hand—and can even interferewith the proper perspective needed tofocus on that purpose. In the case of SilverBlaze, Colonel Ross constantly urgesHolmes to do more, look at more,consider more, to leave, in his words, “nostone unturned.” Energy and activity, moreis more; those are his governingprinciples. He is supremely frustratedwhen Holmes refuses, choosing instead tofocus on the key elements that he hasalready identified. But Holmes realizesthat to weed out the incidental, he shoulddo anything but take in more and moretheories 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 thetendency to gather detail thoughtlessly,and instead focus—thoughtfully—on thedetails we already have. All of thoseobservations? We need to learn to dividethem in our minds in order to maximizeproductive reasoning. We have to learnwhen not to think of them as well as whento bring them in. We have to learn toconcentrate—reflect, inhibit, edit—otherwise we may end up getting exactlynowhere on any of the myriad ideasfloating through our heads. Mindfulnessand motivation are essential to successfuldeduction.

But essential never means simple, nordoes it mean sufficient. Even with SilverBlaze, Holmes, as focused and motivated

as he is, finds it difficult to sift through allof the possible lines of thought. As he tellsWatson once Silver Blaze is recovered, “Iconfess that any theories which I hadformed from the newspaper reports wereentirely erroneous. And yet there wereindications there, had they not beenoverlaid by other details which concealedtheir true import.” The separation ofcrucial and incidental, the backbone ofany deduction, can be hard for even thebest-trained minds. That’s why Holmesdoesn’t run off based on his initialtheories. He first does precisely what heurges us to do: lay the facts out in a neatrow and proceed from there. Even in hismistakes, he is deliberative and Holmes-like, not letting System Watson act thoughit may well want to.

How does he do this? He goes at hisown pace, ignoring everyone who urgeshaste. He doesn’t let anyone affect him.He does what he needs to do. And beyondthat he uses another simple trick. He tellsWatson everything—something that occurswith great regularity throughout theHolmes canon (and you thought it was justa clever expository device!). As he tellsthe doctor before he delves into thepertinent observations, “nothing clears upa case so much as stating it to anotherperson.” It’s the exact same principlewe’ve seen in operation before: statingsomething through, out loud, forces pausesand reflection. It mandates mindfulness. Itforces you to consider each premise on itslogical merits and allows you to slowdown your thinking so that you do not

blunder into a feminist Linda. It ensuresthat you do not let something that is of realsignificance go by simply because itdidn’t catch your attention enough or fitwith the causal story that you have(subconsciously, no doubt) alreadycreated in your head. It allows your innerHolmes to listen and forces your Watsonto pause. It allows you to confirm thatyou’ve actually understood, not justthought you understood because it seemedright.

Indeed, it is precisely in stating thefacts to Watson that Holmes realizes thething that will allow him to solve the case.“It was while I was in the carriage, just aswe reached the trainer’s house, that theimmense significance of the curriedmutton occurred to me.” The choice of a

dinner is easy to mistake for triviality,until you state it along with everythingelse and realize that the dish was perfectlyengineered to hide the smell and taste ofpowdered opium, the poison that was usedon the stable boy. Someone who didn’tknow the curried mutton was to be servedwould never risk using a poison that couldbe tasted. The culprit, then, is someonewho knew what was for dinner. And thatrealization prompts Holmes to his famousconclusion: “Before deciding that questionI had grasped the significance of thesilence of the dog, for one true inferenceinvariably suggests others.” Start on theright track, and you are far more likely toremain there.

While you’re at it, make sure you arerecalling all of your observations, all of

the possible permutations that you’vethought up in your imaginative space, andavoiding those instances that are not partof the picture. You can’t just focus on thedetails that come to mind most easily orthe ones that seem to be representative orthe ones that seem to be most salient or theones that make the most intuitive sense.You have to dig deeper. You would likelynever judge Linda a likely bank tellerfrom her description, though you very wellmight judge her a likely feminist. Don’t letthat latter judgment color what follows;instead, proceed with the same logic thatyou did before, evaluating each elementseparately and objectively as part of aconsistent whole. A likely bank teller?Absolutely not. And so, a feminist one?Even less probable.

You have to remember, like Holmes, allof the details about Silver Blaze’sdisappearance, stripped of all of thepapers’ conjectures and the theories yourmind may have inadvertently formed as aresult. Never would Holmes call Linda afeminist bank teller, unless he was firstcertain that she was a bank teller.

The Improbable Is Not Impossible

I n The Sign of Four, a robbery andmurder are committed in a small room,locked from the inside, on the top floor ofa rather large estate. How in the world didthe criminal get inside to do the deed?Holmes enumerates the possibilities: “Thedoor has not been opened since last

night,” he tells Watson. “Window issnibbed on the inner side. Framework issolid. No hinges at the side. Let us open it.No water-pipe near. Roof quite out ofreach.”

Then how to possibly get inside?Watson ventures a guess: “The door islocked, the window is inaccessible. Wasit through the chimney?”

No, Holmes tells him. “The grate ismuch too small. I had already consideredthat possibility.”

“How then?” asks an exasperatedWatson.

“You will not apply my precept.”Holmes shakes his head. “How often haveI said to you that when you haveeliminated the impossible, whateverremains, however improbable, must be the

truth? We know that he did not comethrough the door, the window, or thechimney. We also know that he could nothave been concealed in the room, as thereis no concealment possible. Whence, then,did he come?”

And then, at last, Watson sees theanswer: “He came from the hole in theroof.” And Holmes’s reply, “Of course hedid. He must have done so,” makes itseem the most logical entrance possible.

It isn’t, of course. It is highlyimprobable, a proposition that mostpeople would never consider, just asWatson, trained as he is in Holmes’sapproach, failed to do without prompting.Just like we find it difficult to separate theincidental from the truly crucial, so, too,we often fail to consider the improbable

—because our minds dismiss it asimpossible before we even give it its due.And it’s up to System Holmes to shock usout of that easy narrative and force us toconsider that something as unlikely as arooftop entrance may be the very thing weneed to solve our case.

Lucretius called a fool someone whobelieves that the tallest mountain thatexists in the world and the tallest mountainhe has ever observed are one and thesame. We’d probably brand someone whothought that way foolish as well. And yetwe do the same thing every single day.Author and mathematician Nassim Talebeven has a name for it, inspired by theLatin poet: the Lucretius underestimation.(And back in Lucretius’s day, was it sostrange to think that your world was

limited to what you knew? In some ways,it’s smarter than the mistakes we maketoday given the ease of knowledge at ourdisposal.)

Simply put, we let our own personalpast experience guide what we perceiveto be possible. Our repertoire becomes ananchor of sorts; it is our reasoning startingpoint, our place of departure for anyfurther thoughts. And even if we try toadjust from our egocentric perspective,we tend not to adjust nearly enough tomatter, remaining stubbornly skewed in aself-directed approach. It’s ourstorytelling proclivity in another guise: weimagine stories based on the ones we’veexperienced, not the ones we haven’t.

Learning of historical precedent as wellmatters little, since we don’t learn in the

same way from description as we do fromexperience. It’s something known as thedescription-experience gap. PerhapsWatson had read at one time or anotherabout a daring rooftop entrance, butbecause he has never had directexperience from it, he will not haveprocessed the information in the same wayand is not likely to use it in the samemanner when trying to solve a problem.Lucretius’s fool? Having read of highpeaks, he may still not believe they exist. Iwant to see them with my own two eyes,he’ll say. What am I, some kind of fool?Absent a direct precedent, the improbableseems so near impossible that Holmes’smaxim falls by the wayside.

And yet distinguishing the two is anessential ability to have. For, even if we

have successfully separated the crucialfrom the incidental, even if we’vegathered all of the facts (and theirimplications) and have focused on theones that are truly relevant, we are lost ifwe don’t let our minds think of the roof,however unlikely it is, as a possible entrypoint into a room. If, like Watson, wedismiss it out of hand—or fail to eventhink about—we will never be able todeduce those alternatives that would flowdirectly from our reasoning if only we’dlet them.

We use the best metric of the future—the past. It’s natural to do so, but thatdoesn’t mean it’s accurate. The pastdoesn’t often make room for theimprobable. It constrains our deduction tothe known, the likely, the probable. And

who is to say that the evidence, if takentogether and properly considered, doesn’tlead to an alternative beyond theserealms?

Let’s go back for a moment to “SilverBlaze.” Sherlock Holmes emergestriumphant, it’s true—the horse is found,as is the trainer’s murderer—but not aftera delay that is uncharacteristic of the greatdetective. He is late to the investigation(three days late, to be specific), losingvaluable time at the scene. Why? He doesjust what he reprimands Watson for doing:he fails to apply the precept that theimprobable is not yet the impossible, thatit must be considered along with the morelikely alternatives.

As Holmes and Watson head toDartmoor to help with the investigation,

Holmes mentions that on Tuesday eveningboth the horse’s owner and InspectorGregson had telegraphed for hisassistance on the case. The flummoxedWatson responds, “Tuesday evening! Andthis is Thursday morning. Why didn’t yougo down yesterday?” To which Holmesanswers, “Because I made a blunder, mydear Watson—which is, I am afraid, amore common occurrence than anyonewould think who only knew me throughyour memoirs. The fact is that I could notbelieve it possible that the mostremarkable horse in England could longremain concealed, especially in sosparsely inhabited a place as the north ofDartmoor.”

Holmes has dismissed the merelyimprobable as impossible and has failed

to act in a timely fashion as a result. In sodoing, he has reversed the usual Holmes-Watson exchange, making Watson’sreprimand uncharacteristically wellwarranted and on point.

Even the best and sharpest mind isnecessarily subject to its owner’s uniqueexperience and world perception. While amind such as Holmes’s is, as a rule, ableto consider even the most remote ofpossibilities, there are times when it, too,becomes limited by preconceived notions,by what is available to its repertoire atany given point. In short, even Holmes islimited by the architecture of his brainattic.

Holmes sees a horse of exceptionalappearance missing in a rural area.Everything in his experience tells him it

can’t go missing for long. His logic is asfollows: if the horse is the mostremarkable such animal in the whole ofEngland, then how could it go under theradar in a remote area where hidingplaces are limited? Surely someone wouldnotice the beast, dead or alive, and make areport. And that would be perfectdeduction from the facts, if it happened tobe true. But it is Thursday, the horse hasbeen missing since Tuesday, and thereport has failed to come. What is it thenthat Holmes failed to take into account?

A horse couldn’t remain concealed if itcould still be recognized as that horse.The possibility of disguising the animaldoesn’t cross the great detective’s mind; ifit had, surely he wouldn’t have discountedthe likelihood of the animal remaining

hidden. What Holmes sees isn’t just whatthere is; he is also seeing what he knows.Were we to witness something that in noway fit with past schemas, had nocounterpart in our memory, we wouldlikely not know how to interpret it—or wemay even fail to see it altogether, andinstead see what we were expecting allalong.

Think of it as a complex version of anyone of the famous Gestalt demonstrationsof visual perception, whereby we areeasily able to see one thing in multipleways, depending on the context ofpresentation.

For instance, consider this picture:

Do you see the middle figure as a B or a13? The stimulus remains the same, butwhat we see is all a matter of expectationand context. A disguised animal? Not inHolmes’s repertoire, however vast itmight be, and so he does not evenconsider 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 a13 were the 12 and 14 to be removed. Itwouldn’t even cross our minds, eventhough it is highly possible, merelyimprobable given the context. But if thecontext were to shift slightly? Or if themissing row were to be present, onlyhidden from our view? That would changethe picture, but it wouldn’t necessarilychange the choices we consider.

This raises another interesting point:not only does our experience affect whatwe consider possible, but so, too, do ourexpectations. Holmes was expectingSilver Blaze to be found, and as a resulthe viewed his evidence in a differentlight, allowing certain possibilities to gounexamined. Demand characteristics reartheir ugly head yet again; only this time

they take the guise of the confirmationbias, one of the most prevalent mistakesmade by novice and experienced mindsalike.

From early childhood, we seem to besusceptible to forming confirmatorybiases, to deciding long before weactually decide and dismissing theimprobable out of hand as impossible. Inone early study of the phenomenon,children as young as third grade wereasked to identify which features of sportsballs were important to the quality of aperson’s serve. Once they made up theirminds (for instance, size matters but colordoes not), they either altogether failed toacknowledge evidence that was contraryto their preferred theory (such as theactual importance of color, or the lack

thereof of size) or considered it in a highlyselective and distorted fashion thatexplained away anything that didn’tcorrespond to their initial thought.Furthermore, they failed to generatealternative theories unless prompted to doso, and when they later recalled both thetheory and the evidence, theymisremembered the process so that theevidence became much more consistentwith the theory than it had been in reality.In other words, they recast the past tobetter suit their own view of the world.

As we age, it only gets worse—or atthe very least it doesn’t get any better.Adults are more likely to judge one-sidedarguments as superior to those that presentboth sides of a case, and more likely tothink that such arguments represent good

thinking. We are also more likely tosearch for confirming, positive evidencefor hypotheses and established beliefseven when we are not actually invested inthose hypotheses. In a seminal study,researchers found that participants tested aconcept by looking only at examples thatwould hold if that concept were correct—and failed to find things that would showit to be incorrect. Finally, we exhibit aremarkable asymmetry in how we weighevidence of a hypothesis: we tend tooverweight any positive confirmingevidence and underweight any negativedisconfirming evidence—a tendency thatprofessional mind readers have exploitedfor 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, aswe surely will by this point in the process,we might still theorize before theevidence, in letting our experience and ournotion of what is and is not possible colorhow we see and apply that evidence. It’sHolmes disregarding the signs in “SilverBlaze” that would point him in the rightdirection because he doesn’t consider itpossible that the horse could remainundetected. It’s Watson disregarding theroof as an option for entrance because hedoesn’t consider it possible that someonecould enter a room in that fashion. Wemight have all the evidence, but thatdoesn’t mean when we reason, we’ll takeinto account that all of the evidence isobjective, intact, and in front of us.

But Holmes, as we know, does manage

to catch and correct his error—or have itcaught for him, with the failure of thehorse to materialize. And as soon as heallows that improbable possibility tobecome possible, his entire evaluation ofthe case and the evidence changes andfalls into place. And off he and Watson goto find the horse and save the day.Likewise, Watson is able to correct hisincomprehension when prompted to do so.Once Holmes reminds him that howeverimprobable something may be, it must stillbe considered, he right away comes upwith the alternative that fits the evidence—an alternative that just a moment ago hehad dismissed entirely.

The improbable is not yet impossible.As we deduce, we are too prone to thatsatisficing tendency, stopping when

something is good enough. Until we haveexhausted the possibilities and are surethat we have done so, we aren’t homeclear. We must learn to stretch ourexperience, to go beyond our initialinstinct. We must learn to look forevidence that both confirms anddisconfirms and, most important, we musttry to look beyond the perspective that isthe all too natural one to take: our own.

We must, in short, go back to that CRTand its steps; reflect on what our mindswant to do; inhibit what doesn’t makesense (here, asking whether something istruly impossible or merely unlikely); andedit our approach accordingly. We won’talways have a Holmes prompting us to doso, but that doesn’t mean we can’t promptourselves, through that very mindfulness

that we’ve been cultivating. While wemay still be tempted to act first and thinklater, to dismiss options before we’veeven considered them, we can at leastrecognize the general concept: think first,act later, and try our utmost to approachevery decision with a fresh mind.

The necessary elements are all there (atleast if you’ve done your observationaland imaginative work). The trick is inwhat you do with them. Are you using allavailable evidence, and not just what youhappen to remember or think of orencounter? Are you giving it all the sameweight, so that you are truly able to sift thecrucial from the incidental instead ofbeing swayed by some other, altogetherirrelevant factors? Are you laying eachpiece out in a logical sequence, where

each step implies the next and each factoris taken to its conclusion, so that you don’tfall victim to the mistake of thinkingyou’ve thought it through when you’vedone no such thing? Are you consideringall logical paths—even those that mayseem to you to be impossible? Andfinally: are you focused and motivated?Do you remember what the problem wasthat got you there in the first place—orhave you been tempted off course, or offto some other problem, without reallyknowing how or why?

I first read Sherlock Holmes in Russianbecause that was the language of mychildhood and of all of my childhoodbooks. Think back to the clues I’ve left foryou. I’ve told you that my family is

Russian, and that both my sister and Iwere born in the Soviet Union. I’ve toldyou that the stories were read to me by mydad. I’ve told you that the book in questionwas old—so old that I wondered if hisdad had, in turn, read it to him. In whatother language could it have possiblybeen, once you see everything laid outtogether? But did you stop to consider thatas you were seeing each piece ofinformation separately? Or did it not evencross your mind because of its . . .improbability? Because Holmes is just so,well, English?

It doesn’t matter that Conan Doylewrote in English and that Holmes himselfis so deeply ingrained in theconsciousness of the English language. Itdoesn’t matter that I now read and write in

English just as well as I ever did inRussian. It doesn’t matter that you mayhave never encountered a RussianSherlock Holmes or even considered thelikelihood of his existence. All thatmatters is what the premises are andwhere they take you if you let them unwindto their logical conclusion, whether or notthat is the place that your mind had beengearing to go.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“ ‘Elementary,’ said he.” “I smokedseveral pipes over them, trying toseparate those which were crucial fromothers which were merely incidental.”from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes,“The Crooked Man,” p. 138.

“Every instinct that I possess cries outagainst it.” from The Return of SherlockHolmes, “The Adventure of the AbbeyGrange,” p. 1158.

“It is one of those cases where the artof the reasoner should be used rather forthe sifting of details . . .” “I confess thatany theories which I had formed from thenewspaper reports were entirelyerroneous.” from The Memoirs ofSherlock Holmes, “Silver Blaze,” p. 1.

“How often have I said to you thatwhen you have eliminated theimpossible, whatever remains, howeverimprobable, must be the truth?” from TheSign of Four, chapter 6: Sherlock HolmesGives a Demonstration, p. 41.

CHAPTER SIX

Maintaining the Brain Attic:Education Never Stops

A lodger’s behavior has been markedlyunusual. His landlady, Mrs. Warren,hasn’t seen him a single time over aperiod often days. He remains always inhis room—save for the first evening of hisstay, when he went out and returned late atnight—pacing back and forth, day in, dayout. What’s more, when he needssomething, he prints a single word on ascrap of paper and leaves it outside: SOAP.MATCH. DAILY GAZZETTE . Mrs. Warren is

alarmed. She feels that something must bewrong. And so she sets off to consultSherlock Holmes.

At first, Holmes has little interest in thecase. A mysterious lodger hardly seemsworth investigating. But little by little, thedetails begin to grow intriguing. First,there is the business of the printed words.Why not write them normally instead?Why choose such a cumbersome, unnaturalall-caps means of communication? Thenthere is the cigarette, which Mrs. Warrenhas helpfully brought along: while thelandlady has assured Holmes that themystery man has a beard and mustache,Holmes asserts that only a clean-shavenman could have smoked the cigarette inquestion. Still, it is not much to go on, sothe detective tells Mrs. Warren to report

back “if anything fresh occurs.”And something does occur. The

following morning, Mrs. Warren returns toBaker Street with the followingexclamation: “It’s a police matter, Mr.Holmes! I’ll have no more of it!” Mr.Warren, the landlady’s husband, has beenattacked by two men, who put a coat overhis head and threw him into a cab, only torelease him, roughly an hour later. Mrs.Warren blames the lodger and resolves tohave him out that very day.

Not so fast, says Holmes. “Do nothingrash. I begin to think that this affair may bevery much more important than appearedat first sight. It is clear now that somedanger is threatening your lodger. It isequally clear that his enemies, lying inwait for him near your door, mistook your

husband for him in the foggy morning light.On discovering their mistake they releasedhim.”

That afternoon, Holmes and Watsontravel to Great Orme Street, to glimpse theidentity of the guest whose presence hascaused such a stir. Soon enough, they seeher—for it is, in fact, a she. Holmes’sconjecture had been correct: a substitutionof lodger has been made. “A couple seekrefuge in London from a very terrible andinstant danger. The measure of that dangeris the rigour of their precautions,” Holmesexplains to Watson.

“The man, who has some work which hemust do, desires to leave the woman inabsolute safety while he does it. It is notan easy problem, but he solved it in an

original fashion, and so effectively thather presence was not even known to thelandlady who supplies her with food. Theprinted messages, as is now evident, wereto prevent her sex being discovered by herwriting. The man cannot come near thewoman, or he will guide their enemies toher. Since he cannot communicate with herdirect, he has recourse to the agonycolumn of a paper. So far all is clear.”

But to what end? Watson wants toknow. Why the secrecy and the danger?Holmes presumes that the matter is one oflife and death. The attack on Mr. Warren,the lodger’s look of horror when shesuspects someone might be looking at her,everything points to a sinister cast.

Why, then, asks Watson, should Holmes

continue to investigate? He has solvedMrs. Warren’s case—and the landladyherself would like nothing more than toforce the lodger out of the boardinghouse.Why involve himself further, especially ifthe case is as risky as it sounds? It wouldbe easy enough to leave and let eventstake their course. “What have you to gainfrom 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 youfound yourself studying cases without athought of a fee?”

“For my education, Holmes.”“Education never ends, Watson. It is a

series of lessons with the greatest for thelast. This is an instructive case. There is

neither money nor credit in it, and yet onewould wish to tidy it up. When duskcomes we should find ourselves one stageadvanced in our investigation.”

It doesn’t matter to Holmes that theinitial goal has been attained. It doesn’tmatter that the further pursuit of the matteris dangerous in the extreme. You don’t justabandon something when your originalgoal is complete, if that something hasproven itself more complex than it mayhave seemed at first. The case isinstructive. If nothing else, there is stillmore to learn. When Holmes says thateducation never ends, his message to usisn’t as one-dimensional as it may seem.Of course it’s good to keep learning: itkeeps our minds sharp and alert and

prevents us from settling in our ways. Butfor Holmes, education means somethingmore. Education in the Holmesian sense isa way to keep challenging yourself andquestioning your habits, of never allowingSystem Watson to take over altogether—even though he may have learned a greatdeal from System Holmes along the way.It’s a way of constantly shaking up ourhabitual behaviors, and of never forgettingthat, no matter how expert we think we areat something, we must remain mindful andmotivated in everything we do.

This whole book has stressed thenecessity of practice. Holmes got to wherehe is because of constantly practicingthose mindful habits of thought that formthe core of his approach to the world. Aswe practice, however, as things become

more and more simple and second nature,they move into the purview of SystemWatson. Even though the habits may nowbe Holmesian ones, they have all the samebecome habits, things we do as a matter ofcourse—and therefore, if we’re notcareful, mindlessly. It’s when we take ourthinking for granted and stop payingattention to what is actually going on inour brain attic that we are prone to messup, even if that attic is now the moststreamlined and polished place you eversaw. Holmes must keep challenginghimself lest he succumb to the very samething. For even though his mindful habitsare sharp indeed, even they can lead himastray if he doesn’t keep applying them. Ifwe don’t keep challenging our habits ofthought, we risk letting the mindfulness

we’ve so carefully cultivated slip backinto its pre-Holmesian, mindlessexistence.

It’s a difficult task, and our brain, asusual, is of little help. When we feel likewe’ve completed something worthwhile,be it a simple task like cleaning up apesky closet, or something a bit moreinvolved, like the resolution of a mystery,our Watson brain would like nothingbetter than to rest, to reward itself for ajob well done. Why go further if you’vedone what you’ve set out to do?

Human learning is largely driven bysomething known as the reward predictionerror (RPE). When something is morerewarding than expected—I made the leftturn! I didn’t hit the cone! in the case oflearning to drive—the RPE leads to a

release of dopamine into the brain. Thatrelease occurs frequently when we beginto learn something new. With each step, itis easy to see gratifying results: we beginto understand what we’re doing, ourperformance improves, we make fewermistakes. And each point ofaccomplishment does actually entail somegain for us. Not only are we performingbetter (which presumably will make ushappy) but our brain is being rewarded forits learning and improvement.

But then, all of a sudden, it stops. It’sno longer surprising that I can drivesmoothly. It’s no longer surprising that I’mnot making mistakes on my typing. It’s nolonger surprising that I can tell thatWatson came from Afghanistan. I knowI’ll be able to do it before I actually do it.

And so there’s no RPE. No RPE, nodopamine. No pleasure. No need forfurther learning. We’ve achieved asuitable plateau and we decide—on aneural level as well as a conscious one—that we’ve learned all we need to know.

The trick is to train your brain to movepast that point of immediate reward, tofind the uncertainty of the future rewardingin itself. It’s not easy—for as I’ve saidbefore, future uncertainty is precisely thething we don’t much like. Far better toreap the benefits now, and bask in thedopamine ride and its aftereffects.

Inertia is a powerful force. We arecreatures of habit—and not justobservable habits, such as, for instance,always putting on the TV when we walkinto our living room after work, or

opening the fridge just to see what’s inthere, but thought habits, predictable loopsof thinking that, when triggered, go down apredictable path. And thought habits aretough to break.

One of the most powerful forces ofchoice is the default effect—the tendency,as we’ve already discussed, to choose thepath of least resistance, going with what isin front of us as long as that is areasonable enough option. We see itplaying out all the time. At work,employees tend to contribute to retirementplans when the contribution is the defaultand to stop contributing—even whenmatched generously by employers—whenthey need to opt in. Countries where organdonation is the default (each person is anorgan donor unless he actively specifies

that he doesn’t want to be) havesignificantly higher percentages of donorsthan countries where donors must opt in.Effectively, when given a choice betweendoing something and nothing, we choosethe nothing—and tend to forget that that,too, is doing something. But it’s doingsomething quite passive and complacent,the polar opposite of the activeengagement that Holmes always stresses.

And here’s the odd thing: the better weare, the better we’ve become, the morewe’ve learned, the more powerful is theurge to just rest already. We feel like wesomehow deserve it, instead of realizingthat it is the greatest disservice we couldpossibly do ourselves.

We see this pattern playing itself out notmerely at the individual levels but

throughout organizations and corporations.Think about how many companies haveproduced breakthrough innovations only tofind themselves swamped by competitorsand left behind a few years later.(Consider, for instance, Kodak or Atari orRIM, creator of the Black-Berry.) Andthis tendency isn’t limited to the businessworld. The pattern of spectacularinnovation followed by just as spectacularstagnation describes a more general trendthat occurs in academia, the military, andalmost any industry or profession you canname. And it’s all rooted in how ourbrain’s reward system is set up.

Why are these patterns so common? Itgoes back to those default effects, thatinertia, on a much broader level: to theentrenchment of habit. And the more

rewarded a habit is, the harder it is tobreak. If a gold star on a spelling test isenough to send dopamine firing in achild’s brain, just imagine whatmultibillion-dollar success, soaringmarket shares, bestseller or award-winning or tenure-worthy academic famecan do.

We’ve spoken before about the differencebetween short- and long-term memory,those things we hold on to just brieflybefore letting them go and those we storein our brain attic more permanently. Thelatter seems to come in two flavors(though its exact mechanisms are stillbeing investigated): declarative, orexplicit memory, and procedural, orimplicit memory. Think of the first as a

kind of encyclopedia of knowledge aboutevents (episodic memory) or facts(semantic memory) or other things that youcan recall explicitly. Each time you learna new one, you can write it down under itsown, separate entry. Then, if you’re askedabout that particular entry, you can flip tothat page of the book and—if everythinggoes well and you’ve written it downproperly and the ink hasn’t faded—retrieve it. But what if something can’t bewritten down per se? What if it’s justsomething you kind of feel or know how todo? Then you’ve moved to the realm ofprocedural, or implicit memory.Experience. It’s no longer as easy as anencyclopedia entry. If I were to ask youabout it directly, you may not be able totell me, and it might even disrupt the very

thing I was asking you about. The twosystems are not entirely separate and dointeract quite a bit, but for our purposesyou can think of them as two differenttypes of information that are stored in yourattic. Both are there, but they are notequally conscious or accessible. And youcan move from one to the other withoutquite realizing you’ve done so.

Think of it like learning to drive a car.At first, you explicitly remembereverything you need to do: turn the key,check your mirrors, take the car out ofpark, and on and on. You have toconsciously execute each step. But soonyou stop thinking of the steps. Theybecome second nature. And if I were toask you what you were doing, you mightnot even be able to tell me. You’ve moved

from explicit to implicit memory, fromactive knowledge to habit. And in therealm of implicit memory, it is far moredifficult to improve consciously or to bemindful and present. You have to workmuch harder to maintain the same level ofalertness as when you were just learning.(That’s why so much learning reacheswhat K. Anders Ericsson terms a plateau,a point beyond which we can’t seem toimprove. As we’ll find out, that is notactually true, but it is difficult toovercome.)

When we are first learning, we are inthe realm of declarative, or explicitmemory. That’s the memory that isencoded in the hippocampus and thenconsolidated and stored (if all goes well)for future use. It’s the memory we use as

we memorize dates in history or learn thesteps of a new procedure at work. It’salso the memory I tried to use inmemorizing the numbers of stairs in allpossible houses (and failed at miserably)when I completely misunderstoodHolmes’s point, and the memory we useas we try to embrace Holmes’s thoughtprocess step-by-step, so that we can beginto approximate his powers of insight.

But it’s not the same memory thatHolmes uses when he does the same thing.He has already mastered those steps ofthought. To him they have become secondnature. Holmes doesn’t need to think aboutthinking, in the proper fashion; he does itautomatically—just as we automaticallydefault to our inner Watson because it’swhat we’ve learned to do and are now

unlearning.Until we unlearn, what to Holmes is

effortless couldn’t be more effortful to ourWatson selves. We must stop Watson atevery point and ask instead the opinion ofHolmes. But as we practice this more andmore, as we force ourselves to observe, toimagine, to deduce over and over andover—and to do it even in thosecircumstances where it may seem silly,like deciding what to have for lunch—achange takes place. Suddenly, things flowa little more smoothly. We proceed a littlemore quickly. It feels a little more natural,a little more effortless.

In essence, what is happening is that weare switching memory systems. We aremoving from the explicit to the implicit,the habitual, the procedural. Our thinking

is becoming akin to the memory that wehave when we drive, when we ride a bike,when we complete a task that we’ve donecountless times. We’ve gone from beinggoal directed (in the case of thinking, ofconsciously going through Holmes’s steps,making sure to execute each one properly)to being automated (we no longer have tothink about the steps; our minds go throughthem as a matter of course). Fromsomething that is based largely on effortfulmemory to something that triggers thatdopamine reward system without ournecessarily realizing it (think of anaddict’s behavior—an extreme example).And here allow me to repeat myself,because it bears repeating: the morerewarded something is, the quicker it willbecome a habit, and the harder it will be

to break.

Bringing Habits Back fromMindlessness into Mindfulness

“The Adventure of the Creeping Man”takes place when Holmes and Watson nolonger live together. One Septemberevening, Watson receives a message fromhis former flatmate. “Come at once ifconvenient,” it reads. “If inconvenientcome all the same.” Clearly, Holmeswants to see the good doctor—and aspromptly as possible. But why? Whatcould Watson have that Holmes sourgently needs, that can’t wait or becommunicated by message or messenger?If you think back on their time together,

it’s not clear that Watson has ever serveda role much beyond that of faithfulsupporter and chronicler. Surely, he wasnever the one to solve the crime, comeupon the key insight, or influence the casein any meaningful way. Surely, SherlockHolmes’s summons now couldn’t be allthat urgent—a message that is meant to askfor Watson’s aid in solving a case.

But that is precisely what it is. As itturns 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 thatSherlock Holmes has managed to remainas sharp and ever mindful as he has beenfor as long as he has. Watson has beenessential (indeed, irreplaceable) insolving a case, and will continue to be so,

again and again. And soon, you will seeprecisely why that is.

Habit is useful. I’ll even go a step furtherand say that habit is essential. It frees usup cognitively to think of broader, morestrategic issues instead of worrying aboutthe nitty-gritty. It allows us to think on ahigher level and an altogether differentplain than we would otherwise be able todo. In expertise lies great freedom andpossibility.

On the other hand, habit is alsoperilously close to mindlessness. It is veryeasy to stop thinking once somethingbecomes easy and automatic. Our effortfuljourney to attain the Holmesian habits ofthought is goal directed. We are focusedon reaching a future reward that comes of

learning to think mindfully, of makingbetter, more informed, and more thoroughchoices, of being in control of our mindsinstead of letting them control us. Habitsare the opposite. When something is ahabit, it has moved from the mindful,motivated System Holmes brain to themindless, unthinking System Watson brain,which possesses all of those biases andheuristics, those hidden forces that beginto affect your behavior without yourknowledge. You’ve stopped being awareof it, and because of that, you are far lessable 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 beincompatible with mindfulness?

Let’s go back to Holmes’s urgent

message to Watson, his call to come nomatter how inconvenient the visit mightbe. Watson knows exactly why he is beingcalled upon—though he may not realizejust how essential he is. Holmes, saysWatson, is “a man of habits, narrow andconcentrated habits, and I had become oneof them. As an institution I was like theviolin, the shag tobacco, the old blackpipe, the index books.” And what,precisely, is the role of Watson-as-an-institution? “I was a whetstone for hismind. I stimulated him. He liked to thinkaloud in my presence. His remarks couldhardly be said to be made to me—many ofthem would have been as appropriatelyaddressed to his bedstead—but none theless, having formed the habit, it hadbecome in some way helpful that I should

register and interject.” And that’s not all.“If I irritated him by a certain methodicalslowness in my mentality,” Watsoncontinues, “that irritation served only tomake his own flame-like intuitions andimpressions flash up the more vividly andswiftly. Such was my humble rôle in ouralliance.”

Holmes has other ways, to be sure—and Watson’s role is but a component of awider theme, as we’ll soon see—butWatson is an irreplaceable tool inHolmes’s multidimensional arsenal, andhis function as tool (or institution, if you’dprefer) is to make sure that Holmes’shabits of thought do not fall into mindlessroutine, that they remain ever mindful,ever present, and ever sharpened.

Earlier we talked about learning to

drive and the danger we face when we’vebecome proficient enough that we stopthinking about our actions, and so may findour attention drifting, our minds shiftinginto mindlessness. If all is as usual, we’dbe fine. But what if something went awry?Our reaction time wouldn’t be nearly asquick as it had been in the initial learningstages when we had focused on the road.

But what if we were forced to reallythink about our driving once more?

Someone taught us how to drive, andwe might be called upon to teach someoneelse. If we are, we would be wise indeedto take up the challenge. When we talksomething through to another person,break it down for his understanding, notonly are we once again forced to payattention to what we’re doing, but we

might even see our own drivingimproving. We might see ourselvesthinking of the steps differently andbecoming more mindful of what we’redoing as we do it—if only to set a goodexample. We might see ourselves lookingat the road in a fresh way, to be able toformulate what it is that our novice driverneeds to know and notice, how he shouldwatch and react. We might see patternsemerge that we hadn’t taken into account—or been able to see, really—the firsttime around, when we were so busymastering the composite steps. Not onlywill our cognitive resources be freer tosee these things, but we will be presentenough to take advantage of the freedom.

Likewise, Holmes. It’s not just in “TheAdventure of the Creeping Man” that he

needs Watson’s presence. Notice how ineach case he is always teaching hiscompanion, always telling him how hereached this or that conclusion, what hismind did and what path it took. And to dothat, he must reflect back on the thoughtprocess. He must focus back in on whathas become habit. He must be mindful ofeven those conclusions that he reachedmindlessly, like knowing why Watsoncame from Afghanistan. (Though, aswe’ve already discussed, Holmesianmindlessness is far different fromWatsonian.) Watson prevents Holmes’smind from forgetting to think about thoseelements that come naturally.

What’s more, Watson serves as aconstant reminder of what errors arepossible. As Holmes puts it, “In noting

your fallacies I was occasionally guidedtowards the truth.” And that is no smallthing. Even in asking the smallestquestions, ones that seem entirely obviousto Holmes, Watson nevertheless forcesHolmes to look twice at the veryobviousness of the thing, to either questionit or explain why it is as plain as all that.Watson is, in other words, indispensable.

And Holmes knows it well. Look at hislist of external habits: the violin, thetobacco and pipe, the index book. Each ofhis habits has been chosen mindfully. Eachfacilitates thought. What did he do pre-Watson? Whatever it was, he certainlyrealized very quickly that a post-Watsonworld was far preferable. “It may be thatyou are not yourself luminous,” he tellsWatson, not altogether unkindly on one

occasion, “but you are a conductor oflight. Some people without possessinggenius have a remarkable power ofstimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow,that I am very much in your debt.” In hisdebt 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 towalk him through the scientific method ofthe mind—he may as well have inventedthe thing—he nevertheless keepschallenging himself to learn more, to dothings better, to improve, to tackle a caseor an angle or an approach that he hasnever seen in the past. Part of this goesback to his constant enlistment of Watson,who challenges him, stimulates him, andforces him to never take his prowess for

granted. And another part goes to thechoice of the cases themselves.Remember, Holmes doesn’t take on justany case. He takes on only those thatinterest him. It’s a tricky moral code. Hedoesn’t take his cases merely to reducecrime but to challenge some aspect of histhinking. The commonplace criminal neednot apply.

But either way, whether in cultivatingWatson’s companionship or in choosingthe harder, more exceptional case over theeasier one, the message is the same: keepfeeding the need to learn and to improve.At the end of “The Red Circle” Holmesfinds himself face-to-face with InspectorGregson, who turns out to have beeninvestigating the very case that Holmesdecides to pursue after his initial work is

done. Gregson is perplexed to theextreme. “But what I can’t make head ortail of, Mr. Holmes, is how on earth yougot yourself mixed up in the matter,” hesays.

Holmes’s response is simple.“Education, Gregson, education. Stillseeking knowledge at the old university.”The complexity and unrelatedness of thissecond crime do the opposite of deterringhim. They engage him and invite him tolearn more.

In a way, that, too, is a habit, of neversaying no to more knowledge, as scary oras complicated as it may be. The case inquestion is “a specimen of the tragic andgrotesque,” 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 thecomfort of knowing we’ve already solveda crime, already accomplished a difficulttask. Instead, we have to embrace thechallenging, even when it is far easier notto. Only by doing so can we continuethroughout our lives to reap the benefits ofHolmesian thinking.

The Perils of Overconfidence

But how do we make sure we don’t fallvictim to overly confident thinking,thinking that forgets to challenge itself ona regular basis? No method is foolproof.In fact, thinking it foolproof is the verything that might trip us up. Because ourhabits have become invisible to us,

because we are no longer learningactively and it doesn’t seem nearly as hardto think well as it once did, we tend toforget how difficult the process once was.We take for granted the very thing weshould value. We think we’ve got it allunder control, that our habits are stillmindful, our brains still active, our mindsstill constantly learning and challenged—especially since we’ve worked so hard toget there—but we have instead replacedone, albeit far better, set of habits withanother. In doing so we run the risk offalling prey to those two great slayers ofsuccess: complacency andoverconfidence. These are powerfulenemies indeed. Even to someone likeSherlock Holmes.

Consider for a moment “The Yellow

Face,” one of the rare cases whereHolmes’s theories turn out to becompletely wrong. In the story, a mannamed Grant Munro approaches Holmesto uncover the cause of his wife’s bizarrebehavior. A cottage on the Munros’property has recently acquired newtenants, and strange ones at that. Mr.Munro glimpses one of its occupants andremarks that “there was somethingunnatural and inhuman about the face.”The very sight of it chills him.

But even more surprising than themystery tenants is his wife’s response totheir arrival. She leaves the house in themiddle of the night, lying about herdeparture, and then visits the cottage thenext day, extracting a promise from herhusband that he will not try to pursue her

inside. When she goes a third time, Munrofollows, only to find the place deserted.But in the same room where he earliersaw the chilling face, he finds aphotograph of his wife.

What ever is going on? “There’sblackmail in it, or I am much mistaken,”proclaims Holmes. And the blackmailer?“The creature who lives in the onlycomfortable room in the place and has herphotograph above his fireplace. Upon myword, Watson, there is something veryattractive about that livid face at thewindow, and I would not have missed thecase for worlds.”

Watson is intrigued at these tidbits.“You have a theory, then?” he asks.

“Yes, a provisional one,” Holmes isquick to reply. “But,” he adds, “I shall be

surprised if it does not turn out to becorrect. This woman’s first husband is inthat cottage.”

But this provisional theory provesincorrect. The occupant of the cottage isnot Mrs. Munro’s first husband at all, buther daughter, a daughter of whoseexistence neither Mr. Munro nor Holmeshad any prior knowledge. What hadappeared to be blackmail is insteadsimply the money that enabled thedaughter and the nanny to make thepassage from America to England. Andthe face that had seemed so unnatural andinhuman was that way because it was,indeed, just that. It was a mask, designedto hide the little girl’s black skin. In short,Holmes’s wonderings have ended up farfrom the truth. How could the great

detective have gone so wrong?

Confidence in ourselves and in our skillsallows us to push our limits and achievemore than we otherwise would, to tryeven those borderline cases where a lessconfident person would bow out. A bit ofexcess confidence doesn’t hurt; a little bitof above-average sensation can go a longway toward our psychological well-beingand even our effectiveness at problemsolving. When we’re more confident, wetake on tougher problems than weotherwise might. We push ourselvesbeyond our comfort zone.

But there can be such a thing as beingtoo certain of yourself: overconfidence,when confidence trumps accuracy. Webecome more confident of our abilities, or

of our abilities as compared with others’,than we should be, given thecircumstances and the reality. The illusionof validity grows ever stronger, thetemptation to do things as you do evermore tempting. This surplus of belief inourselves can lead to unpleasant results—like being so incredibly wrong about acase when you are usually so incrediblyright, thinking a daughter is a husband, ora loving mother, a blackmailed wife.

It happens to the best of us. In fact, asI’ve hinted at already, it happens more tothe best of us. Studies have shown thatwith experience, overconfidenceincreases instead of decreases. The moreyou know and the better you are in reality,the more likely you are to overestimateyour own ability—and underestimate the

force of events beyond your control. Inone study, CEOs were shown to becomemore overconfident as they gainedmergers and acquisitions experience: theirestimates of a deal’s value become overlyoptimistic (something not seen in earlierdeals). In another, in contributions topension plans, overconfidence correlatedwith age and education, such that the mostoverconfident contributors were highlyeducated males nearing retirement. Inresearch from the University of Vienna,individuals were found to be, in general,not overconfident in their risky assettrades in an experimental market—until,that is, they obtained significantexperience with the market in question.Then levels of overconfidence rose apace.What’s more, analysts who have been

more accurate at predicting earnings in theprior four quarters have been shown to beless accurate in subsequent earningspredictions, and professional traders tendto have a higher degree of overconfidencethan students. In fact, one of the bestpredictors of overconfidence is power,which tends to come with time andexperience.

Success breeds overconfidence likenothing else. When we are nearly alwaysright, how far is it to saying that we’llalways be right? Holmes has every reasonto be confident. He is almost invariablycorrect, almost invariably better thananyone else at almost everything, be itthinking, solving crimes, playing theviolin, or wrestling. And so, he shouldrightly fall victim to overconfidence often.

His saving grace, however, or what isusually his saving grace, is precisely whatwe identified in the last section: that heknows the pitfalls of his mental stature andfights to avoid them by following his strictthought guidelines, realizing that he needsto always keep learning.

For those of us who live off the page,overconfidence remains a tricky thing. Ifwe let our guard down for just a moment,as Holmes does here, it will get us.

Overconfidence causes blindness, andblindness in turn causes blunders. Webecome so enamored of our own skill thatwe discredit information that experiencewould otherwise tell us shouldn’t bediscredited—even information as glaringas Watson telling us that our theories are“all surmise,” as he does in this case—

and we proceed as before. We are blindedfor a moment to everything we know aboutnot theorizing before the facts, not gettingahead of ourselves, prying deeper andobserving more carefully, and we getcarried away by the simplicity of ourintuition.

Overconfidence replaces dynamic,active investigation with passiveassumptions about our ability or theseeming familiarity of our situation. Itshifts our assessment of what leads tosuccess from the conditional to theessential. I am skilled enough that I canbeat the environment as easily as I havebeen doing. Everything is due to myability, nothing due to the fact that thesurroundings just so happened toprovide a good background for my skill

to shine. And so I will not adjust mybehavior.

Holmes fails to consider the possibilityof unknown actors in the drama orunknown elements in Mrs. Munro’sbiography. He also does not consider thepossibility of disguise (something of ablind spot for the detective. If youremember, he, with equal confidence,does not take it into account in the case ofSilver Blaze; nor does he do so in “TheMan with the Twisted Lip”). Had Holmeshad the same benefit of rereading his ownexploits as we do, he may have learnedthat he was prone to this type of error.

Many studies have shown this processin action. In one classic demonstration,clinical psychologists were asked to giveconfidence judgments on a personality

profile. They were given a case report infour parts, based on an actual clinicalcase, and asked after each part to answera series of questions about the patient’spersonality, such as his behavioralpatterns, interests, and typical reactions tolife events. They were also asked to ratetheir confidence in their responses. Witheach section, background informationabout the case increased.

As the psychologists learned more,their confidence rose—but accuracyremained at a plateau. Indeed, all but twoof the clinicians became overconfident (inother words, their confidence outweighedtheir accuracy), and while the mean levelof confidence rose from 33 percent at thefirst stage to 53 percent by the last, theaccuracy hovered at under 28 percent

(where 20 percent was chance, given thequestion setup).

Overconfidence is often directlyconnected to this kind ofunderperformance—and at times, to graveerrors in judgment. (Imagine a clinician ina nonexperimental setting trusting toomuch in his however inaccurate judgment.Is he likely to seek a second opinion oradvise his patient to do so?)Overconfident individuals trust too muchin their own ability, dismiss too easily theinfluences that they cannot control, andunderestimate others—all of which leadsto them doing much worse than theyotherwise would, be it blundering insolving a crime or missing a diagnosis.

The sequence can be observed over andover, even outside of experimental

settings, when real money, careers, andpersonal outcomes are at stake.Overconfident traders have been shown toperform worse than their less confidentpeers. They trade more and suffer lowerreturns. Overconfident CEOs have beenshown to overvalue their companies anddelay IPOs, with negative effects. Theyare also more likely to conduct mergers ingeneral, and unfavorable mergers inparticular. Overconfident managers havebeen shown to hurt their firms’ returns.And overconfident detectives have beenshown to blemish their otherwise pristinerecord through an excess of self-congratulation.

Something about success has a tendencyto bring about an end to that very essentialprocess of constant, never-ending

education—unless the tendency is activelyresisted, and then resisted yet again.There’s nothing quite like victory to causeus to stop questioning and challengingourselves in the way that is essential forHolmesian thinking.

Learning to Spot the Signs ofOverconfidence

Perhaps the best remedy foroverconfidence is knowing when it ismost likely to strike. Holmes, for one,knows how liable past success andexperience are to cause a blunder inthought. It is precisely this knowledge thatlets him lay his master trap for the villainat the heart of the tragedies in The Hound

of the Baskervilles. When the suspectlearns that Sherlock Holmes has arrived atthe scene, Watson worries that theknowledge will prove to make his captureall the more difficult: “I am sorry that hehas seen you,” he tells Holmes. ButHolmes is not so sure that it’s a bad thing.“And so was I at first,” he responds. Butnow he realizes that the knowledge, “maydrive him to desperate measures at once.Like most clever criminals, he may be tooconfident in his own cleverness andimagine that he has completely deceivedus.”

Holmes knows that the successfulcriminal is likely to fall victim to his verysuccess. He knows to watch out for thered flag of cleverness that thinks itself tooclever, thereby underestimating its

opponents while overestimating its ownstrength. And he uses that knowledge inhis capture of the villain on multipleoccasions—not just at Baskerville Hall.

Spotting overconfidence, or theelements that lead to it, in others is onething; identifying it in ourselves issomething else entirely, and far moredifficult. Hence Holmes’s Norburyblunders. Luckily for us, however,psychologists have made excellentheadway in identifying whereoverconfidence most often lies in wait.

Four sets of circumstances tend topredominate. First, overconfidence ismost common when facing difficulty: forinstance, when we have to make ajudgment on a case where there’s no wayof knowing all the facts. This is called the

hard-easy effect. We tend to beunderconfident on easy problems andoverconfident on difficult ones. Thatmeans that we underestimate our ability todo well when all signs point to success,and we overestimate it when the signsbecome much less favorable, failing toadjust enough for the change in externalcircumstances. For instance, in somethingknown as the choice-50 (C50) task,individuals must choose between twoalternatives and then state how confidentthey are in their choice, between 0.5 and1. Repeatedly, researchers have found thatas the difficulty of the judgment increases,the mismatch between confidence andaccuracy (i.e., overconfidence) increasesdramatically.

One domain where the hard-easy effect

is prevalent is in the making of futurepredictions—a task that is nothing if notdifficult (it is, as a matter of fact,impossible). The impossibility, however,doesn’t stop people from trying, and frombecoming a bit too confident in theirpredictions based on their ownperceptions and experience. Consider thestock market. It’s impossible to actuallypredict the movement of a particularstock. Sure, you might have experienceand even expertise—but you arenevertheless trying to predict the future. Isit such a surprise, then, that the samepeople who at times have outsized successalso have outsized failures? The moresuccessful you are, the more likely you areto attribute everything to your ability—andnot to the luck of the draw, which, in all

future predictions, is an essential part ofthe equation. (It’s true of all gambling andbetting, really, but the stock market makesit somewhat easier to think you have aninside, experiential edge.)

Second, overconfidence increases withfamiliarity. If I’m doing something for thefirst time, I will likely be cautious. But if Ido it many times over, I am increasinglylikely to trust in my ability and becomecomplacent, even if the landscape shouldchange (overconfident drivers, anyone?).And when we are dealing with familiartasks, we feel somehow safer, thinkingthat we don’t have the same need forcaution as we would when tryingsomething new or that we haven’t seenbefore. In a classic example, Ellen Langerfound that people were more likely to

succumb to the illusion of control (a sideof overconfidence whereby you think youcontrol the environment to a greater extentthan you actually do) if they played alottery that was familiar versus one thatwas unknown.

It’s like the habit formation that we’vebeen talking about. Each time we repeatsomething, we become better acquaintedwith it and our actions become more andmore automatic, so we are less likely toput adequate thought or consideration intowhat we’re doing. Holmes isn’t likely topull a Yellow Face-style mess-up on hisearly cases; it’s telling that the story takesplace later in his career, and that it seemsto resemble a more traditional blackmailcase, the likes of which he hasexperienced many times before. And

Holmes knows well the danger offamiliarity, at least when it comes toothers. In “The Adventure of the VeiledLodger,” he describes the experience of acouple who had fed a lion for too long. “Itwas deposed at the inquest that there hasbeen some signs that the lion wasdangerous, but, as usual, familiarity begatcontempt, and no notice was taken of thefact.” All Holmes has to do is apply thatlogic to himself.

Third, overconfidence increases withinformation. If I know more aboutsomething, I am more likely to think I canhandle it, even if the additionalinformation doesn’t actually add to myknowledge in a significant way. This isthe exact effect we observed earlier in thechapter with the clinicians who were

making judgments on a case: the moreinformation they had about the patient’sbackground, the more confident they werein the accuracy of the diagnosis, yet theless warranted was that confidence. Asfor Holmes, he has detail upon detailwhen he travels to Norbury But all thedetails are filtered through the viewpointof Mr. Munro, who is himself unaware ofthe most important ones. And yeteverything seems so incredibly plausible.Holmes’s theory certainly covers all ofthe facts—the known facts, that is. ButHolmes doesn’t calibrate for thepossibility that, despite the magnitude ofthe information, it continues to beselective information. He lets the sheeramount overwhelm what should be a noteof caution: that he still knows nothing from

the main actor who could provide the mostmeaningful information, Mrs. Munro. Asever, quantity does not equal quality.

Finally, overconfidence increases withaction. As we actively engage, we becomemore confident in what we are doing. Inanother classic study, Langer found thatindividuals who flipped a cointhemselves, in contrast to watchingsomeone else flip it, were more confidentin being able to predict heads or tailsaccurately, even though, objectively, theprobabilities remained unchanged.Furthermore, individuals who chose theirown lottery ticket were more confident ina lucky outcome than they were if a lotteryticket was chosen for them. And in the realworld, the effects are just as pronounced.Let’s take the case of traders once again.

The more they trade, the more confidentthey tend to become in their ability tomake good trades. As a result, they oftenovertrade, and in so doing undermine theirprior performance.

But forewarned is forearmed. Anawareness of these elements can help youcounteract them. It all goes back to themessage at the beginning of the chapter:we must continue to learn. The best thingyou can do is to acknowledge that you,too, will inevitably stumble, be it fromstagnation or overconfidence, its closelyrelated near opposite (I say near becauseoverconfidence creates the illusion ofmovement, as opposed to habitualstagnation, but that movement isn’tnecessarily taking you anywhere), and tokeep on learning.

As “The Yellow Face” draws to aclose, Holmes has one final message forhis companion. “Watson, if it should everstrike you that I am getting a littleoverconfident in my powers, or givingless pains to a case than it deserves,kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and Ishall be infinitely obliged to you.” Holmeswas right about one thing: he shouldn’thave missed the case for worlds. Even thebest of us—especially the best of us—need a reminder of our fallibility andability to deceive ourselves into a veryconfident 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 RedCircle,” Holmes’s triumph of never-ending education. The year of that feat ofundying curiosity and ever-present desireto continue to challenge the mind withnew, more difficult cases and ideas?1902.4 As for the year of “The YellowFace,” when victory of confidence overthe very education Holmes urges befell thegreat detective? 1888.1 raise thischronology to point out one somewhatobvious and yet absolutely central elementof the human mind: we never stoplearning. The Holmes that took the case ofa mysterious lodger and ended upembroiled in a saga of secret societies andinternational crime rings (for that is themeaning of Red Circle: a secret Italiancrime syndicate with many evil deeds to

its name) is no longer the same Holmeswho made such seemingly careless errorsin “The Yellow Face.”

Holmes may have his Norburys. But hehas chosen to learn from them and makehimself a better thinker in the process,ever perfecting a mind that already seemssharp beyond anything else. We, too,never stop learning, whether we know itor not. At the time of “The Red Circle,”Holmes was forty-eight years old. Bytraditional standards, we might havethought him incapable of any profoundchange by that point in life, at least on thefundamental level of the brain. Untilrecently, the twenties were considered thefinal decade during which substantialneural changes could take place, the pointwhere our wiring is basically complete.

But new evidence points to an altogetherdifferent reality. Not only can we keeplearning but our brains’ very structure canchange and develop in more complexways for far longer, even into old age.

In one study, adults were taught tojuggle three balls over a three-monthperiod. Their brains, along with those ofmatched non-juggling adults who receivedno training, were scanned at three pointsin time: before the training began, at apoint when they reached jugglingproficiency (i.e., could sustain the routinefor at least sixty seconds), and threemonths after the proficiency point, duringwhich time they were asked to stopjuggling altogether. At first there were nodifferences in gray matter betweenjugglers 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 posteriorintraparietal sulcus, areas associated withthe processing and retention of complexvisual-motion information. Not only werethe jugglers learning, but so were theirbrains—and learning at a morefundamental level than previously thoughtpossible.

What’s more, these neural changes canhappen far more rapidly than we’ve everrealized. When researchers taught a groupof adults to distinguish newly defined andnamed categories for two colors, greenand blue, over a period of two hours (theytook four colors that could be told apart

visually but not lexically and assignedarbitrary names to each one), theyobserved an increase in gray-mattervolume in the region of the visual cortexthat is known to mediate color vision,V2/3. So in just two hours the brain wasalready showing itself receptive to newinputs and training, at a deep, structurallevel.

Even something that has beentraditionally seen as the purview of theyoung—the ability to learn new languages—continues to change the landscape of thebrain late into life. When a group of adultstook a nine-month intensive course inmodern standard Chinese, their brains’white matter reorganized progressively(as measured monthly) in the lefthemisphere language areas and their right

hemisphere counterparts—as well as int h e genu (anterior end) of the corpuscollosum, that network of neural fibersthat connects the two hemispheres, whichwe encountered in the discussion of split-brain patients.

And just think of the rewiring that takesplace in extreme cases, when a personloses his vision or function in some limbor undergoes some other drastic change inthe body. Entire areas of the brain becomereassigned to novel functions, taking upthe real estate of the lost faculty inintricate and innovative ways. Our brainsare capable of learning feats that arenothing short of miraculous.

But there’s more. It now seems clearthat with application and practice even theelderly can reverse signs of cognitive

decl ine that has already occurred. Iplace that emphasis out of pureexcitement. How amazing to consider thateven if we’ve been lazy all our lives, wecan make a substantial difference andreverse damage that has already beendone, if only we apply ourselves andremember Holmes’s most enduring lesson.

There is, of course, a downside in allthis. If our brains can keep learning—andkeep changing as we learn—throughoutour lives, so, too, can they keepunlearning. Consider this: in that jugglingstudy, by the time of the third scan, thegray-matter expansion that had been sopronounced three months prior haddecreased 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 weknow it or not. If we are not strengtheningconnections, we are losing them.

Our education might stop, if we sochoose. Our brains’ never does. The brainwill keep reacting to how we decide touse it. The difference is not whether or notwe learn, but what and how we learn. Wecan learn to be passive, to stop, to, ineffect, not learn, just as we can learn to becurious, to search, to keep educatingourselves about things that we didn’t evenknow we needed to know. If we followHolmes’s advice, we teach our brains tobe active. If we don’t, if we’re content, ifwe get to a certain point and decide thatthat point is good enough, we teach themthe opposite.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“It’s a police matter, Mr. Holmes!” “Itis art for art’s sake.” from His Last Bow,“The Adventure of the Red Circle,” p.1272.

“Come at once if convenient.” “As aninstitution I was like the violin, the shagtobacco, the old black pipe, the indexbooks.” from The Memoirs of SherlockHolmes, “The Crooked Man,” p. 138.

“There’s blackmail in it, or I am muchmistaken.” from The Memoirs ofSherlock Holmes, “The Yellow Face,” p.30.

“Like most clever criminals, he maybe 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 ItAll Together

In the opening pages of The Hound of theBaskervilles, Watson enters the sittingroom of 221B Baker Street to find awalking stick that has been left behind bya certain James Mortimer. When he takesthe opportunity to try to put Holmes’smethods into practice, seeing what he candeduce about the doctor from theappearance of the stick, he finds histhoughts 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 backturned. How could he have known whatthe doctor was doing or thinking? Surely,he must have eyes in the back of his head.

Not quite, says Holmes. “I have, atleast, a well-polished, silver-platedcoffee-pot in front of me. But tell me,Watson, what do you make of our visitor’sstick?” he presses. “Let me hear youreconstruct the man by an examination ofit.”

Watson gamely takes up the challenge,trying his best to mirror his companion’susual approach. “I think that Dr. Mortimeris a successful, elderly medical man,well-esteemed, since those who know himgive him this mark of their appreciation,”

he begins. “I also think that the probabilityis in favour of his being a countrypractitioner who does a great deal of hisvisiting on foot.”

The first part initially soundsreasonable enough. But why does Watsondeduce the second? “Because this stick,though originally a very handsome one,has been so knocked about that I canhardly imagine a town practitionercarrying it,” he says.

Holmes is pleased. “Perfectly sound!”he exclaims. And what else?

“And then again, there is the ‘friends ofthe C.C.H.,’” Watson notes the inscriptionon the stick. “I should guess that to be theSomething Hunt, the local hunt to whosemembers he has possibly given somesurgical assistance,” he continues, “and

which has made him a small presentationin return.”

“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,”Holmes responds. He then goes on topraise Watson as a “conductor of light”and a stimulator of genius, ending hispaean with the words, “I must confess, mydear fellow, that I am very much in yourdebt.”

Has Watson finally learned the trick?Has he mastered Holmes’s reasoningprocess? Well, for at least a moment hebasks in the compliment. Until, that is,Holmes picks up the stick himself andcomments that there are indeed “one ortwo indications” that can furnish the basisfor deduction.

“Has anything escaped me?” Watsonasks with admitted self-importance. “I

trust that there is nothing of consequencewhich I have overlooked?”

Not exactly. “I am afraid, my dearWatson, that most of your conclusionswere erroneous,” Holmes says. “When Isaid that you stimulated me I meant, to befrank, that in noting your fallacies I wasoccasionally guided towards the truth. Notthat you are entirely wrong in thisinstance. The man is certainly a countrypractitioner. And he walks a good deal.”

Watson takes that to mean that he had,in point of fact, been right. Well, onlyinsofar as he got those details accurately.But is he still right if he fails to see thebigger picture?

Not according to Holmes. He suggests,for instance, that C.C.H. is much morelikely to refer to Charing Cross Hospital

than to any local hunt, and that from therestem multiple inferences. What may thosebe, wonders Watson?

“Do none suggest themselves?” Holmesasks. “You know my methods. Applythem!”

And with that famed interjection, thatchallenge, if you will, Holmes embarks onhis own logical tour de force, which endswith the arrival of Dr. Mortimer himself,followed closely by the curly-hairedspaniel whose existence the detective hasjust deduced.

This little repartee brings together all ofthe elements of the scientific approach tothought that we’ve spent this bookexploring and serves as a near-idealjumping-off point for discussing how to

bring the thought process together as awhole—and how that coming together mayfall short. That walking stick illustratesboth how to think properly and how onecan fail to do so. It presents that crucialline between theory and practice, betweenthe knowledge of how we’re to think andthe practice of actually doing so.

Watson has observed Holmes at workmany a time, and yet when it comes toapplying the process himself, he remainsunsuccessful. Why? And how can we dohim one better?

1. Know Yourself—And YourEnvironment

We begin, as always, with the basics.

What are we ourselves bringing to asituation? How do we assess the sceneeven before we begin the observationalprocess?

To Watson, the question at hand beginswith the walking stick: “a fine, thick pieceof wood, bulbous-headed, of the sortwhich 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.” Thatfirst bit is just fine, a description of thestick’s outward qualities. But take a closelook at the second part. Is that trueobservation, or is it more like inference?

Hardly has Watson started to describethe stick and already his personal biasesare flooding his perception, his ownexperience and history and views framing

his thoughts without his realizing it. Thestick is no longer just a stick. It is the stickof the old-fashioned family practitioner,with all the characteristics that followfrom that connection. The instantaneouslyconjured image of the family doctor willcolor every judgment that Watson makesfrom this point forward—and he will haveno idea that it is doing so. In fact, he willeven fail to consider that C.C.H. mightstand for a prominent hospital, somethingthat he as a doctor himself should be wellaware of, if only he’d not gone off on thecountry doctor tangent and failed toconsider it entirely.

This is the frame, or the subconsciousprime, in all its glory. And who knowswhat other biases, stereotypes, and thelike will be rustled up out of the corners

of Watson’s brain attic along with it?Certainly not he. But we can know onething. Any heuristics—or rules of thumb,as you’ll recall—that will affect hiseventual judgment will likely have theirroot in this initial, thoughtless assessment.

Holmes, on the other hand, realizes thatthere is always a step that comes beforeyou begin to work your mind to its fullpotential. Unlike Watson, he doesn’t beginto observe without quite being aware of it,but rather takes hold of the process fromthe very beginning—and starting wellbefore the stick itself. He takes in thewhole situation, doctor and stick and all,long before he starts to make detailedobservations about the object of interestitself. And to do it, he does something farmore prosaic than Watson could ever

suppose: he looks in a polished silvercoffeepot. He doesn’t need to use hisdeductional powers where he has use of areflective surface; why waste themneedlessly?

So, too, must we always look around usto see if there’s a ready-and-waitingmirror, before plunging in without asecond thought—and then use it to takestock of the entire situation instead ofletting the mind thoughtlessly get ahead ofitself and begin grabbing who knows whatout of our attic without our full knowledgeand control.

Evaluating our environment meansdifferent things, depending on the choiceswe are making. For Holmes, it wasobserving the room, Watson’s actions, andthe easily available coffeepot. Whatever it

is, we can rest assured that it will requirea pause before the dive. We can’t forget tolook at our surroundings before launchinginto action—or even into the Holmesianthought process. For, after all, pausing andreflecting is the first step to that process.It’s point zero of observation. Before webegin to gather detail, we need to knowwhat detail, if any, we’ll be gathering.

Remember: specific, mindfulmotivation matters. It matters a great deal.We have to frame our goals ahead of time.Let them inform how we proceed. Letthem inform how we allocate our preciouscognitive resources. We have to thinkthem through, write them down, to makesure they are as clear-cut as they canpossibly be. Holmes doesn’t need to takenotes, to be sure, but most of us certainly

do, at least for the truly important choices.It will help clarify the important pointsbefore we embark on our journey ofthought: What do I want to accomplish?And what does that mean for my futurethought process? Not looking necessarilymeans not finding. And to find, we firstneed to know where to look.

2. Observe—Carefully and Thoughtfully

When Watson looks at the stick, he notesits size and heft. He also remarks the beat-up bottom—a sign of frequent walking interrain that is less than hospitable. Finally,he looks to the inscription, C.C.H., andwith 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 hisobservation to the stick as physical object;after all, the original goal, the frame set inthe first step of the process, was to learnabout the man who owned it. “It is only anabsent-minded one who leaves his stickand not his visiting-card after waiting anhour in your room,” he tells Watson. Butof course: the stick was left behind.Watson knows that, naturally—and yet hefails to know it.

What’s more, the stick creates its owncontext, its own version of the owner’shistory, if you will, by virtue of theinscription. While Watson reads theC.C.H. only in light of his unconsciouspreconceptions of the country practitioner,

Holmes realizes that it must be observedon its own terms, without any priorassumptions, and that in that light, it tellsits own story. Why would a doctorreceive a stick as a gift? Or, as Holmesputs it, “On what occasion would it bemost probable that such a presentationwould be made? When would his friendsunite to give him a pledge of their goodwill?” That is the point of departuresuggested by a true observation of theinscription, not a biased one, and thatpoint suggests a background story that canbe reached through careful deduction. Thecontext is an integral part of the situation,not a take-it-or-leave-it accessory.

As for the stick itself, here, too, thegood doctor has not been as careful in hisobservations as he should have been. First

off, he merely glances at it, whereasHolmes “examined it for a few minuteswith his naked eyes. Then with anexpression of interest he laid down hiscigarette, and, carrying the cane to thewindow, he looked over it again with aconvex lens.” Closer scrutiny, frommultiple angles and multiple approaches.Not as fast as the Watson method, to besure, but much more thorough. And whileit may well be true that such care will notbe rewarded with any new details, youcan never know in advance, so if you areto truly observe, you can never afford toforego it. (Though, of course, our ownwindow and convex lens may bemetaphorical, they nevertheless imply adegree of closer scrutiny, ofscrupulousness and sheer time spent in

contemplation of the problem.)Watson notes the stick’s size and the

worn-down bottom, true. But he fails tosee that there are teeth marks plainlyvisible on its middle. Teeth marks on astick? It’s hardly a leap of faith to take thatobservation as implying the existence of adog who has carried the stick, and carriedit often, behind his master (as Holmes, infact, does). That, too, is part of theobservation, part of the full story of Dr.Mortimer. What’s more, as Holmes pointsout to his friend, the size of the dog’s jawis evident from the space between themarks, making it possible to envision justwhat type of dog it might have been. That,of course, would be jumping ahead todeduction—but it wouldn’t be possible atall without recognizing the necessary

details and mentally noting their potentialsignificance for your overall goal.

3. Imagine—Remembering to Claim theSpace You May Not Think You Need

After observation comes that creativespace, that time to reflect and explore theins and outs of your attic calledimagination. It’s that break of the mind,that three-pipe problem, that violininterlude or opera or concerto or trip tothe art museum, that walk, that shower,that who knows what that forces you totake a step back from the immediacy of thesituation before you once more moveforward.

We need to give Watson some credit

here. He doesn’t exactly have time to takea break, as Holmes puts him on the spot,challenging him to apply the detective’smethods to inferring what he can about theimplications of C.C.H. standing forCharing Cross Hospital instead of forSomething Hunt. Watson can hardly beexpected to break out the cigarettes orbrandy.

And yet Watson could do something alittle less extreme but far moreappropriate to a problem of far lessermagnitude than solving a full crime. Afterall, not everything is a three-pipeproblem. It may be enough to take a moremetaphorical step back. To distanceyourself mentally, to pause and reflect andreconfigure and reintegrate in a muchshorter time frame.

But Watson does no such thing. Hedoesn’t even give himself time to thinkafter Holmes prompts him to do so, sayingthat he can only draw “the obviousconclusions” but can’t see anythingfurther.

Contrast the approach that Watson andHolmes take. Watson goes right to it: fromobservation of the heft and shape of thestick to image of old-fashionedpractitioner, from C.C.H. to SomethingHunt, from worn-down iron ferrule tocountry practitioner, from Charing Crossto a move from town to country, andnothing more besides. Holmes, on theother hand, spends quite a bit more time inbetween his observations and hisconclusions. Recall that first, he listens toWatson; next, he examines the stick; then,

he once more speaks with Watson; andfinally, when he begins to list his ownconclusions, he does not do so all at once.Rather, he asks himself questions,questions that suggest a number ofanswers, before settling on a singlepossibility. He looks at differentpermutations—could Dr. Mortimer havebeen in a well-established Londonpractice? A house surgeon? A housephysician? A senior student?—and thenconsiders which would be more likely inlight of all of the other observations. Hedoesn’t deduce. Rather, he reflects and heplays around with options. He questionsand he considers. Only after will he startto form his conclusions.

4. Deduce—Only from What You’veObserved, and Nothing More

From a walking stick to a “successful,elderly medical man, well-esteemed,” a“country practitioner who does a lot of hisvisiting on foot” and who has “given somesurgical assistance” to a local hunt (forwhich he has received said stick), ifyou’re Watson. And from that same stickto a former Charing Cross Hospital“house-surgeon or house-physician,” a“young fellow under thirty, amiable,unambitious, absent-minded, and thepossessor of a favourite dog”—nay, acurly-haired spaniel—who received thestick on the occasion of the change fromCharing Cross to the country, if you’reHolmes. Same starting point, altogether

different deductions (with the soleintersection of a country practitioner whowalks a great deal). How do two peoplecome out so differently when faced withan identical problem?

Watson has made two correctdeductions: that the stick belongs to acountry practitioner and that thatpractitioner does much of his visiting onfoot. But why elderly and well esteemed?Whence came this picture of theconscientious and dedicated familypractitioner? Not from any actualobservation. It came instead from afabrication of Watson’s mind, of hisimmediate reaction that the stick was justsuch “as the old-fashioned familypractitioner used to carry—dignified,solid, and reassuring.”

The stick itself is no such thing, otherthan solid. It is just an object that carriescertain signs. But to Watson, it at once hasa story. It has brought up memories thathave little bearing on the case at hand andinstead are stray pieces of attic furniturethat have become activated by virtue ofsome associative memory processes ofwhich Watson himself is hardly aware.Ditto the local hunt. So focused hasWatson become on his imagined solid anddignified country practitioner that it seemsonly logical to him that the walking stickwas the gift of a hunt, to whose membersDr. Mortimer has, naturally, given somesurgical assistance. Watson doesn’tactually have any solid, logical steps toshow for these deductions. They stemfrom his selective focus and the doctor

that exists in his imagination. As areassuring and elderly family man, Dr.Mortimer would naturally be both amember of a local hunt and ever ready togive assistance. Surgical? But of course.Someone of such stature and refinementmust clearly be a surgical man.

Watson fails to note entirely theM.R.C.S. appended to Mortimer’s name(something that the man himself will laterpoint out in correcting Holmes when thelatter addresses him as Doctor: “Mister,sir, Mister—a humble M.R.C.S.”)—anaddition that belies the stature Mortimerhas assumed in Watson’s hyperactivemind. And he makes no note, as we’vealready discussed, of the sheer fact of thestick having been left in the visiting room—minus so much as a visiting card. His

memory in this instance is as mindlesslyselective as his attention—after all, he didread the M.R.C.S. when he first looked atthe stick; it was just overshadowedcompletely by the details his mind thensupplied of its own accord based on thenature of the stick itself. And he didrecognize at the very beginning that thestick’s owner had left it behind on theprior evening, but that, too, slipped hismind as an observation or fact worthy ofnote.

Holmes’s version, in contrast, comesfrom an entirely different thought process,one that is fully aware of itself and of itsinformation, that seeks to incorporate allevidence and not just selective bits, and touse that evidence as a whole, rather thanfocusing on some parts but not others,

coloring some more brightly, and others ina paler hue.

First, the man’s age. “You willobserve,” he tells Watson, after havingconvinced the doctor that the most likelymeaning of C.C.H. is Charing CrossHospital and not Something Hunt (afterall, we are talking about a doctor; isn’t itmost logical that he would receive apresentation from a hospital and not ahunt? Which of the two Hs is the morelikely, given the objective information andnot any subjective version thereof?), “thathe could not have been on the staff of thehospital, since only a man well-established in a London practice couldhold such a position, and such a onewould 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 notedand grasped.) Fair enough. Someone sowell established as to be a staff memberwould hardly be expected to up and leave—unless, of course, there were someunforeseen circumstances. But there are nosuch circumstances that one could graspfrom the evidence of the stick, so that isnot an explanation to be considered fromthe available evidence (indeed,considering it would entail the precisefallacy that Watson commits in creatinghis version of the doctor, a story told bythe mind and not based in objectiveobservation).

Who, then? Holmes reasons it out: “Ifhe was in the hospital and yet not on thestaff he could only have been a house-

surgeon or a house-physician—little morethan a senior student. And he left fiveyears ago—the date is on the stick.”Hence, “a young fellow under thirty” toWatson’s middle-aged practitioner. Notealso that while Holmes is certain about theage—after all, he has exhausted alloptions of his former position, until onlyone reasonable age alternative remains(remember: “It may well be that severalexplanations remain, in which case onetries to test after test until one or other ofthem has a convincing amount of support”)—he does not go as far as Watson innecessitating that the man in question be asurgeon. He may just as well be aphysician. There is zero evidence to pointin either direction, and Holmes does notdeduce past where the evidence leads.

That would be just as fallacious as notdeducing far enough.

What of the man’s personality? “As tothe adjectives,” says Holmes, “I said, if Iremember right, amiable, unambitious, andabsent-minded.” (He does rememberright.) How could he have possiblydeduced these characteristics? Not, itturns out, in the mindless fashion thatWatson deduced his own set of attributes.“It is my experience,” says Holmes, “thatit is only an amiable man in this worldwho receives testimonials, only anunambitious one who abandons a Londoncareer for the country, and only an absent-minded one who leaves his stick and nothis visiting-card after waiting an hour inyour room.” Each trait emerges directlyfrom 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 ofmultiple possibilities, to a narrowing ofthe most likely ones. No extraneousdetails, no holes filled in by an all toowilling imagination. Scientific deductionat its best.

Finally, why does Holmes give Dr.Mortimer a dog, and a very specific one atthat? We’ve already discussed the teethmarks that Watson has missed. But themarks—or rather, the distance betweenthem—are quite specific, “too broad inmy opinion for a terrier and not broadenough for a mastiff.” Holmes may wellhave gotten to a curly-haired spaniel onhis own, following that logical train, but

he has no opportunity to do so, as the dogin question appears at that momentalongside its owner. And there, thedeductive trail comes to an end. Butwasn’t it a clear one as far as it went?Didn’t it make you want to say,Elementary? How could I not have seenthat myself? That is exactly whatdeduction at its best, of course, is meant todo.

5. Learn—From Your Failures Just asYou Do from Your Successes

In observing Watson’s fallacies in thisparticular instance, Holmes learns evermore about the pitfalls of the thoughtprocess, those moments when it is easy to

go astray—and precisely in whichdirection the false path usually lies. Fromthis encounter, he will take away thepower of stereotype activation and theoverwhelming influence an improperinitial frame can have on the inferencesthat follow, as well as the error that isintroduced when one fails to considerevery observation and focuses instead onthe most salient, recent, or otherwiseaccessible ones. Not that he doesn’t knowboth of these things already, but each timeserves as a reminder, a reinforcement, anew manifestation in a different contextthat ensures that his knowledge never goesstale.

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 wentwrong and to learn how better to go rightthe next time around. Alas, he chooses theother route, focusing instead on Holmes’sstatement that he is not “entirely wrong inthis instance. The man is certainly acountry practitioner. And he walks a gooddeal.” Instead of trying to see why it wasprecisely that he got these two detailsright and the rest altogether wrong,Watson says, “Then I was right,”forsaking the opportunity to learn, andinstead focusing once more onlyselectively on the available observations.

Education is all well and good, but itneeds to be taken from the level of theoryto that of practice, over and over and over—lest it begin to gather dust and let out

that stale, rank smell of the attic whosedoor has remained unopened for years.

Any time we get the urge to take it easy,we’d do well to bring to mind the imageof the rusted razor blade from The Valleyof Fear: “A long series of sterile weekslay behind us, and here at last was a fittingobject for those remarkable powerswhich, like all special gifts, becomeirksome to their owner when they are notin use. That razor brain blunted and rustedwith inaction.” Picture that rusted, bluntedrazor, the yucky orange specks peeling off,the dirt and decay so palpable that youdon’t even want to reach out to remove itfrom its place of neglect, and rememberthat even when everything seemswonderful and there are no major choicesto be made or thoughts to be thought, the

blade has to remain in use. Exercising ourminds even on the unimportant things willhelp keep them sharp for the importantones.

Time to Keep a Diary

Let’s take a quick break from Mr.Mortimer. A good friend of mine—I’llcall her Amy—has long been a migrainesufferer. Everything will be going just finewhen out of the blue, it hits her. Once, shethought she was dying, another time, thatshe’d gotten the terrible Norovirus thathad been going around. It took some yearsfor her to learn to discern the first signsand run for the nearest dark room and anice dose of Imitrex before the I’m-about-

to-die/I-have-a-horrible-stomach-flupanic set in. But eventually, she couldmore or less manage. Except when themigraines struck several times a week,putting her behind work, writing, andeverything else in a steady stream of pain.Or when they came at those inopportunetimes when she had neither a dark, quietroom nor medicine to fall back on. Shesoldiered on.

A year or so ago, Amy switchedprimary care doctors. During the usualgetting-to-know-you chat, she complained,as always, about her migraines. Butinstead of nodding sympathetically andprescribing more Imitrex, as every doctorbefore her had done, this particularphysician asked her a question. Had Amyever kept a migraine diary?

Amy was confused. Was she supposedto write from the migraine’s point ofview? Try to see through the pain anddescribe her symptoms for posterity? No.It was much simpler. The doctor gave hera stack of preprinted sheets, with fieldslike Time Started/Ended, Warning Signs,Hours of Sleep, what she’d eaten that day,and the lot. Each time Amy had amigraine, she was to fill it inretroactively, as best she could. And shewas to keep doing it until she had a dozenor so entries.

Amy called me afterward to tell me justwhat she thought of the new doctor’sapproach: the whole exercise was ratherabsurd. She knew what caused hermigraines, she told me confidently. It wasstress and changes of weather. But she

said she’d give it a shot, if only for alaugh and despite her reservations. Ilaughed right along with her.

I wouldn’t be telling the story now ifthe results didn’t shock us both. Didcaffeine ever cause migraines? the doctorhad asked Amy in their initialconversation. Alcohol? Amy had shakenher head knowingly. Absolutely not. Noconnection whatsoever. Except that’s notthe story the migraine diary told. Strongblack tea, especially later in the day, wasalmost always on the list of what she’deaten before an attack. More than a glassof wine, also a frequent culprit. Hours ofsleep? Surely that wasn’t important. Butthere it was. The number of hours listedon those days when she found it hard tomove tended to be far below the usual

amount. Cheese (cheese? seriously?), alsoon the list. And, yes, she had been right,too. Stress and changes in weather weresurefire triggers.

Only, Amy hadn’t been right entirely.She had been like Watson, insisting thatshe’d been correct, when she’d beencorrect only “to that extent.” She’d justnever taken notice of anything else, sosalient were those two factors. And shecertainly never drew the connections thatwere, in retrospect, all too apparent.

Knowing is only part of the battle, ofcourse. Amy still gets migraines moreoften than she would like. But at the veryleast, she can control some of the triggerfactors much better than she ever couldbefore. And she can spot symptomsearlier, too, especially if she’s knowingly

done something she shouldn’t, like havesome wine and cheese . . . on a rainy day.Then she can sometimes sneak in themedicine before the headache sets in forgood, and at least for the moment she hasit beat.

Not everyone suffers from migraines. Buteveryone makes choices and decisions,thinks through problems and dilemmas, ona daily basis. So here’s what I recommendto speed up our learning and help usintegrate all of those steps that Holmes hasso graciously shown us: we should keep adecision diary. And I don’t meanmetaphorically. I mean actually,physically, writing things down, just asAmy had to do with her migraines andtriggers.

When we make a choice, solve aproblem, come to a decision, we canrecord the process in a single place. Wecan put here a list of our observations, tomake sure we remember them when thetime comes; we can include, too, ourthoughts, our inferences, our potentiallines of inquiry, things that intrigued us.But we can even take it a step further.Record what we ended up doing. Whetherwe had any doubts or reservations orconsidered other options (and in all cases,we’d do well to be specific and say whatthose were). And then, we can revisit eachentry to write down how it went. Was Ihappy? Did I wish I’d done somethingdifferently? Is there anything that isclear to me in retrospect that wasn’tbefore?

For those choices for which we haven’twritten any observations or made anylists, we can still try our best to put downwhat was going through our mind at thetime. What was I considering? What wasI basing my decision on? What was Ifeeling in the moment? What was thecontext (was I stressed? emotional?lazy? was it a regular day or not? what,if anything, stood out?)? Who else, ifanyone, was involved? What were thestakes? What was my goal, my initialmotivation? Did I accomplish what I’dset out to do? Did something distractme? In other words, we should try tocapture as much as possible of our thoughtprocess 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 lookthrough it all. All of those thoughts on allof those unrelated issues, from beginningto end. Chances are that we’ll see theexact same thing Amy did when she rereadher migraine entries: that we make thesame habitual mistakes, that we think inthe same habitual ways, that we’re prey tothe same contextual cues over and over.And that we’ve never quite seen whatthose habitual patterns are—much asHolmes never realizes how little credit hegives to others when it comes to thepower of disguise.

Indeed, writing things down that youthink you know cold, keeping track ofsteps that you think need no tracking, canbe an incredibly useful habit even for themost expert of experts. In 2006, a group of

physicians released a groundbreakingstudy: they had managed to lower the rateof catheter-related bloodstream infections—a costly and potentially lethalphenomenon, estimated at about 80,000cases (and up to 28,000 deaths) per year,at a cost of $45,000 per patient—inMichigan ICUs from a median rate of 2.7infections in 1,000 patients to 0 in onlythree months. After sixteen and eighteenmonths, the mean rate per 1,000 haddecreased from a baseline of 7.7 to 1.4infections. How was this possible? Hadthe doctors discovered some new miracletechnique?

Actually, they had done something sosimple that many a physician rebelled atsuch a snub to their authority. They hadinstituted a mandatory checklist. The

checklist had only five items, as simple ashandwashing and making sure to clean apatient’s skin prior to inserting thecatheter. Surely, no one needed suchelementary reminders. And yet—with thereminders in place, the rate of infectiondropped precipitously, to almost zero.(Consider the natural implication: prior tothe checklist, some of those obvious thingsweren’t getting done, or weren’t gettingdone regularly.)

Clearly, no matter how expert atsomething we become, we can forget thesimplest of elements if we go through themotions of our tasks mindlessly,regardless of how motivated we may be tosucceed. Anything that prompts a momentof mindful reflection, be it a checklist orsomething else entirely, can have profound

influence on our ability to maintain thesame high level of expertise and successthat got us there to begin with.

Humans are remarkably adaptable. AsI’ve emphasized over and over, our brainscan wire and rewire for a long, long time.Cells that fire together wire together. Andif they start firing in differentcombinations, with enough repetition, thatwiring, too, will change.

The reason I keep focusing on thenecessity of practice is that practice is theonly thing that will allow us to applyHolmes’s methodology in real life, in thesituations that are far more chargedemotionally than any thought experimentcan ever lead you to believe. We need totrain ourselves mentally for thoseemotional moments, for those times when

the deck is stacked as high against us as itwill ever be. It’s easy to forget howquickly our minds grasp for familiarpathways when given little time to think orwhen otherwise pressured. But it’s up tous to determine what those pathways willbe.

It is most difficult to apply Holmes’slogic in those moments that matter themost. And so, all we can do is practice,until our habits are such that even the mostsevere stressors will bring out the verythought patterns that we’ve worked sohard 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 everydetail” from His Last Bow, “TheAdventure of the Red Circle,” p. 1272.“That razor brain blunted and rustedwith inaction” from The Valley of Fear ,chapter 2: Mr. Sherlock HolmesDiscourses, p. 11.

CHAPTER EIGHT

We’re Only Human

On a morning in May 1920, Mr. EdwardGardner received a letter from a friend.Inside were two small photographs. Inone, a group of what looked to be fairieswere dancing on a stream bank while alittle girl looked on. In another, a wingedcreature (a gnome perhaps, he thought) satnear another girl’s beckoning hand.

Gardner was a theosophist, someonewho believed that knowledge of God maybe achieved through spiritual ecstasy,direct intuition, or special individualrelation (a popular fusion of Eastern ideasabout reincarnation and the possibility ofspirit travel). Fairies and gnomes seemeda far cry from any reality he’d everexperienced outside of books, but where

another may have laughed and cast asidepictures and letter both, he was willing todig a little deeper. And so, he wrote backto the friend: Might he be able to obtainthe photo negatives?

When the plates arrived, Gardnerpromptly delivered them to a Mr. HaroldSnelling, photography expertextraordinaire. No fakery, it was said,could get past Snelling’s eye. As thesummer drew on, Gardner awaited theexpert’s verdict. Was it possible that thephotographs were something more than aclever staging?

By the end of July, Gardner got hisanswer: “These two negatives,” Snellingwrote, “are entirely genuine unfakedphotographs of single exposure, open-airwork, show movement in the fairy figures,

and there is no trace whatever of studiowork involving card or paper models,dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc. Inmy opinion, they are both straightuntouched pictures.”

Gardner was ecstatic. But not everyonewas equally convinced. It seemed soaltogether improbable. One man,however, heard enough to pursue thematter further: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle was nothing if notmeticulous. In that, at least, he took hiscreation’s methodology to heart. And so,he asked for further validation, this timefrom an undisputed authority inphotography, Kodak—who also happenedto have manufactured the camera that hadbeen used to take the picture.

Kodak refused to offer an official

endorsement. The photographs wereindeed single exposure, the experts stated,and showed no outward signs of beingfaked, 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 picturescould not possibly be real.

Conan Doyle dismissed that last bit asfaulty logic, a circular argument if everthere was one. The other statements,however, seemed sound enough. No signsof fakery. Single exposure. It certainlyseemed convincing, especially whenadded to Snelling’s endorsement. The onlynegative finding that Kodak had offeredwas pure conjecture—and who better thanHolmes’s creator to know to throw those

out of consideration?There remained, however, one final

piece of evidence to verify: what aboutthe girls depicted in the photographs?What evidence, be it supportive ordamning, could they offer? Alas, SirArthur was leaving on a trip to Australiathat would not be put off, and so, he askedGardner to travel in his stead to the sceneof the pictures, a small West Yorkshiretown called Cottingley, to speak with thefamily in question.

In August 1920, Edward Gardner metElsie Wright and her six-years-youngercousin, Frances Griffiths, for the firsttime. They’d taken the photographs, theytold him, three years prior, when Elsiewas sixteen and Frances ten. Their parentshadn’t believed their tale of fairies by the

stream, they said, and so they had decidedto document it. The photographs were theresult.

The girls, it seemed to Gardner, werehumble and sincere. They were well-raised country girls, after all, and theycould hardly have been after personalgain, refusing, as they did, all mention ofpayment for the pictures. They even askedthat their names be withheld were thephotographs to be made public. Andthough Mr. Wright (Elsie’s father)remained skeptical and called the printsnothing more than a childish prank, Mr.Gardner was convinced that these photoswere genuine: the fairies were real. Thesegirls weren’t lying. Upon his return toLondon, he sent a satisfied report toConan Doyle. So far, everything seemed

to be holding together.Still, Conan Doyle decided that more

proof was in order. Scientificexperiments, after all, needed to bereplicated if their results were to be heldvalid. So Gardner traveled once more tothe country, this time with two camerasand two dozen specially marked platesthat couldn’t be substituted withoutdrawing attention to the change. He leftthese with the girls with the instructions tocapture the fairies again, preferably on asunny day when the light was best.

He wasn’t disappointed. In early fall,he received three more photographs. Thefairies were there. The plates were theoriginal ones he’d supplied. No evidenceof tampering was found.

Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced.

The experts agreed (though, of course, onewithout offering official endorsement).The replication had gone smoothly. Thegirls seemed genuine and trustworthy.

In December, the famed creator of Mr.Sherlock Holmes published the originalphotographs, along with an account of theverification process, in The StrandMagazine—the home publication of noneother than Holmes himself. The title:“Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-MakingEvent.” Two years later, he released abook, The Coming of the Fairies, whichexpanded on his initial investigation andincluded additional corroboration of thefairies’ existence by the clairvoyant Mr.Geoffrey Hodson. Conan Doyle had madeup his mind, and he wasn’t about tochange it.

How had Conan Doyle failed the test ofHolmesian thinking? What led such anobviously intelligent individual down apath to concluding that fairies existedsimply because an expert had affirmed thatthe Cottingley photographs had not been

faked?Sir Arthur spent so much effort

confirming the veracity of the photos thathe never stopped to ask an obviousquestion: why, in all of the inquiries intowhether the prints were genuine, did noone ask whether the fairies themselvesmight have been more easilymanufactured? We can easily agree withthe logic that it would seem improbablefor a ten-year-old and a sixteen-year-oldto fabricate photographs that couldconfound the experts, but what aboutfabricating a fairy? Take a look at thepictures on the preceding pages. It seemsobvious in retrospect that they can’t bereal. 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’ttheir wings moving? Why did no one staywith the girls to see the fairies in person?

Conan Doyle could—and should—havedug deeper when it came to the youngladies in question. Had he done so, hewould have discovered, for one, thatyoung Elsie was a gifted artist—and onewho, it just so happened, had beenemployed by a photography studio. Hemay have also discovered a certain book,published in 1915, whose pictures bore anuncanny resemblance to the fairies thatappeared on the camera in the originalprints.

Holmes surely wouldn’t have beentaken in so easily by the Cottingleyphotographs. Could the fairies have hadhuman agents as well, agents who may

have helped them get on camera, easedthem into existence, so to speak? Thatwould have been his first question.Something improbable is not yetimpossible—but it requires acorrespondingly large burden of proof.And that, it seems quite clear, wassomething Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did notquite provide. Why? As we will see,when we really want to believesomething, we become far less skepticaland inquisitive, letting evidence passmuster with far less scrutiny than wewould ever admit for a phenomenon wedidn’t want to believe. We don’t, in otherwords, require as large or diligent aburden of proof. And for Conan Doyle, theexistence of fairies was just such aninstance.

When we make a decision, we decidewithin the context of knowledge that isavailable to us in the moment and not inretrospect. And within that context, it canbe difficult indeed to balance the requisiteopen-mindedness with what passes forrationality given the context of the times.We, too, can be fooled into believing thatfairies—or our version thereof—are real.All it takes is the right environment andthe right motivation. Think of that beforeyou leap to judge Conan Doyle’s folly(something that, I hope, you will be lessinclined to do before the chapter’s end).

Prisoners of Our Knowledge andMotivation

Close your eyes and picture a tiger. It’slying on a patch of green grass, basking inthe sun. It licks its paws. With a lazyyawn, it turns over onto its back. There’sa rustle off to the side. It might just be thewind, 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 havestripes? What color are those? What aboutthe eyes? The face (are there whiskers)?The texture of the fur? Did you see itsteeth when it opened its mouth?

If you’re like most people, your tigerwas a kind of orange, with dark blackstripes lining its face and sides. Maybeyou remembered to add the characteristicwhite spots to the face and underbelly, the

tips of the paws and base of the neck.Maybe you didn’t and your tiger was moremonochrome than most. Maybe yourtiger’s eyes were black. Maybe they wereblue. Both are certainly possible. Maybeyou saw its incisors bared. Maybe youdidn’t.

But one detail is constant for nearlyeveryone: one thing your tiger was not isany predominant color other than thatburnt orange-red hue that seems somethingbetween fire and molasses. It probablywasn’t the rare white tiger, the albino-likecreature whose white fur is caused by adouble recessive gene that occurs soinfrequently that experts estimate itsnatural incidence at only one out ofapproximately ten thousand tigers born inthe wild. (Actually, they aren’t albinos at

all. The condition is called leucism and itresults in a reduction of all skin pigments,not just melanin.) Nor is it likely to havebeen a black tiger, otherwise known as amelanistic tiger. That particular coloration—no stripes, no gradation, just pure, jet-black fur—is caused by a polymorphismthat results in a non-agouti mutation (theagouti gene, essentially, determineswhether a coat will be banded, the usualprocess of coloring each individual hair,or solid, non-agouti). Neither kind iscommon. Neither kind seems to be thetypical tiger that the word brings to mind.And yet, all three are members of theexact same species, panthera tigris.

Now close your eyes and pictureanother animal: a mimic octopus. It’sperched on the ocean floor, near some

reefs. The water is a misty blue. Nearby, aschool offish passes.

Stumped? Here’s some help. Thisoctopus is about two feet long, and hasbrown and white stripes or spots—exceptwhen it doesn’t. You see, the mimic cancopy over fifteen different sea animals. Itcan look like that jellyfish from “TheLion’s Mane” that claimed so manyvictims right under the nose of a baffledHolmes. It can take the shape of a bandedsea snake, a leaf-shaped sole, orsomething resembling a furry turkey withhuman legs. It can change color, size, andgeometry all at a moment’s notice. In otherwords, it’s almost impossible to imagineit as any one thing. It is myriad animals atonce, and none that you can pinpoint at anyone instant.

Now I’m going to tell you one morething. One of those animals mentioned inthe preceding paragraphs doesn’t actuallyexist. It may one day be real, but as ofnow it’s the stuff of legend. Which one doyou think it is? The orange tiger? Thewhite one? The black one? The mimicoctopus?

Here’s the answer: the black tiger.While genetically it seems plausible—andwhat we know about the tiger’s patterns ofinheritance and genome confirms that itremains a theoretical possibility—a truemelanistic tiger has never been seen.There have been allegations. There havebeen pseudo-melanistic examples (whosestripes are so thick and close as to almostgive off the impression of melanism).There have been brown tigers with dark

stripes. There have been black tigers thatended up being black leopards—the mostcommon source of confusion. But therehasn’t ever been a black tiger. Not oneconfirmed, verified case. Not ever.

And yet chances are you had littletrouble believing in its existence. Peoplehave certainly wanted them to exist forcenturies. The dark beasts figure in aVietnamese legend; they’ve been thesubject of numerous bounties; one waseven presented as a gift to Napoleon fromthe king of Java (alas, it was a leopard).And they make sense. They fit in with thegeneral pattern of animals that we expectto be real. And anyway, why ever not?

The mimic octopus, on the other hand,was indeed the stuff of legend until not toolong ago. It was discovered only in 1998,

by a group of fishermen off the coast ofIndonesia. So strange was the report andso seemingly implausible that it took hoursof footage to convince skeptical scientiststhat the creature was for real. After all,while mimicry is fairly common in theanimal kingdom, never before had a singlespecies been able to take on multipleguises—and never before had an octopusactually assumed the appearance ofanother animal.

The point is that it’s easy to be fooledby seemingly scientific context intothinking something real when it’s not. Themore numbers we are given, the moredetails we see, the more we read big,scientific-seeming words like melanisminstead of plain black, agouti and non-agouti instead of banded or solid,

mutation, polymorphism, allele, genetics,piling them on word after word, the morelikely we are to believe that the thingdescribed is real. Conversely, it’s all tooeasy to think that because somethingsounds implausible or out-there ordiscordant, because it has never beforebeen seen and wasn’t even suspected, itmust be nonexistent.

Imagine for a moment that theCottingley photographs had insteaddepicted the young girls with a never-before-seen variety of insect. What if, forinstance, the picture had been of the girlshandling this creature instead.

A miniature dragon, no less. (Actually,draco sumatranus, a gliding lizard native

to Indonesia—but would anyone inEngland during Conan Doyle’s time havebeen so wise?) Or this.

A creature of the deep, darkimagination, something out of a book ofhorrors, perhaps. But real? (Actually, thestar-nosed mole, condylura cristata, is

found in eastern Canada. Hardly commonknowledge even in the pre-Internet days,let alone back in the Victorian era.)

Or indeed any number of animals thathad seemed foreign and strange onlydecades earlier—and some that seemstrange even today. Would they have beenheld to the same burden of proof—orwould the lack of obvious fakery in thephotograph have been enough?

What we believe about the world—andthe burden of proof that we require toaccept something as fact—is constantlyshifting. These beliefs aren’t quite theinformation that’s in our brain attic, norare they pure observation, but they aresomething that colors every step of theproblem-solving process nevertheless.What we believe is possible or plausible

shapes our basic assumptions in how weformulate and investigate questions. Aswe’ll see, Conan Doyle was predisposedto believe in the possibility of fairies. Hewanted them to be real. Thepredisposition in turn shaped his intuitionabout the Cottingley photographs, and thatmade all the difference in his failure tosee through them, even though he actedwith what he thought was great rigor intrying to establish their veracity.

An intuition colors how we interpretdata. Certain things “seem” moreplausible than others, and on the flip side,certain things just “don’t make sense,” nomatter how much evidence there may be tosupport them. It’s the confirmation bias(and many other biases at that: the illusionof validity and understanding, the law of

small numbers, and anchoring andrepresentativeness, all in one) all overagain.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidtsummarizes the dilemma in The RighteousMind, when he writes, “We are terrible atseeking evidence that challenges our ownbeliefs, but other people do us this favor,just as we are good at finding errors inother people’s beliefs.” It’s easy enoughfor most of us to spot the flaws in thefairies, because we have no emotionalstake in their potential reality. But takesomething that touches us personally,where our very reputation might be on theline, and will it still be so simple?

It’s easy to tell our minds stories aboutwhat is, and equally easy to tell themstories about what is not. It depends

deeply on our motivation. Even still, wemight think that fairies seem a far cry froma creature of the deep like the mimicoctopus, no matter how hard it might be tofathom such a creature. After all, we knowthere are octopi. We know that newspecies of animals are discovered everyday. We know some of them may seem abit bizarre. Fairies, on the other hand,challenge every rational understanding wehave of how the world works. And this iswhere context comes in.

A Recklessness of Mind?

Conan Doyle wasn’t altogether reckless inauthenticating the Cottingley photos. Yes,he did not gather the same exacting proof

he would doubtless have demanded of hisdetective. (And it bears remembering thatSir Arthur was no slouch when it came tothat type of thing. He was instrumental,you’ll recall, in clearing the name of twofalsely accused murder suspects, GeorgeEdalji and Oscar Slater.) But he did askthe best photography experts he knew.And he did try for replication—of a sort.And was it so difficult to believe that twogirls of ten and sixteen would not becapable of the type of technical expertisethat had been suggested as a means offalsifying the negatives?

It helps us to more clearly understandConan Doyle’s motivations if we try tosee the photographs as he and hiscontemporaries would have seen them.Remember, this was before the age of

digital cameras and Photoshopping andediting ad infinitum, when anyone cancreate just about anything that can beimagined—and do so in a much moreconvincing fashion than the CottingleyFairies. Back then, photography was arelatively new art. It was labor intensive,time consuming, and technicallychallenging. It wasn’t something that justanyone could do, let alone manipulate in aconvincing fashion. When we look at thepictures today, we see them with differenteyes than the eyes of 1920. We havedifferent standards. We have grown upwith different examples. There was a timewhen a photograph was considered highproof indeed, so difficult was it to takeand to alter. It’s nearly impossible to lookback and realize how much has changed

and how different the world onceappeared.

Still, the Cottingley Fairies sufferedfrom one major—and, it turned out forConan Doyle’s reputation, insurmountable—limitation. Fairies do not and cannotexist. It’s just as that Kodak employeepointed out to Sir Arthur: the evidence didnot matter, whatever it was. Fairies arecreatures of the imagination and not ofreality. End of story.

Our own view of what is and is notpossible in reality affects how weperceive identical evidence. But that viewshifts with time, and thus, evidence thatmight at one point seem meaningless cancome to hold a great deal of meaning.Think of how many ideas seemedoutlandish when first put forward, seemed

so impossible that they couldn’t be true:the earth being round; the earth goingaround the sun; the universe being madeup almost entirely of something that wecan’t see, dark matter and energy. Anddon’t forget that magical things did keephappening all around as Conan Doylecame of age: the invention of the X-ray (orthe Röntgen ray, as it was called), thediscovery of the germ, the microbe,radiation—all things that went frominvisible and thus nonexistent to visibleand apparent. Unseen things that no onehad suspected were there were, in fact,very there indeed.

In that context, is it so crazy that ArthurConan Doyle became a spiritualist? Whenhe officially embraced Spiritualism in1918, he was hardly alone in his belief—

or knowledge, as he would have it.Spiritualism itself, while nevermainstream, had prominent supporters onboth sides of the ocean. William James,for one, felt that it was essential for thenew discipline of psychology to test thepossibilities of psychical research,writing: “Hardly, as yet, has the surface ofthe facts called ‘psychic’ begun to bescratched for scientific purposes. It isthrough following these facts, I ampersuaded, that the greatest scientificconquests of the coming generation willbe achieved.” The psychic was the future,he thought, of the knowledge of thecentury. It was the way forward, not justfor psychology, but for all of scientificconquest.

This from the man considered the father

of modern psychology. Not to mentionsome of the other names who filled out theranks of the psychical community.Physiologist and comparative anatomistWilliam B. Carpenter, whose workincluded influential writings oncomparative neurology; the renownedastronomer and mathematician SimonNewcomb; naturalist Alfred RusselWallace, who proposed the theory ofevolution simultaneously with CharlesDarwin; chemist and physicist WilliamCrookes, discoverer of new elements andnew methods for studying them; physicistOliver Lodge, closely involved in thedevelopment of the wireless telegraph;psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner,founder of one of the most preciselyscientific areas of psychological research,

psychophysics; physiologist CharlesRichet, awarded the Nobel Prize for hiswork on anaphylaxis; and the list goes on.

And have we come that much furthertoday? In the United States, as of 2004, 78percent of people believed in angels. Asfor the spiritual realm as such, considerthis. In 2011, Daryl Bem, one of the grandsires of modern psychology—who madehis name with a theory that contends thatwe perceive our own mental andemotional states much as we do others’,by looking at physical signs—published apaper in the Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology, one of the mostrespected and highly impactfulpublications in the discipline. The topic:proof of the existence of extrasensoryperception, or ESP. Human beings, he

contends, can see the future.In one study, for instance, Cornell

University students saw two curtains on ascreen. They had to say which curtain hida picture. After they chose, the curtain wasopened, and the researcher would showthem the picture’s location.

What’s the point, you might (reasonablyenough) wonder, to show a location afteryou’ve already made your choice? Bemargues that if we are able to see even atiny bit into the future, we will be able toretroactively use that information to makebetter-than-average guesses in the present.

It gets even better. There were twotypes of photographs: neutral ones, andones showing erotic scenes. In Bem’sestimation, there was a chance that we’dbe better at seeing the future if it was

worth seeing (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).If he was correct, we’d be better than thefifty-fifty predicted by chance at guessingthe image. Lo and behold, rates for theerotic images hovered around 53 percent.ESP is real. Everyone, rejoice. Or, in themore measured words of psychologistJonathan Schooler (one of the reviewersof the article), “I truly believe that thiskind of finding from a well-respected,careful researcher deserves publicairing.” It’s harder than we thought toleave the land of fairies and Spiritualismbehind. It’s all the more difficult to dowhen it deals with something we want tobelieve.

Bem’s work has launched the exactsame cries of “crisis of the discipline”that arose with William James’s public

embrace of Spiritualism over one hundredyears ago. In fact, it is called out as suchin the very same issue that carries thestudy—a rare instance of article andrebuttal appearing simultaneously. MightJPSP have seen the future and tried to staya step ahead of the controversial decisionto publish at all?

Not much has changed. Except now,instead of psychical research andSpiritualism it’s called psi,parapsychology, and ESP. (On the flipside, how many people refuse to believeStanley Milgram’s results on obedience,which showed that the vast majority ofpeople will deliver lethal levels of shockwhen ordered to do so, with fullknowledge of what they are doing, evenwhen 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 thatcontext is deeply informed by the worldwe live in. It can thus serve as a blinder—or blind spot—of sorts, much as it did forConan Doyle and his fairies. Withmindfulness, however, we can strive tofind a balance between fact-checking ourintuitions and remaining open-minded. Wecan then make our best judgments, with theinformation we have and no more, butwith, as well, the understanding that timemay change the shape and color of thatinformation.

Can we really blame, then, ArthurConan Doyle’s devotion to his fairystories? Against the backdrop of Victorian

England, where fairies populated thepages of nigh every children’s book (notleast of all Peter Pan, by Sir Arthur’sown good friend J. M. Barrie), whereeven the physicists and psychologists, thechemists and the astronomers werewilling to grant that there might besomething to it, was he so far off? Afterall, he was only human, just like us.

We will never know it all. The most wecan do is remember Holmes’s preceptsand apply them faithfully. And toremember that open-mindedness is one ofthem—hence the maxim (or axiom, as hecalls it on this particular occasion in “TheAdventure of the Bruce-PartingtonPlans”), “When all other contingenciesfail, whatever remains, howeverimprobable, must be the truth.”

But how do we do this in practice?How do we go beyond theoreticallyunderstanding this need for balance andopen-mindedness and applying itpractically, in the moment, in situationswhere we might not have as much time tocontemplate our judgments as we do in theleisure of our reading?

It all goes back to the very beginning:the habitual mindset that we cultivate, thestructure that we try to maintain for ourbrain attic no matter what.

The Mindset of a Hunter

One of the images of Sherlock Holmes thatrecurs most often in the stories is that ofHolmes the hunter, the ever-ready

predator looking to capture his next preyeven when he appears to be loungingcalmly in the shade, the vigilant marksmanalert to the slightest activity even as hebalances his rifle across his knees duringa midafternoon break.

Consider Watson’s description of hiscompanion in “The Adventure of theDevil’s Foot.”

One realized the red-hot energy whichunderlay Holmes’s phlegmatic exteriorwhen one saw the sudden change whichcame over him from the moment that heentered the fatal apartment. In an instant hewas tense and alert, his eyes shining, hisface set, his limbs quivering with eageractivity . . . for all the world like adashing foxhound drawing a cover.

It’s the perfect image, really. No energywasted needlessly, but an ever-alert,habitual state of attention that makes youready to act at a moment’s notice, be it asa hunter who has glimpsed a lion, a lionwho has glimpsed a gazelle, or a foxhoundwho has sensed the fox near and whosebody has become newly alerted to thepursuit. In the symbol of the hunter, all ofthe qualities of thought that SherlockHolmes epitomizes merge together into asingle, elegant shape. And in cultivatingthat mindset, in all of its precepts, wecome one step closer to being able to doin practice what we understand in theory.The mind of a hunter encapsulates theelements of Holmesian thought that mightotherwise get away from us, and learningto use that mindset regularly can remind us

of principles that we might otherwise letslide.

Ever-Ready Attention

Being a hunter doesn’t mean alwayshunting. It means always being ready to goon alert, when the circumstances warrantit, but not squandering your energyneedlessly when they don’t. Being attunedto the signs that need attending to, butknowing which ones to ignore. As anygood hunter knows, you need to gather upyour resources for the moments thatmatter.

Holmes’s lethargy—that “phlegmaticexterior” that in others might signalmelancholy or depression or pure laziness

—is calculated. There is nothing lethargicabout it. In those deceptive moments ofinaction, his energy is pent up in his mindattic, circulating around, peering into thecorners, gathering its strength in order tosnap into focus the moment it is called onto do so. At times, the detective evenrefuses to eat because he doesn’t want todraw blood from his thoughts. “Thefaculties become refined when you starvethem,” Holmes tells Watson in “TheAdventure of the Mazarin Stone,” whenWatson urges him to consume at leastsome food. “Why, surely, as a doctor, mydear Watson, you must admit that whatyour digestion gains in the way of bloodsupply is so much lost to the brain. I am abrain, Watson. The rest of me is a mereappendix. 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 outif not managed properly and replenishedregularly. And so, we must employ ourattentional resources mindfully—andselectively. Be ready to pounce when thattiger does make an appearance, to tense upwhen the scent of the fox carries on thebreeze, the same breeze that to a lessattentive nose than yours signifies nothingbut spring and fresh flowers. Know whento engage, when to withdraw—and whensomething 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 youwould a tiger, approach the shooting of apartridge as you would the stalking of adeer. Unless you’re content with huntingthe same type of prey over and over, youmust learn to be appropriate to thecircumstances, to modify your weapon,your approach, your very demeanoraccording to the dictates of the specificsituation.

Just as a hunter’s endgame is always thesame—kill the prey—Holmes’s goal isalways to obtain information that will leadhim to the suspect. And yet, consider howHolmes’s approach differs depending onthe 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’sability to get information that, onlymoments earlier, was not forthcoming.Holmes explains how he was able to doit: “When you see a man with whiskers ofthat cut and the ‘Pink ’un’ protruding outof his pocket, you can always draw him bya bet,” said he. “I daresay that if I had put£100 down in front of him, that man wouldnot have given me such completeinformation as was drawn from him by theidea that he was doing me on a wager.”

Contrast this tactic with that employedi n The Sign of Four, when Holmes setsout to learn the particulars of the steamlaunch Aurora. “The main thing withpeople of that sort,” he tells Watson, “is

never to let them think that theirinformation can be of the slightestimportance to you. If you do they willinstantly shut up like an oyster. If youlisten to them under protest, as it were,you are very likely to get what you want.”

You don’t bribe someone who thinkshimself above it. But you do approach himwith a bet if you see the signs of bettingabout his person. You don’t hang on toevery word with someone who doesn’twant to be giving information to justanybody. But you do let them prattle alongand pretend to indulge them if you see anytendency to gossip. Every person isdifferent, every situation requires anapproach of its own. It’s the recklesshunter indeed who goes to hunt the tigerwith the same gun he reserves for the

pheasant shoot. There is no such thing asone size fits all. Once you have the tools,once you’ve mastered them, you can wieldthem with greater authority and not use ahammer where a gentle tap would do.There’s a time for straightforwardmethods, and a time for more unorthodoxones. The hunter knows which is whichand when to use them.

Adaptability

A hunter will adapt when hiscircumstances change in an unpredictablefashion. What if you should be out huntingducks and just so happen to spot a deer inthe nearby thicket? Some may say, Nothanks, but many would adapt to the

challenge, using the opportunity to get at amore valuable, so to speak, prey.

Consider “The Adventure of the AbbeyGrange,” when Holmes decides at the lastmoment not to give up the suspect toScotland Yard. “No I couldn’t do it,Watson,” he says to the doctor.

“Once that warrant was made out, nothingon earth would save him. Once or twice inmy career I feel that I have done more realharm by my discovery of the criminal thanever he had done by his crime. I havelearned caution now, and I had rather playtricks with the law of England than withmy own conscience. Let us know a littlemore before we act.”

You don’t mindlessly follow the same

preplanned set of actions that you haddetermined early on. Circumstanceschange, and with them so does theapproach. You have to think before youleap to act, or to judge someone, as thecase may be. Everyone makes mistakes,but some may not be mistakes as such,when taken in context of the time and thesituation. (After all, we wouldn’t make achoice if we didn’t think it the right one atthe time.) And if you do decide to keep tothe same path, despite the changes, at leastyou will choose the so-called nonoptimalroute mindfully, and with full knowledgeof why you’re doing it. And you will learnto always “know a little more” before youact. As William James puts it, “We all,scientists and non-scientists, live on someinclined plane of credulity. The plane tips

one way in one man, another way inanother; and may he whose plane tips inno way be the first to cast a stone!”

Acknowledging Limitations

The hunter knows his weak spots. If he hasa blind side, he asks someone to cover it;or he makes sure it is not exposed, if noone is available. If he tends to overshoot,he knows that, too. Whatever thehandicap, he must take it into account if heis to emerge successful from the hunt.

In “The Disappearance of Lady FrancesCarfax,” Holmes realizes where theeponymous lady has disappeared to onlywhen it is almost too late to save her.“Should you care to add the case to your

annals, my dear Watson,” he says, oncethey return home, having beaten the clockby mere minutes, “it can only be as anexample of that temporary eclipse towhich even the best-balanced mind maybe exposed. Such slips are common to allmortals, and the greatest is he who canrecognize and repair them. To thismodified credit I may, perhaps, makesome claim.”

The hunter must err before he realizeswhere his weakness may lie. Thedifference between the successful hunterand the unsuccessful one isn’t a lack oferror. It is the recognition of error, and theability to learn from it and to prevent itsoccurrence in the future. We need torecognize our limitations in order toovercome them, to know that we are

fallible, and to recognize the fallibilitythat we see so easily in others in our ownthoughts and actions. If we don’t, we’ll becondemned to always believe in fairies—or to never believe in them, even shouldsigns point to the need for a more open-minded consideration.

Cultivating Quiet

A hunter knows when to quiet his mind. Ifhe allows himself to always take ineverything that is there for the taking, hissenses will become overwhelmed. Theywill lose their sharpness. They will losetheir ability to focus on the important signsand to filter out the less so. For that kindof vigilance, moments of solitude are

essential.Watson makes the point succinctly in

The Hound of the Baskervilles, whenHolmes asks to be left alone. His frienddoesn’t complain. “I knew that seclusionand solitude were very necessary for myfriend in those hours of intense mentalconcentration during which he weighedevery particle of evidence, constructedalternative theories, balanced one againstthe other, and made up his mind as towhich points were essential and whichimmaterial,” he writes.

The world is a distracting place. It willnever quiet down for you, nor will it leaveyou alone of its own accord. The huntermust seek out his own seclusion andsolitude, his own quietness of mind, hisown space in which to think through his

tactics, his approaches, his past actions,and his future plans. Without thatoccasional silence, there can be little hopeof a successful hunt.

Constant Vigilance

And most of all, a hunter never lets downhis guard, not even when he thinks that notiger in its right mind could possibly beout and about in the heat of the afternoonsun. Who knows, it might just be the daythat the first-ever black tiger is spotted,and that tiger may have different huntinghabits than you are used to (isn’t itscamouflage different? wouldn’t it makesense that it would approach in analtogether different manner?). As Holmes

warns over and over, it is the leastremarkable crime that is often the mostdifficult. Nothing breeds complacency likeroutine and the semblance of normality.Nothing kills vigilance so much as thecommonplace. Nothing kills the successfulhunter like a complacency bred of thatvery success, the polar opposite of whatenabled that success to begin with.

Don’t be the hunter who missed hisprey because he thought he’d gotten it alldown so well that he succumbed tomindless routine and action. Remain evermindful of how you apply the rules. Neverstop thinking. It’s like the moment in TheValley of Fear when Watson says, “I aminclined to think—” and Holmes cuts himoff in style: “I should do so.”

Could there be a more appropriate imageto that awareness of mind that is thepinnacle of the Holmesian approach tothought? A brain, first and foremost, andin it, the awareness of a hunter. The hunterwho is never just inclined to think, butwho does so, always. For that mindfulnessdoesn’t begin or end with the start of eachhunt, the beginning of each new venture orthought process. It is a constant state, awell-rehearsed presence of mind even ashe settles down for the night and stretcheshis legs in front of the fire.

Learning to think like a hunter will go along way toward making sure that wedon’t blind ourselves to the obviousinconsistencies of fairy land when theystare us in the face. We shouldn’t rulethem out, but we should be wary—and

know that even if we really want to be theones to discover the first real proof oftheir existence, that proof may still be inthe future, or nowhere at all; in eithercase, the evidence should be treated justas severely. And we should apply thatsame attitude to others and their beliefs.

The way you see yourself matters. Viewyourself as a hunter in your own life, andyou may find yourself becoming more ableto hunt properly, in a matter of speaking.Whether you choose to consider thepossibility of fairies’ existence or not, you—the hunter you—will have done itthinkingly. You won’t have beenunprepared.

In 1983, the tale of the Cottingley Fairiescame to as near an end as it ever would.

More than sixty years after thephotographs first surfaced, seventy-six-year-old Frances Griffiths made aconfession: the photographs were fake. Orat least four of them were. The fairies hadbeen her older cousin’s illustrations,secured by hat pins to the scenery. And theevidence of a belly button that ConanDoyle had thought he’d seen on the goblinin the original print was actually nothingmore than that—a hat pin. The finalphotograph, however, was genuine. Or sosaid Frances.

Two weeks later, Elsie Hill (néeWright) herself came forward. It’s true,she said, after having held her silencesince the original incident. She had drawnthe fairies in sepia on Windsor and Bristolboard, coloring them in with watercolors

while her parents were out of the house.She had then fastened them to the groundwith hat pins. The figures themselves hadapparently been traced from the 1915Princess Mary Gift Book. And that lastpicture, that Frances had maintained wasreal? Frances wasn’t even there, Elsietold The Times. “I am very proud of thatone—it was all done with my owncontraption and I had to wait for theweather to be right to take it,” she said. “Iwon’t reveal the secret of that one until thevery 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 arethose who maintain that the fifthphotograph was genuine. The CottingleyFairies just refuse to die.

But maybe, just maybe, Conan Doylethe hunter would have escaped the samefate. Had he taken himself (and the girls)just a bit more critically, pried just a bitharder, perhaps he could have learnedfrom his mistakes, as did his creationwhen it came to his own vices. ArthurConan Doyle may have been a Spiritualist,but his spirituality failed to take the onepage of Sherlock Holmes that wasnonnegotiable for the taking: mindfulness.

W. H. Auden writes of Holmes,

His attitude towards people and histechnique of observation and deductionare those of the chemist or physicist. If hechooses human beings rather thaninanimate matter as his material, it isbecause investigating the inanimate is

unheroically easy since it cannot tell lies,which human beings can and do, so that indealing with them, observation must betwice as sharp and logic twice asrigorous.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle valued fewthings as highly as he did heroism. And yethe failed to realize that the animals he washunting were just as human as those that hecreated. He was not twice as sharp, twiceas logical, twice as rigorous. But perhapshe could have been, with a little help fromthe mindset that he himself created for hisown detective, someone who wouldsurely have never forgotten that humanbeings can and do tell lies, that everyonecan be mistaken and everyone is fallible,ourselves included.

Conan Doyle could not know wherescience was headed. He did the best hecould, and did so within the parametersthat he had set for himself, and which, Imight add, remain to this day. For, unlikeWilliam James’s confident prediction, ourknowledge about the unseen forces thatguide our lives, while light-years furtherthan Sir Arthur could ever imagine when itcomes to explaining natural phenomena, isstill stuck circa 1900 when it comes toexplaining psychical ones.

But the point is greater than eitherSherlock Holmes or Arthur Conan Doyle—or, for that matter, Daryl Bem orWilliam James. We are all limited by ourknowledge and context. And we’d do wellto remember it. Just because we can’tfathom something doesn’t make it not so.

And just because we screw up for lack ofknowledge doesn’t mean we’ve done soirredeemably—or that we can’t keeplearning. When it comes to the mind, wecan all be hunters.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“And yet the motives of women are soinscrutable” from The Return ofSherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of theSecond Stain,” p. 1189.

“If the devil did decide to have a handin the affairs of men—.” “I knew thatseclusion and solitude were verynecessary for my friend . . .” from TheHound of the Baskervilles, chapter 3: TheProblem, p. 22.

“One realized the red-hot energy that

underlay Holmes’s phlegmatic exterior.”from His Last Bow, “The Adventure of theDevil’s Foot,” p. 1392.

“When you see a man with whiskers ofthat cut and the ‘pink ‘un’ protrudingout of his pocket, you can always drawhim by a bet.” from The Adventures ofSherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of theBlue Carbuncle,” p. 158.

“Once that warrant was made out,nothing on earth could save him.” fromThe Return of Sherlock Holmes, “TheAdventure of the Abbey Grange,” p. 1158.

“Should you care to add the case toyour annals, my dear Watson, it can onlybe as an example of that temporaryeclipse to which even the best-balancedmind may be exposed.” from His LastBow, “The Disappearance of Lady

Frances Carfax,” p. 342.“I am inclined to think—.” from The

Valley of Fear , Part One, chapter 1: TheWarning, p. 5.

Postlude

Walter Mischel was nine years old whenhe started kindergarten. It wasn’t that hisparents had been negligent in hisschooling. It was just that the boy couldn’tspeak English. It was 1940 and theMischels had just arrived in Brooklyn.They’d been one of the few Jewishfamilies lucky enough to escape Vienna inthe wake of the Nazi takeover in the springof 1938. The reason had as much to dowith luck as with foresight: they haddiscovered a certificate of U.S.citizenship from a long-since-deadmaternal grandfather. Apparently, he hadobtained it while working in New York

City around 1900, before returning oncemore to Europe.

But ask Dr. Mischel to recall hisearliest memories, and chances are thatthe first thing he will speak of is not howthe Hitler Youths stepped on his newshoes on the sidewalks of Vienna. Norwill it be of how his father and otherJewish men were dragged from theirapartments and forced to march in thestreets in their pajamas while holdingbranches in their hands, in a makeshift“parade” staged by the Nazis in parody ofthe Jewish tradition of welcoming spring.(His father had polio and couldn’t walkwithout his cane. And so, the youngMischel had to watch as he jerked fromside to side in the procession.) Nor will itbe of the trip from Vienna, the time spent

in London in an uncle’s spare room, thejourney to the United States at the outbreakof war.

Instead, it will be of the earliest days inthat kindergarten classroom, when littleWalter, speaking hardly a word ofEnglish, was given an IQ test. It shouldhardly come as a surprise that he did notfare well. He was in an alien culture andtaking a test in an alien language. And yethis teacher was surprised. Or so she toldhim. She also told him how disappointedshe was. Weren’t foreigners supposed tobe smart? She’d expected more from him.

Carol Dweck was on the opposite sideof the story. When she was in sixth grade—also, incidentally, in Brooklyn—she,too, was given an intelligence test, alongwith the rest of her class. The teacher then

proceeded to do something that todaywould raise many eyebrows but back thenwas hardly uncommon: she arranged thestudents in order of score. The “smart”students were seated closest to theteachers. And the less fortunate, fartherand farther away. The order wasimmutable, and those students who hadfared less than well weren’t even allowedto perform such basic classroom duties aswashing the blackboard or carrying theflag to the school assembly. They were tobe reminded constantly that their IQ wassimply not up to par.

Dweck herself was one of the luckyones. Her seat: number one. She hadscored highest of all her classmates. Andyet, something wasn’t quite right. Sheknew that all it would take was another

test to make her less smart. And could itbe that it was so simple as all that—ascore, and then your intelligence wasmarked for good?

Years later, Walter Mischel and CarolDweck both found themselves on thefaculty of Columbia University. (As of thiswriting, Mischel is still there and Dweckhas moved to Stanford.) Both had becomekey players in social and personalitypsychology research (though Mischel thesixteen-years-senior one), and both creditthat early test to their subsequent careertrajectories, their desire to conductresearch into such supposedly fixed thingsas personality traits and intelligence,things that could be measured with asimple test and, in that measurement,determine your future.

It was easy enough to see how Dweckhad gotten to that pinnacle of academicachievement. She was, after all, thesmartest. But what of Mischel? Howcould someone whose IQ would haveplaced him squarely in the back ofDweck’s classroom have gone on tobecome one of the leading figures inpsychology of the twentieth century, he ofthe famous marshmallow studies of self-control and of an entirely new approach tolooking at personality and itsmeasurement? Something wasn’t quiteright, and the fault certainly wasn’t withMischel’s intelligence or his stratosphericcareer trajectory.

Sherlock Holmes is a hunter. He knowsthat there is nothing too difficult for his

mastery—in fact, the more difficultsomething is, the better. And in thatattitude may lie a large portion of hissuccess, and a large part of Watson’sfailure to follow in his footsteps.Remember that scene from “TheAdventure of the Priory School,” whereWatson all but gives up hope at figuringout what happened to the missing studentand 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 arepoints that have escaped yourMachiavellian intellect.” But Watson’s

attitude is surely not helping. “Let uscontinue the problem in the light of purereason,” he directs him, and goes on,naturally, to decipher the note.

In a way, Watson has beaten himself inboth cases before he has even started. Bydeclaring himself at his wit’s end, bylabeling something as beyond humanpower, he has closed his mind to thepossibility of success. And that mindset,as it turns out, is precisely what mattersmost—and it’s a thing far more intangibleand unmeasurable than a number on a test.

For many years, Carol Dweck has beenresearching exactly what it is thatseparates Holmes’s “tut, tut” fromWatson’s “wit’s end,” Walter Mischel’ssuccess from his supposed IQ. Herresearch has been guided by two main

assumptions: IQ cannot be the only way tomeasure intelligence, and there might bemore to that very concept of intelligencethan meets the eye.

According to Dweck, there are twomain theories of intelligence: incrementaland entity. If you are an incrementaltheorist, you believe that intelligence isfluid. If you work harder, learn more,apply yourself better, you will becomesmarter. In other words, you dismiss thenotion that something might possibly bebeyond human power to penetrate. Youthink that Walter Mischel’s original IQscore is not only something that should notbe a cause for disappointment but that ithas little bearing on his actual ability andlater performance.

If, on the other hand, you are an entity

theorist, you believe that intelligence isfixed. Try as you might, you will remainas smart (or not) as you were before. It’sjust your original luck. This was theposition of Dweck’s sixth-grade teacher—and of Mischel’s kindergarten one. Itmeans that once in the back, you’re stuckin the back. And there’s nothing you cando about it. Sorry, buddy, luck of thedraw.

In the course of her research, Dweckhas repeatedly found an interesting thing:how someone performs, especially inreacting to failure, largely depends onwhich of the two beliefs he espouses. Anincremental theorist sees failure as alearning opportunity; an entity theorist, asa frustrating personal shortcoming thatcannot be remedied. As a result, while the

former may take something away from theexperience to apply to future situations,the latter is more likely to write it offentirely. So basically, how we think of theworld and of ourselves can actuallychange how we learn and what we know.

In a recent study, a group ofpsychologists decided to see if thisdifferential reaction is simply behavioral,or if it actually goes deeper, to the level ofbrain performance. The researchersmeasured response-locked event-relatedpotentials (ERPs)—electric neural signalsthat result from either an internal orexternal event—in the brains of collegestudents as they took part in a simpleflanker task. The students were shown astring of five letters and asked to quicklyidentify the middle letter. The letters

could be congruent—for instance,MMMMM—or they might be incongruent—for example, MMNMM.

While performance accuracy wasgenerally high, around 91 percent, thespecific task parameters were hard enoughthat everyone made some mistakes. Butwhere individuals differed was in howboth they—and, crucially, their brains—responded to the mistakes. Those who hadan incremental mindset (i.e., believed thatintelligence was fluid) performed betterfollowing error trials than those who hadan entity mindset (i.e., believedintelligence was fixed). Moreover, as thatincremental mindset increased, positivityERPs on error trials as opposed to correcttrials increased as well. And the larger theerror positivity amplitude on error trials,

the more accurate the post-errorperformance.

So what exactly does that mean? Fromthe data, it seems that a growth mindset,whereby you believe that intelligence canimprove, lends itself to a more adaptiveresponse to mistakes—not justbehaviorally but neurally. The moresomeone believes in improvement, thelarger the amplitude of a brain signal thatreflects a conscious allocation of attentionto errors. And the larger that neural signal,the better the subsequent performance.That mediation suggests that individualswith an incremental theory of intelligencemay actually have better self-monitoringand control systems on a very basic neurallevel: their brains are better at monitoringtheir own, self-generated errors and at

adjusting their behavior accordingly. It’s astory of improved online error awareness—of noticing mistakes as they happen, andcorrecting for them immediately.

The way our brains act is infinitelysensitive to the way we, their owners,think. And it’s not just about learning.Even something as theoretical as belief infree will can change how our brainsrespond (if we don’t believe in it, ourbrains actually become more lethargic intheir preparation). From broad theories tospecific mechanisms, we have an uncannyability to influence how our minds work,and how we perform, act, and interact as aresult. If we think of ourselves as able tolearn, learn we will. And if we think weare doomed to fail, we doom ourselves todo precisely that, not just behaviorally but

at the most fundamental level of theneuron.

But mindset isn’t predetermined, just asintelligence isn’t a monolithic thing that ispreset from birth. We can learn, we canimprove, we can change our habitualapproach to the world. Take the exampleof stereotype threat, an instance whereothers’ perception of us—or what wethink that perception is—influences howwe in turn act, and does so on the samesubconscious level as all primes. Being atoken member of a group (for example, asingle woman among men) can increaseself-consciousness and negatively impactperformance. Having to write down yourethnicity or gender before taking a test hasa negative impact on math scores forfemales and overall scores for minorities.

(On the GREs, for instance, having racemade salient lowers black students’performance.) Asian women performbetter on a math test when their Asianidentity is made salient, and worse whentheir female identity is. White menperform worse on athletic tasks when theythink performance is based on naturalability, and black men when they are toldit is based on athletic intelligence. It’scalled stereotype threat.

But a simple intervention can help.Women who are given examples offemales successful in scientific andtechnical fields don’t experience thenegative performance effects on mathtests. College students exposed toDweck’s theories of intelligence—specifically, the incremental theory—have

higher grades and identify more with theacademic process at the end of thesemester. In one study, minority studentswho wrote about the personal significanceof a self-defining value (such as familyrelationships or musical interests) three tofive times during the school year had aGPA that was 0.24 grade points higherover the course of two years than thosewho wrote about neutral topics—and low-achieving African Americans showedimprovements of 0.41 points on average.Moreover, the rate of remediationdropped from 18 percent to 5 percent.

What is the mindset you typically havewhen it comes to yourself? If you don’trealize you have it, you can’t do anythingto combat the influences that come with it

when they are working against you, ashappens with negative stereotypes thathinder performance, and you can’t tap intothe benefits when they are working for you(as can happen if you activate positivelyassociated stereotypes). What we believeis, in large part, how we are.

It is an entity world that Watson seeswhen he declares himself beaten–blackand white, you know it or you don’t, and ifyou come up against something that seemstoo difficult, well, you may as well noteven try lest you embarrass yourself in theprocess. As for Holmes, everything isincremental. You can’t know if youhaven’t tried. And each challenge is anopportunity to learn something new, toexpand your mind, to improve yourabilities and add more tools to your attic

for future use. Where Watson’s attic isstatic, Holmes’s is dynamic.

Our brains never stop growing newconnections and pruning unused ones. Andthey never stop growing stronger in thoseareas where we strengthen them, like thatmuscle we encountered in the early pagesof the book, that keeps strengthening withuse (but atrophies with disuse), that can betrained to perform feats of strength we’dnever before thought possible.

How can you doubt the brain’stransformational ability when it comes tosomething like thinking when it is capableof producing talent of all guises in peoplewho had never before thought they had itin them? Take the case of the artist Ofey.When Ofey first started to paint, he was amiddle-aged physicist who hadn’t drawn a

day in his life. He wasn’t sure he’d everlearn how. But learn he did, going on tohave his own one-man show and to sellhis art to collectors all over the world.

Ofey, of course, is not your typicalcase. He wasn’t just any physicist. Hehappens to have been the Nobel Prize–winning Richard Feynman, a man ofuncommon genius in nearly all of hispursuits. Feynman had created Ofey as apseudonym to ensure that his art wasvalued on its own terms and not on thoseof his laurels elsewhere. And yet there aremultiple other cases. While Feynman maybe unique in his contributions to physics,he certainly is not in representing thebrain’s ability to change—and to changein profound ways—late in life.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses—better

known as Grandma Moses—did not beginto paint until she was seventy-five. Shewent on to be compared to Pieter Bruegelin her artistic talent. In 2006, her paintingSugaring Off sold for $1.2 million.

Václav Havel was a playwright andwriter—until he became the center of theCzech opposition movement and then thefirst post-Communist president ofCzechoslovakia at the age of fifty-three.

Richard Adams did not publishWatership Down until he was fifty-two.He’d never even thought of himself as awriter. The book that was to sell over fiftymillion copies (and counting) was bornout of a story that he told to his daughters.

Harlan David Sanders—better knownas Colonel Sanders—didn’t start hisKentucky Fried Chicken company until the

age of sixty-five, but he went on tobecome one of the most successfulbusinessmen of his generation.

The Swedish shooter Oscar Swahncompeted in his first Olympic games in1908, when he was sixty years old. Hewon two gold and one bronze medals, andwhen he turned seventy-two, he becamethe oldest Olympian ever and the oldestmedalist in history after his bronze-winning performance at the 1920 games.The list is long, the examples varied, theaccomplishments all over the map.

And yes, there are the Holmeses whohave the gift of clear thought from earlyon, who don’t have to change or strike outin a new direction after years of badhabits. But never forget that even Holmeshad to train himself, that even he was not

born thinking like Sherlock Holmes.Nothing just happens out of the blue. Wehave to work for it. But with properattention, it happens. It is a remarkablething, the human brain.

As it turns out, Holmes’s insights canapply to most anything. It’s all about theattitude, the mindset, the habits of thinking,the enduring approach to the world thatyou develop. The specific applicationitself is far less important.

If you get only one thing out of this book, itshould be this: the most powerful mind isthe quiet mind. It is the mind that ispresent, reflective, mindful of its thoughtsand its state. It doesn’t often multitask, andwhen it does, it does so with a purpose.

The message may be getting across. A

recent New York Times piece spoke of thenew practice of squatting while texting:remaining in parked cars in order toengage in texting, emailing, Twittering, orwhatever it is you do instead of drivingoff to vacate parking spaces. The practicemay provoke parking rage for peoplelooking for spots, but it also shows anincreased awareness that doing anythingwhile driving may not be the best idea.“It’s time to kill multitasking” rang aheadline at the popular blog The 99%.

We can take the loudness of our worldas a limiting factor, an excuse as to whywe cannot have the same presence of mindthat Sherlock Holmes did—after all, hewasn’t constantly bombarded by media,by technology, by the ever more franticpace of modern life. He had it so much

easier. Or, we can take it as a challenge todo Holmes one better. To show that itdoesn’t really matter—we can still be justas mindful as he ever was, and then some,if only we make the effort. And the greaterthe effort, we might say, the greater thegain and the more stable the shift in habitsfrom the mindless toward the mindful.

We can even embrace technology as anunexpected boon that Holmes would havebeen all too happy to have. Consider this:a recent study demonstrated that whenpeople are primed to think aboutcomputers, or when they expect to haveaccess to information in the future, theyare far less able to recall the information.However—and this is key—they are farbetter able to remember where (and how)to find the information at a later point.

In the digital age, our mind attics are nolonger subject to the same constraints aswere Holmes’s and Watson’s. We’ve ineffect expanded our storage space with avirtual ability that would have beenunimaginable in Conan Doyle’s day. Andthat addition presents an intriguingopportunity. We can store “clutter” thatmight be useful in the future and knowexactly how to access it should the needarise. If we’re not sure whether somethingdeserves a prime spot in the attic, we neednot throw it out. All we need to do isremember that we’ve stored it forpossible future use. But with theopportunity comes the need for caution.We might be tempted to store outside ourmind attics that which should rightly be inour mind attics, and the curatorial process

(what to keep, what to toss) becomesincreasingly difficult.

Holmes had his filing system. We haveGoogle. We have Wikipedia. We havebooks and articles and stories fromcenturies ago to the present day, all neatlyavailable for our consumption. We haveour own digital files.

But we can’t expect to consulteverything for every choice that we make.Nor can we expect to remembereverything that we are exposed to—andthe thing is, we shouldn’t want to. Weneed to learn instead the art of curatingour attics better than ever. If we do that,our limits have indeed been expanded inunprecedented ways. But if we allowourselves to get bogged down in themorass of information flow, if we store

the irrelevant instead of those items thatwould be best suited to the limited storagespace that we always carry with us, in ourheads, the digital age can be detrimental.

Our world is changing. We have moreresources than Holmes could have everimagined. The confines of our mind attichave shifted. They have expanded. Theyhave increased the sphere of the possible.We should strive to be cognizant of thatchange, and to take advantage of the shiftinstead of letting it take advantage of us. Itall comes back to that very basic notion ofattention, of presence, of mindfulness, ofthe mindset and the motivation thataccompany us throughout out lives.

We will never be perfect. But we canapproach our imperfections mindfully, andin so doing let them make us into more

capable thinkers in the long term.“Strange how the brain controls the

brain!” Holmes exclaims in “TheAdventure of the Dying Detective.” And italways will. But just maybe we can getbetter at understanding the process andlending it our input.

ENDNOTES

1. All page numbers for this andsubsequent “Further Reading” sectionstaken from editions specified at the end ofthe book.

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

3. Indeed, some of his deduction would, inlogic’s terms, be more properly calledinduction or abduction. All references todeduction or deductive reasoning use it inthe Holmesian sense, and not the formallogic sense.

4. All cases and Holmes’s life chronologyare taken from Leslie Klinger’s The NewAnnotated Sherlock Holmes (NY: W. W.Norton, 2004).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many extraordinary people havehelped to make this book possible that itwould take another chapter—at the veryleast; I’m not always known for myconciseness—to thank them all properly. Iam incredibly grateful to everyone whohas been there to guide and support methroughout it all: to my family andwonderful friends, I love you all andwouldn’t have even gotten started, letalone finished, with this book without you;and to all of the scientists, researchers,scholars, and Sherlock Holmesaficionados who have helped guide mealong 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 andfriend I could ever imagine, who has beenselfless in sharing his time and wisdomwith me for close to ten years (as if he hadnothing better to do). His books were thereason I first decided to study psychology—and his support is the reason I am stillhere. Richard Panek, who helpedshepherd the project from its inceptionthrough to its final stages, and whoseadvice and tireless assistance wereessential to getting it off the ground (andkeeping it there). Katherine Vaz, who hasbelieved in my writing from the verybeginning and has remained for manyyears a constant source of encouragementand inspiration. And Leslie Klinger,

whose early interest in my work on Mr.Holmes and unparalleled expertise on theworld of 221B Baker Street wereessential to the success of the journey.

My amazing agent, Seth Fishman,deserves constant praise; I’m lucky tohave him on my side. Thank you to the restof the team at the Gernert Company—anda special thanks to Rebecca Gardner andWill Roberts. My wonderful editors,Kevin Doughten and Wendy Wolf, havetaken the manuscript from nonexistent toready-for-the-world in under a year—something I never thought possible. I’mgrateful as well to the rest of the team atViking/Penguin, especially Yen Cheong,Patricia Nicolescu, Veronica Windholz,and Brittney Ross. Thank you to NickDavies for his insightful edits and to

everyone at Canongate for their belief inthe project.

This book began as a series of articlesi n Big Think and Scientific American. Ahuge thank you to Peter Hopkins, VictoriaBrown, and everyone at Big Think and toBora Zivkovic and everyone at ScientificAmerican for giving me the space andfreedom to explore these ideas as Iwanted to.

Far more people than I could list havebeen generous with their time, support,and encouragement throughout thisprocess, but there are a few in particular Iwould like to thank here: Walter Mischel,Elizabeth Greenspan, Lyndsay Faye, andall of the lovely ladies of ASH, everyoneat the Columbia University Department ofPsychology, Charlie Rose, Harvey

Mansfield, Jenny 8. Lee, Sandra Upson,Meg Wolitzer, Meredith Kaffel, AllisonLorentzen, Amelia Lester, Leslie Jamison,Shawn Otto, Scott Hueler, Michael Dirda,Michael Sims, Shara Zaval, and JoannaLevine.

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

FURTHER READING

The further reading sections at the end ofeach chapter reference page numbers fromthe following editions:

Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2009). TheAdventures of Sherlock Holmes. PenguinBooks: New York.

Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2001). TheHound of the Baskervilles. PenguinClassics: London.

Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2011). TheMemoirs of Sherlock Holmes. PenguinBooks: New York.

Conan Doyle, Arthur. (2001). The Signof 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 NewAnnotated Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S.Klinger. Norton: New York. Vol. II.

In addition, many articles and bookshelped inform my writing. For a full list ofsources, please visit my website,www.mariakonnikova.com. Below are afew highlighted readings for each chapter.They are not intended to list every studyused or every psychologist whose workhelped shaped the writing, but rather tohighlight some key books and researchersin each area.

Prelude

For those interested in a more detailedhistory of mindfulness and its impact, Iwould recommend Ellen Langer’s classicMindfulness. Langer has also publishedan update to her original work,Counterclockwise: Mindful Health andthe Power of Possibility.

For an integrated discussion of themind, its evolution, and its naturalabilities, there are few better sources thanSteven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and Howthe Mind Works.

Chapter One: The Scientific Method ofthe Mind

For the history of Sherlock Holmes andthe background of the Conan Doyle storiesand Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, I’vedrawn heavily on several sources: LeslieKlinger’s The New Annotated SherlockHolmes; Andrew Lycett’s The Man WhoCreated Sherlock Holmes; and JohnLellenerg, Daniel Stashower, and CharlesFoley’s Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life inLetters. While the latter two form acompendium of information on ConanDoyle’s life, the former is the single bestsource on the background for and variousinterpretations of the Holmes canon.

For a taste of early psychology, Irecommend William James’s classic text,The Principles of Psychology. For adiscussion of the scientific method and itshistory, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions. Much of thediscussion of motivation, learning, andexpertise draws on the research of AngelaDuckworth, Ellen Winner (author ofGifted Children: Myths and Realities),and K. Anders Ericsson (author of TheRoad to Excellence). The chapter alsoowes a debt to the work of Daniel Gilbert.

Chapter Two: The Brain Attic

One of the best existing summaries of theresearch on memory is Eric Kandel’s InSearch of Memory. Also excellent isDaniel Schacter’s The Seven Sins ofMemory.

John Bargh continues to be the leadingauthority on priming and its effects on

behavior. The chapter also drawsinspiration from the work of SolomonAsch and Alexander Todorov and the jointresearch of Norbert Schwarz and GeraldClore. A compilation of research on theIAT is available via the lab of MahzarinBanaji.

Chapter Three: Stocking the BrainAttic

The seminal work on the brain’s defaultnetwork, resting state, and intrinsic naturalactivity and attentional disposition wasconducted by Marcus Raichle. For adiscussion of attention, inattentionalblindness, and how our senses can lead usastray, I recommend Christopher Chabris

and Daniel Simon’s The InvisibleGorilla. For an in-depth look at thebrain’s inbuilt cognitive biases, DanielKahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.The correctional model of observation istaken from the work of Daniel Gilbert.

Chapter Four: Exploring the Brain Attic

For an overview of the nature ofcreativity, imagination, and insight, Irecommend the work of MihalyCsikszentmihalyi, including his booksCreativity: Flow and the Psychology ofDiscovery and Invention and Flow: ThePsychology of Optimal Experience. Thediscussion of distance and its role in thecreative process was influenced by the

work of Yaacov Trope and Ethan Kross.The chapter as a whole owes a debt to thewritings of Richard Feynman and AlbertEinstein.

Chapter Five: Navigating the BrainAttic

My understanding of the disconnectbetween objective reality and subjectiveexperience and interpretation wasprofoundly influenced by the work ofRichard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson,including their groundbreaking 1977paper, “Telling More Than We CanKnow.” An excellent summary of theirwork can be found in Wilson’s book,Strangers to Ourselves, and a new

perspective is offered by DavidEagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Livesof the Brain.

The work on split-brain patients waspioneered by Roger Sperry and MichaelGazzaniga. For more on its implications, Irecommend Gazzaniga’s Who’s inCharge?: Free Will and the Science ofthe Brain.

For a discussion of how biases canaffect our deduction, I point you oncemore to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking,Fast and Slow. Elizabeth Loftus andKatherine Ketcham’s Witness for theDefense is an excellent starting point forlearning more about the difficulty ofobjective perception and subsequentrecall and deduction.

Chapter Six: Maintaining the BrainAttic

For a discussion of learning in the brain, Ionce more refer you to Daniel Schacter’swork, including his book Searching forMemory. Charles Duhigg’s The Power ofHabit offers a detailed overview of habitformation, habit change, and why it is soeasy to get stuck in old ways. For more onthe emergence of overconfidence, Isuggest Joseph Hallinan’s Why We MakeMistakes and Carol Tavris’s MistakesWere Made (But Not by Me). Much of thework on proneness to overconfidence andillusions of control was pioneered byEllen Langer (see “Prelude”).

Chapter Seven: The Dynamic Attic

This chapter is an overview of the entirebook, and while a number of studies wentinto its writing, there is no specific furtherreading.

Chapter Eight: We’re Only Human

For more on Conan Doyle, Spiritualism,and the Cottingley Fairies, I refer youonce more to the sources on the author’slife listed in chapter one. For thoseinterested in the history of Spiritualism, Irecommend William James’s The Will toBelieve and Other Essays in PopularPhilosophy.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind

provides a discussion of the difficulty ofchallenging our own beliefs.

Postlude

Carol Dweck’s work on the importance ofmindset is summarized in her bookMindset. On a consideration of theimportance of motivation, see DanielPink’s Drive.

INDEX

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

activation spread, ref1, ref2active perception, compared with passive

perception, ref1Adams, Richard, ref1adaptability, ref1ADHD, ref1“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,”

ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,”

ref1, ref2“The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington

Plans,” ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,”

ref1, ref2, ref3“The Adventure of the Creeping Man,”

ref1“The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,”

ref1, ref2“The Adventure of the Dying Detective,”

ref1“The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,”

ref1“The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,”

ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6“The Adventure of the Priory School,”

ref1, ref2, ref3“The Adventure of the Red Circle,” ref1,

ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5“The Adventure of the Second Stain,” ref1“The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,”

ref1“The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” ref1,

ref2affect heuristic, ref1Anson, George, ref1associative activation, ref1, ref2, ref3,

ref4astronomy, and Sherlock Holmes, ref1Atari, ref1attention, paying, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,

ref5, ref6, ref7attentional blindness, ref1Auden, W. H., ref1availability heuristic, ref1

Bacon, Francis, ref1Barrie, J. M., ref1base rates, ref1, ref2Baumeister, Roy, ref1Bavelier, Daphné, ref1Bell, Joseph, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Bem, Daryl, ref1, ref2bias, implicit, ref1, ref2, ref3BlackBerry, ref1brainand aging process, ref1baseline, ref1cerebellum, ref1cingulate cortex, ref1, ref2, ref3corpus collosum, ref1frontal cortex, ref1hippocampus, ref1, ref2, ref3parietal cortex, ref1precuneus, ref1prefrontal cortex, ref1split, ref1, ref2, ref3tempero-parietal junction (TPJ), ref1temporal gyrus, ref1temporal lobes, ref1wandering, ref1, ref2

Watson’s compared with Holmes’, ref1brain atticcontents, ref1, ref2defined, ref1levels of storage, ref1and memory, ref1structure, ref1, ref2System Watson compared with SystemHolmes, ref1, ref2Watson’s compared with Holmes’s, ref1,ref2Brett, Jeremy, ref1

capital punishment, ref1Carpenter, William B., ref1“The Case of the Crooked Lip,” ref1cell phone information experiment, ref1cerebellum, ref1childhood, mindfulness in, ref1

cingulate cortex, ref1, ref2, ref3cocaine, ref1Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), ref1,

ref2common sense, systematized, ref1, ref2compound remote associates, ref1Conan Doyle, Arthurbecomes spiritualist, ref1creation of Sherlock Holmes character,ref1and fairy photos, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,ref5and Great Wyrley sheep murders, ref1,ref2, ref3and Joseph Bell, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5confi dence , ref1, ref2. See also

overconfidenceconfirmation bias, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4Copernican theory, ref1

corpus collosum, ref1, ref2correspondence bias, ref1, ref2, ref3Cottingley fairy photos, ref1, ref2, ref3,

ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7creativity, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4“The Crooked Man,” ref1, ref2, ref3Crookes, William, ref1Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, ref1Cumberbatch, Benedict, ref1

Dalio, Ray, ref1, ref2Darwin, Charles, ref1decision diaries, ref1declarative memory, ref1deduction, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5role of imagination, ref1, ref2in The Sign of Four, ref1, ref2in “Silver Blaze,” ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,ref5

in “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,”ref1in “The Crooked Man,” ref1, ref2walking stick example in The Hound ofthe Baskervilles, ref1default effect, ref1, ref2default mode network (DMN), ref1diary, writing, ref1digital age, ref1“The Disappearance of Lady Frances

Carfax,” ref1, ref2disguise, ref1, ref2Disney, Walt, ref1distance, psychological, ref1distancing mechanismsmeditation as, ref1through acquiring physical distance, ref1through change in activity, ref1, ref2distraction, ref1, ref2, ref3

Downey, Robert, Jr., ref1Doyle, Arthur Conan. See Conan Doyle,

Arthurdriving, learning, ref1, ref2, ref3Dumas, Alexander, ref1Duncker, Karl, ref1Dweck, Carol, ref1, ref2

Edalji, George, ref1, ref2, ref3Edison, Thomas, ref1educationand aging process, ref1Holmesian, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4Einstein, Albert, ref1, ref2emotionHolmes’ view, ref1and priming, ref1Empire State Building experiment, ref1engagement, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4. See also

motivationenvironment, ref1Ericsson, K. Anders, ref1, ref2, ref3event-related potentials (ERPs), ref1exceptions, Holmes’ view, ref1explicit memory, ref1eyewitness testimony, ref1

fairy photos, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5,ref6, ref7

Falk, Ruma, ref1Fechner, Gustav Theodor, ref1Feynman, Richard, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4filtering, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6,

ref7foreign language learning, ref1Fosbury, Dick, ref1Frederick, Shane, ref1frontal cortex, ref1

functional fixedness, ref1

Gardner, Edward, ref1Gazzaniga, Michael, ref1Gilbert, Daniel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4Gillette, William, ref1Gollwitzer, Peter, ref1Great Wyrley, Staffordshire, England,

ref1, ref2“The Greek Interpreter,” ref1Green, C. Shawn, ref1Griffiths, Frances, ref1, ref2, ref3

habit, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4Haggard, Sir H. Rider, ref1Haidt, Jonathan, ref1halo effect, ref1hard-easy effect, ref1Havel, Václav, ref1

Heisenberg uncertainty principle, ref1Hill, Elsie Wright. See Wright, Elsiehippocampus, ref1, ref2, ref3Hodson, Geoffrey, ref1Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., ref1Holmes, Sherlockin “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,”ref1, ref2, ref3in “The Adventure of the BlueCarbuncle,” ref1in “The Adventure of the Bruce-PartingtonPlans,” ref1, ref2, ref3in “The Adventure of the CopperBeeches,” ref1, ref2in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,”ref1in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,”ref1in “The Adventure of the Dying

Detective,” ref1in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,”ref1in “The Adventure of the NorwoodBuilder,” ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4in “The Adventure of the Priory School,”ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4in “The Adventure of the Red Circle,”ref1, ref2, ref3in “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,”ref1in “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,”ref1and astronomy, ref1and brain attic concept, ref1, ref2, ref3,ref4, ref5in “The Case of the Crooked Lip,” ref1and cocaine, ref1comparisons with Watson, ref1, ref2, ref3,

ref4, ref5as confident, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4in “The Crooked Man,” ref1, ref2describes how he knew Watson camefrom Afghanistan, ref1in “The Disappearance of Lady FrancesCarfax,” ref1errors and limitations, ref1, ref2, ref3,ref4first meets Watson, ref1, ref2in “The Greek Interpreter,” ref1in The Hound of the Baskervilles, ref1,ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9as hunter, ref1hypothetical plane spotting experiment,ref1in “The Lion’s Mane,” ref1, ref2, ref3in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” ref1and mindfulness, ref1, ref2

in “The Musgrove Ritual,” ref1need for Watson, ref1“phlegmatic exterior,” ref1, ref2in “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” ref1as psychologist, ref1in “The Red-Headed League,” ref1role of emotion in thinking, ref1in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” ref1in The Sign of Four, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,ref5, ref6in “Silver Blaze,” ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10in “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” ref1, ref2i n A Study in Scarlet, ref1, ref2, ref3,ref4, ref5thinking process in The Hound of theBaskervilles, ref1in The Valley of Fear, ref1, ref2viewed by others, ref1

as visionary, ref1well-known images, ref1in “The Yellow Face,” ref1, ref2, ref3,ref4, ref5The Hound of the Baskervilles, ref1, ref2,

ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9,ref10, ref11, ref12

hunter mindset, ref1

imagination, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4and visualization, ref1walking stick example in The Hound ofthe Baskervilles, ref1Implicit Association Test (IAT), ref1,

ref2, ref3implicit memory, ref1impressions, ref1, ref2improbability, ref1induction, ref1n

inertia, ref1inquisitiveness, ref1, ref2instincts, filtering, ref1intuition, ref1, ref2, ref3

James, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,ref5, ref6, ref7

Jerome, Jerome K., ref1Jobs, Steve, ref1, ref2juggling, ref1

Kahneman, Daniel, ref1, ref2Kassam, Karim, ref1Kodak, ref1, ref2, ref3Kross, Ethan, ref1Kruglanski, Arie, ref1Krull, Douglas, ref1

Ladenspelder, Hans, ref1

Langer, Ellen, ref1Lashley, Karl, ref1learning. See also educationand aging process, ref1walking stick example in The Hound ofthe Baskervilles, ref1Libby, Scooter, ref1lightbulb moments, ref1Lincoln, Abraham, ref1“The Lion’s Mane,” ref1, ref2, ref3location, as learned association, ref1Lodge, Oliver, ref1Loft us, Elizabeth, ref1long-term memory, declarative compared

with procedural, ref1Lucretius, ref1, ref2

Maier, Norman, ref1“The Man with the Twisted Lip,” ref1

meditation, ref1memoryand brain attic, ref1consolidation in, ref1, ref2encoding, ref1and motivation, ref1, ref2short-term compared with long-term, ref1,ref2Meredith, George, ref1mimic octopus, ref1mindtwo-system basis, ref1wandering, ref1, ref2Watson system compared with Holmessystem, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5mindfulness, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4history, ref1in moving to system Holmes-governedthinking, ref1

walking stick example in The Hound ofthe Baskervilles, ref1mindset, ref1, ref2, ref3Mischel, Walter, ref1, ref2misinformation effect, ref1Moses, Anna (Grandma), ref1motivation, ref1, ref2Motivation to Remember (MTR), ref1Mueller, Jennifer, ref1multitasking, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4“The Musgrove Ritual,” ref1

Neisser, Ulric, ref1Newcomb, Simon, ref1

objectivity, ref1, ref2observationwith a capital O, ref1compared with seeing, ref1

Holmes’ attention to detail, ref1speaking aloud, ref1as start of scientific method, ref1, ref2,ref3walking stick example in The Hound ofthe Baskervilles, ref1Ofey (artist), ref1omission neglect, ref1overconfidenceperils of, ref1spotting signs, ref1

parietal cortex, ref1passive perception, compared with active

perception, ref1Pavlov, Ivan, ref1perception, ref1person perception, ref1, ref2, ref3pink elephants, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), ref1,ref2

preconceived notions, ref1precuneus, ref1prefrontal cortex, ref1pre-impressions, ref1priming, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4probabilistic incoherence, ref1“The Problem of Thor Bridge,” ref1procedural memory, ref1psychological distance, ref1

quietness of mind, ref1

Rabinow, Jacob, ref1Raichle, Marcus, ref1Rathbone, Basil, ref1recency effect, ref1“The Red-Headed League,” ref1, ref2

representativeness heuristic, ref1reward prediction error (RPE), ref1Richet, Charles, ref1RIM (Blackberry), ref1

Sanders, Harlan David, ref1satisficing, ref1, ref2“A Scandal in Bohemia,” ref1Schooler, Jonathan, ref1Science of Deduction and Analysis, ref1scientific method, ref1selective listening, ref1selective looking, ref1selectivity, ref1, ref2Seligman, Martin, ref1Sherlock (BBC TV series), ref1, ref2showers, as distancing mechanism, ref1,

ref2“Silver Blaze,” ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5,

ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12Silverstein, Shel, ref1Simon, Herbert, ref1skepticism, ref1, ref2, ref3Slater, Oscar, ref1sloth, ref1Snelling, Harold, ref1Sotomayor, Javier, ref1Sperry, Roger, ref1Spinoza, Benedict de, ref1Spiritualism, ref1split-brain, ref1, ref2, ref3“The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” ref1, ref2,

ref3A Study in Scarlet, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,

ref5, ref6, ref7success, and confidence, ref1, ref2, ref3,

ref4Swahn, Oscar, ref1

System Holmes-governed thinking, ref1,ref2, ref3

System Watson-governed thinking, ref1,ref2, ref3

systematized common sense, ref1, ref2

Taleb, Nassim, ref1tempero-parietal junction (TPJ), ref1temporal gyrus, ref1temporal lobes, ref1The Sign of Four, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,

ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11three-pipe problems, ref1, ref2, ref3tiger experiment, ref1Trope, Yaacov, ref1Tversky, Amos, ref1221B Baker Street, steps, ref1

uncertainty, fear of, ref1

The Valley of Fear, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,ref5

video games, ref1Viereck, Sylvester, ref1vigilance, ref1visualization, ref1

Wagner, Berny, ref1walking, as distancing mechanism, ref1,

ref2walking stick, ref1, ref2Wallace, Alfred Russel, ref1wandering minds, ref1, ref2Watson, Dr.as actively disengaged, ref1in “Adventure of the Copper Beeches,”ref1comparison with Holmes, ref1, ref2, ref3,ref4

competitiveness with Holmes, ref1description of Holmes, ref1first meets Holmes, ref1, ref2hypothetical plane spotting experiment,ref1past in Afghanistan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4,ref5role in solving cases, ref1in The Sign of Four, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4in “The Adventure of the Priory School,”ref1thinking process in The Hound of theBaskervilles, ref1time in Afganistan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4white coat effect, ref1Winner, Ellen, ref1Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ref1Wright, Elsie, ref1, ref2, ref3

“The Yellow Face,” ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Zeigarnik, Bluma, ref1

CHANNELLING GREATCONTENT FOR YOU TOWATCH, LISTEN TO ANDREAD.

Table of ContentsTitle pageCopyright pageDedication pageEpigraph pageContentsPreludePART ONE - UNDERSTANDING

(YOURSELF)CHAPTER ONE - The Scientific Method

of the MindCHAPTER TWO - The Brain Attic: What

Is It and What’s in There?PART TWO - FROM OBSERVATION

TO IMAGINATIONCHAPTER THREE - Stocking the Brain

Attic: The Power of Observation

CHAPTER FOUR - Exploring the BrainAttic: The Value of Creativity andImagination

PART THREE - THE ART OFDEDUCTION

CHAPTER FIVE - Navigating the BrainAttic: Deduction from the Facts

CHAPTER SIX - Maintaining the BrainAttic: Education Never Stops

PART FOUR - THE SCIENCE ANDART OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER SEVEN - The Dynamic Attic:Putting It All Together

CHAPTER EIGHT - We’re Only HumanPostludeAcknowledgmentsFurther ReadingIndex