Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (10 page)

Being aware is the first step. Holmes’s awareness enables him to avoid many of the faults that plague Watson, the inspectors, his clients, and his adversaries. But how does he go from awareness to something more, something actionable? That process begins with observation: once we understand how our brain attic works and where our thought process originates, we are in a position to direct our attention to the things that matter—and away from the things that don’t. And it is to that task of mindful observation that we now turn.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

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

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

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

“ ‘Are they not fresh and beautiful?’ I cried . . .”
from
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” p. 292.

PART TWO

CHAPTER THREE

Stocking the Brain Attic: The Power of Observation

I
t was Sunday night and time for my dad to whip out the evening’s reading. Earlier in the week we had finished
The Count of Monte Cristo
—after a harrowing journey that took several months to complete—and the bar was set high indeed. And there, far from the castles, fortresses, and treasures of France, I found myself face-to-face with a man who could look at a new acquaintance for the first time and proclaim with utter certainty, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” And Watson’s reply—“How on earth did you know that?”—was exactly how I immediately felt. How in the world
did
he know that? The matter, it was clear to me, went beyond simple observation of detail.

Or did it? When Watson wonders how Holmes could have possibly known about his wartime service, he posits that someone told the detective beforehand. It’s simply impossible that someone could tell such a thing just from . . . looking.

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

I
knew
you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the 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. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded?
Clearly in Afghanistan.” The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.

Sure enough, the starting point seems to be observation, plain and simple. Holmes looks at Watson and gleans at once details of his physical appearance, his demeanor, his manner. And out of those he forms a picture of the man as a whole—just as the real-life Joseph Bell had done in the presence of the astonished Arthur Conan Doyle.

But that’s not all. Observation with a capital
O
—the way Holmes uses the word when he gives his new companion a brief history of his life with a single glance—
does
entail more than, well, observation (the lowercase kind). It’s not just about the passive process of letting objects enter into your visual field. It is about knowing
what
and
how
to observe and directing your attention accordingly: what details do you focus on? What details do you omit? And how do you take in and capture those details that you do choose to zoom in on? In other words, how do you maximize your brain attic’s potential? You don’t just throw any old detail up there, if you remember Holmes’s early admonitions; you want to keep it as clean as possible. Everything we choose to notice has the potential to become a future furnishing of our attics—and what’s more, its addition will mean a change in the attic’s landscape that will affect, in turn, each
future
addition. So we have to choose wisely.

Choosing wisely means being selective. It means not only looking but looking properly, looking with real thought. It means looking with the full knowledge that what you note—and how you note it—will form the basis of any future deductions you might make. It’s about seeing the full picture, noting the details that matter, and understanding how to contextualize those details within a broader framework of thought.

Why does Holmes note the details he does in Watson’s appearance—and why did his real-life counterpart Bell choose to observe what he did in the demeanor of his new patient? (“You see gentlemen,” the surgeon told his students, “the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had
he been long discharged. He had an air of authority,” he continued, “and is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British, and the Scottish regiments are at present in that particular land.” And how did he know which of the many details of the patient’s physical appearance were important? That came from sheer practice, over many days and years. Dr. Bell had seen so many patients, heard so many life stories, made so many diagnoses that at some point, it all became natural—just as it did for Holmes. A young, inexperienced Bell would have hardly been capable of the same perspicacity.)

Holmes’s explanation is preceded by the two men’s discussion of the article “The Book of Life” that Holmes had written for the morning paper—the same article I referred to earlier, which explains how the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara could emerge from a single drop of water. After that aqueous start, Holmes proceeds to expand the principle to human interaction.

Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems. Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent inquirer in any case is almost inconceivable.

Let’s consider again how Holmes approaches Watson’s stint in Afghanistan. When he lists the elements that allowed him to pinpoint the location of Watson’s sojourn, he mentions, in one example of many, a tan in London—something that is clearly
not
representative of that climate and so must have been acquired elsewhere—as illustrating his having
arrived from a tropical location. His face, however, is haggard. Clearly then, not a vacation, but something that made him unwell. And his bearing? An unnatural stiffness in one arm, such a stiffness as could result from an injury.

Tropics, sickness, injury: take them together, as pieces of a greater picture, and voilà. Afghanistan. Each observation is taken in context and in tandem with the others—not just as a stand-alone piece but as something that contributes to an integral whole. Holmes doesn’t just observe. As he looks, he asks the right questions about those observations, the questions that will allow him to put it all together, to deduce that ocean from the water drop. He need not have known about Afghanistan per se to know that Watson came from a war; he may not have known what to call it then, but he could have well come up with something along the lines of, “You have just come from the war, I perceive.” Not as impressive sounding, to be sure, but having the same intent.

As for profession: the category
doctor
precedes
military doctor
—category before subcategory, never the other way around. And about that
doctor
: quite a prosaic guess at a man’s profession for someone who spends his life dealing with the spectacular. But prosaic doesn’t mean wrong. As you’ll note if you read Holmes’s other explanations, rarely do his guesses of professions jump—unless with good reason—into the esoteric, sticking instead to more common elements—and ones that are firmly grounded in observation and fact, not based on overheard information or conjecture. A doctor is clearly a much more common profession than, say, a detective, and Holmes would never forget that. Each observation must be integrated into an existing knowledge base. In fact, were Holmes to meet himself, he would categorically
not
guess his own profession. After all, he is the self-acknowledged only “consulting detective” in the world. Base rates—or the frequency of something in a general population—matter when it comes to asking the right questions.

For now, we have Watson, the doctor from Afghanistan. As the good doctor himself says, it’s all quite simple once you see the elements that led to the conclusion. But how do we learn to get to that conclusion on our own?

It all comes down to a single word: attention.

Paying Attention Is Anything but Elementary

When Holmes and Watson first meet, Holmes at once correctly deduces Watson’s history. But what of Watson’s impressions? First, we know he pays little attention to the hospital—where he is heading 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 is Holmes himself. Watson’s first impression is shock at his strength. Holmes grips his hand “with a strength for which [Watson] should hardly have given him credit.” His second is surprise at Holmes’s interest in the chemical test that he demonstrates for the newcomers. His third, the first actual observation of Holmes physically: “I noticed that [his hand] was all mottled over with similar pieces of plaster, and discoloured with strong acids.” The first two are impressions—or preimpressions—more than observations, much closer to the instinctive, preconscious judgment of Joe Stranger or Mary Morstan in the prior chapter. (Why shouldn’t Holmes be strong? It seems that Watson has jumped the gun by assuming him to be somehow akin to a medical student, and thus someone who is not associated with great physical feats. Why shouldn’t Holmes be excited? Again, Watson has already imputed his own views of what does and does not qualify as interesting onto his new acquaintance.) The third is an observation in line with Holmes’s own remarks on Watson, the observations that lead him to his deduction of service in Afghanistan—except that Watson only makes it because Holmes draws his attention to it by putting a Band-Aid on his finger and remarking on that very fact. “I have to be careful,” he explains. “I dabble with poisons a good deal.” The only real observation, as it turns out, is one that Watson doesn’t actually make until it is pointed out to him.

Why the lack of awareness, the superficial and highly subjective assessment? Watson answers for us when he enumerates his flaws to Holmes—after all, shouldn’t prospective flatmates know the worst about each other? “I am extremely lazy,” he says. In four words, the essence of the entire problem. As it happens, Watson is far from alone. That fault bedevils most of us—at least when it comes to paying attention. In 1540,
Hans Ladenspelder, a copperplate engraver, finished work on an engraving that was meant to be part of a series of seven: a female, reclining on one elbow on a pillar, her eyes closed, her head resting on her left hand. Peeking out over her right shoulder, a donkey. The engraving’s title: “Acedia.” The series: The Seven Deadly Sins.

Acedia means, literally, not caring. Sloth. A laziness of the mind that the
Oxford Dictionary
defines as “spiritual or mental sloth; apathy.” It’s what the Benedictines called the noonday demon, that spirit of lethargy that tempted many a devoted monk to hours of idleness where there should have rightly been spiritual labor. And it’s what today might pass for attention deficit disorder, easy distractibility, low blood sugar, or whatever label we choose to put on that nagging inability to focus on what we need to get done.

Whether you think of it as a sin, a temptation, a lazy habit of mind, or a medical condition, the phenomenon begs the same question: why is it so damn hard to pay attention?

It’s not necessarily our fault. As neurologist Marcus Raichle learned after decades of looking at the brain, our minds are wired to wander. Wandering is their default. Whenever our thoughts are suspended between specific, discrete, goal-directed activities, the brain reverts to a so-called baseline, “resting” state—but don’t let the word fool you, because the brain isn’t at rest at all. Instead, it experiences tonic activity in what’s now known as the DMN, the default mode network: the posterior cingulate cortex, the adjacent precuneus, and the medial prefrontal cortex. This baseline activation suggests that the brain is constantly gathering information from both the external world and our internal states, and what’s more, that it is monitoring that information for signs of something that is worth its attention. And while such a state of readiness could be useful from an evolutionary standpoint, allowing us to detect potential predators, to think abstractly and make future plans, it also signifies something else: our minds are made to wander.
That
is their resting state. Anything more requires an act of conscious will.