Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (11 page)

The modern emphasis on multitasking plays into our natural tendencies quite well, often in frustrating ways. Every new input, every new demand that we place on our attention is like a possible predator:
Oooh,
says the brain.
Maybe I should pay attention to
that
instead
. And then along comes something else. We can feed our mind wandering ad infinitum. The result? We pay attention to everything and nothing as a matter of course. While our minds might be made to wander, they are not made to switch activities at anything approaching the speed of modern demands. We were supposed to remain ever ready to engage, but not to engage with multiple things at once, or even in rapid succession.

Notice once more how Watson pays attention—or not, as the case may be—when he first meets Holmes. It’s not that he doesn’t see anything. He notes “countless bottles. Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames.” All that detail, but nothing that makes a difference to the task at hand—his choice of future flatmate.

Attention is a limited resource. Paying attention to one thing necessarily comes at the expense of another. Letting your eyes get too taken in by all of the scientific equipment in the laboratory prevents you from noticing anything of significance about the man in that same room. We cannot allocate our attention to multiple things at once and expect it to function at the same level as it would were we to focus on just one activity. Two tasks cannot possibly be in the attentional foreground at the same time. One will inevitably end up being the focus, and the other—or others—more akin to irrelevant noise, something to be filtered out. Or worse still, none will have the focus and all will be, albeit slightly clearer, noise, but degrees of noise all the same.

Think of it this way. I am going to present you with a series of sentences. For each sentence, I want you to do two things: one, tell me if it is plausible or not by writing a
P
for
plausible
or a
N
for
not plausible
by the sentence; and two, memorize the final word of the sentence (at the end of all of the sentences, you will need to state the words in order). You can take no more than five seconds per sentence, which includes reading the sentence, deciding if it’s plausible or not, and memorizing the final word. (You can set a timer that beeps at every five-second interval, or find one online—or try to approximate as best you can.) Looking back at a sentence you’ve already completed is cheating. Imagine that each sentence vanishes once you’ve read it. Ready?

She was worried about being too hot so she took her new shawl.

She drove along the bumpy road with a view to the sea.

When we add on to our house, we will build a wooden duck.

The workers knew he was not happy when they saw his smile.

The place is such a maze it is hard to find the right hall.

The little girl looked at her toys then played with her doll.

Now please write down the final word of each sentence in order. Again, do not try to cheat by referring back to the sentences.

Done? You’ve just completed a sentence-verification and span task. How did you do? Fairly well at first, I’m guessing—but it may not have been quite as simple as you’d thought it would be. The mandatory time limit can make it tricky, as can the need to not only read but understand each sentence so that you can verify it: instead of focusing on the last word, you have to process the meaning of the sentence as a whole as well. The more sentences there are, the more complex they become, the trickier it is to tell if they are plausible or not, and the less time I give you per sentence, the less likely you are to be able to keep the words in mind, especially if you don’t have enough time to rehearse.

However many words you can manage to 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 the most difficult for you (i.e., when the sentences were more complex or when you were nearing the end of a list), so that you were keeping more final words in mind at the same time—you would have very likely missed any other letters or images that may have flashed on the screen while you were counting: your eyes would have looked directly at them, and yet your brain would have been so preoccupied with reading, processing, and memorizing in a steady pattern that you would have failed to grasp them entirely. And your brain would have been right to ignore them—it would have distracted you too much to take active note, especially when you were in the middle of your given task.

Consider the policeman in
A Study in Scarlet
who misses the criminal because he’s too busy looking at the activity in the house. When Holmes asks him whether the street was empty, Rance (the policeman in question)
says, “Well, it was, as far as anybody that could be of any good goes.” And yet the criminal was right in front of his eyes. Only, he didn’t know how to look. Instead of a suspect, he saw a drunk man—and failed to note any incongruities or coincidences that might have told him otherwise, so busy was he trying to focus on his “real” job of looking at the crime scene.

The phenomenon is often termed attentional blindness, a process whereby a focus on one element in a scene causes other elements to disappear; I myself like to call it attentive inattention. The concept was pioneered by Ulric Neisser, the father of cognitive psychology. Neisser noticed how he could look out a window at twilight and either see the external world or focus on the reflection of the room in the glass. But he couldn’t actively pay attention to both. Twilight or reflection had to give. He termed the concept selective looking.

Later, in the laboratory, he observed that individuals who watched two superimposed videos in which people engaged in distinct activities—for instance, in one video they were playing cards, and in the other, basketball—could easily follow the action in either of the films but would miss entirely any surprising event that happened in the other. If, for example, they were watching the basketball game, they would not notice if the cardplayers suddenly stopped playing cards and instead stood up to shake hands. It was just like selective listening—a phenomenon discovered in the 1950s, in which people listening to a conversation with one ear would miss entirely something that was said in their other ear—except, on an apparently much broader scale, since it now applied to multiple senses, not just to a single one. And ever since that initial discovery, it has been demonstrated over and over, with visuals as egregious as people in gorilla suits, clowns on unicycles, and even, in a real-life case, a dead deer in the road 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 our visual field without knowingly doing so. Holmes admonished Watson for seeing but not observing. He could have gone a step further: sometimes we don’t even see.

We don’t even need to be actively engaged in a cognitively demanding
task to let the world pass us by without so much as a realization of what we’re missing. For instance, when we are in a foul mood, we quite literally see less than when we are happy. Our visual cortex actually takes in less information from the outside world. We could look at the exact same scene twice, once on a day that has been going well and once on a day that hasn’t, and we would notice less—and our brains would take in less—on the gloomy day.

We can’t actually be aware unless we pay attention. No exceptions. Yes, awareness may require only minimal attention, but it does require some attention. Nothing happens quite automatically. We can’t be aware of something if we don’t attend to it.

Let’s go back to the sentence-verification task for a moment. Not only will you have missed the proverbial twilight for focusing too intently at the reflection in the window, but the harder you were thinking, the more dilated your pupils will have become. I could probably tell your mental effort—as well as your memory 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 the neurotransmitter norepinephrine and an area implicated in memory retrieval, a variety of anxiety syndromes, and selective attentional processing), which will also tell me whether you are likely to keep going or to give up—just by looking at the size of your pupils.

But there is one encouraging thing: the importance—and effectiveness—of training, of brute practice, is overwhelmingly clear. If you were to do the sentence verification regularly—as some subjects did in fact do—your pupils would gradually get smaller; your recall would get more natural; and, miracle of all miracles, you’d notice those same letters or images or whatnot that you’d missed before. You’d probably even ask yourself, how in the world did I
not
see this earlier? What was previously taxing will have become more natural, more habitual, more effortless; in other words, easier. What used to be the purview of the Holmes system would have sneaked into the Watson system. And all it will have taken is a little bit of practice, a small dose of habit formation. Your brain can be one quick study if it wants to be.

The trick is to duplicate that same process, to let your brain study and
learn and make effortless what was once effortful, in something that lacks the discrete nature of a cognitive task like the sentence verification, in something that is so basic that we do it constantly, without giving it much thought or attention: the task of looking and thinking.

Daniel Kahneman argues repeatedly that System 1—our Watson system—is hard to train. It likes what it likes, it trusts what it trusts, and that’s that. His solution? Make System 2—Holmes—do the work by taking System 1 forcibly out of the equation. For instance, use a checklist of characteristics when hiring a candidate for a job instead of relying on your impression, an impression that, as you’ll recall, is formed within the first five minutes or less of meeting someone. Write a checklist of steps to follow when making a diagnosis of a problem, be it a sick patient, a broken car, writer’s block, or whatever it is you face in your daily life, instead of trying to do it by so-called instinct. Checklists, formulas, structured procedures: those are your best bet—at least, according to Kahneman.

The Holmes solution? Habit, habit, habit. That, and motivation. Become an expert of sorts at those types of decisions or observation that you want to excel at making. Reading people’s professions, following their trains of thought, inferring their emotions and thinking from their demeanor? Fine. But just as fine are things that go beyond the detective’s purview, like learning to tell the quality of food from a glance or the proper chess move from a board or your opponent’s intention in baseball, poker, or a business meeting from a gesture. If you learn first how to be selective accurately, in order to accomplish precisely what it is you want to accomplish, you will be able to limit the damage that System Watson can do by preemptively teaching it to not muck it up. The important thing is the proper, selective training—the presence of mind—coupled with the desire and the motivation to master your thought process.

No one says it’s easy. When it comes right down to it, there is no such thing as free attention; it all has to come from somewhere. And every time we place an additional demand on our attentional resources—be it by listening to music while walking, checking our email while working, or following five media streams at once—we limit the awareness that surrounds any one aspect and our ability to deal with it in an engaged, mindful, and productive manner.

What’s more, we wear ourselves out. Not only is attention limited, but it is a finite resource. We can drain it down only so much before it needs a reboot. Psychologist Roy Baumeister uses the analogy of a muscle to talk about self-control—an analogy that is just as appropriate when it comes to attention: just as a muscle, our capacity for self-control has only so many exertions in it and will get tired with too much use. You need to replenish a muscle—actually, physically replenish it, with glucose and a rest period; Baumeister is not talking about metaphorical energy—though a psych-you-up speech never hurt—to remain in peak form. Otherwise, performance will flag. Yes, the muscle will get bigger with use (you’ll improve your self-control or attentional ability and be able to exercise it for longer and longer periods and at more complicated tasks), but its growth, too, is limited. Unless you take steroids—the exercise equivalent of a Ritalin or Adderall for superhuman attention—you will reach your limit, and even steroids take you only so far. And failure to use it? It will shrink right back to its pre-exercise size.

Improving Our Natural Attentional Abilities

Picture this. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are visiting New York (not so far-fetched—their creator spent some memorable time in the city) and decide to go to the top of the Empire State Building. When they arrive at the observation deck, they are accosted by a quirky stranger who proposes a contest: which of them will be the first to spot an airplane in flight? They can use any of the viewing machines—in fact, the stranger even gives them each a stack of quarters—and look wherever they’d like. The only consideration is who sees the plane first. How do the two go about the task?

It may seem like an easy thing to do: an airplane is a pretty large bird, and the Empire State Building is a pretty tall house, with a pretty commanding 360-degree view. But if you want to be first, it’s not as simple as standing still and looking up (or over). What if the plane is somewhere else? What if you can’t see it from where you’re standing? What if it’s behind you? What if you could have been the first to spot one that was farther
away if only you’d used your quarters on a viewing machine instead of standing there like an idiot with only your naked eyes? There are a lot of what-ifs—if you want to emerge victorious, that is—but they can be made manageable what-ifs, if you view them as nothing more than a few strategy choices.