Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (12 page)

Let’s first imagine how Watson would go about the task. Watson, as we know, is energetic. He is quick to act and quick to move. And he’s also quite competitive with Holmes—more than once, he tries to show that he, too, can play the detective game; there’s nothing he likes more than thinking he can beat Holmes on his own turf. I’m willing to bet that he’ll do something like the following. He won’t waste a single moment in thought (Time’s a ticking! Better move quickly). He’ll try to cover as much ground as possible (It could come from anywhere! And I don’t want to be the idiot who’s left behind, that’s for sure!) and will thus likely plop coins into as many machines as he can find and then run between them, scanning the horizon in between sprints. He may even experience a few false alarms (It’s a plane! Oh, no, it’s a bird) in his desire to spot something—and when he does, he’ll genuinely think that he’s seeing a plane. And in between the running and the false spotting, he’ll quickly run out of breath.
This is horrid
, he’ll think.
I’m exhausted
. And anyway, what’s the point? It’s a stupid 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 quick calculation on the location of the airports and thus the most likely direction of a plane. He would even, perhaps, factor in such elements as the relative likelihood of seeing a plane that’s taking off or landing given the time of day and the likeliest approach or takeoff paths, depending on the answer to the former consideration. He would then position himself so as to focus in on the area of greatest probability, perhaps throwing a coin in a machine for good measure and giving it a quick once-over to make sure he isn’t missing anything. He would know when a bird was just a bird, or a passing shadow just a low-hanging cloud. He wouldn’t rush. He would look, and he would even listen, to see if a telltale noise might help direct his attention to a looming jet. He might even smell and feel the air for changing wind or a whiff of gasoline. All the while, he’d be
rubbing together his famous long-fingered hands, thinking,
Soon; it will come soon. And I know precisely where it will appear
.

Who would win? There’s an element of chance involved, of course, and either man could get lucky. But play the game enough times, and I’d be willing to bet that Holmes would come out on top. While his strategy may at first glance seem slower, not nearly as decisive, and certainly not as inclusive as Watson’s, at the end it would prove to be the superior of the two.

Our brains aren’t stupid. Just as we remain remarkably efficient and effective for a remarkable percentage of the time despite our cognitive biases, so, too, our Watsonian attentional abilities are as they are for a reason. We don’t notice everything because noticing everything—each sound, each smell, each sight, each touch—would make us crazy (in fact, a lack of filtering ability is the hallmark of many psychiatric conditions). And Watson had a point back there: searching for that airplane? Perhaps not the best use of his time.

You see, the problem isn’t a lack of attention so much as a lack of mindfulness and direction. In the usual course of things, our brains pick and choose where to focus without much conscious forethought on our part. What we need to learn instead is how to tell our brains what and how to filter, instead of letting them be lazy and decide for us, based on what they think would make for the path of least resistance.

Standing on top of the Empire State Building, watching quietly for airplanes, Sherlock Holmes has illustrated the four elements most likely to allow us to do just that: selectivity, objectivity, inclusivity, and engagement.

1. Be Selective

Picture the following scene. A man passes by a bakery on his way to the office. The sweet smell of cinnamon follows him down the street. He pauses. He hesitates. He looks in the window. The beautiful glaze. The warm, buttery rolls. The rosy doughnuts, kissed with a touch of sugar. He goes in. He asks for a cinnamon roll.
I’ll go on my diet tomorrow
, he says.
You only live once. And besides, today is an exception. It’s brutally cold and I have a tough meeting in just an hour
.

Now rewind and replay. A man passes by a bakery on his way to the office. He smells cinnamon.
I don’t much care for cinnamon, now that I think about it
, he says.
I far prefer nutmeg, and there isn’t any here that I can smell
. He pauses. He hesitates. He looks in the window. The oily, sugary glaze that has likely caused more heart attacks and blocked arteries than you can count. The dripping rolls, drenched in butter—actually, it’s probably margarine, and everyone knows you can’t make good rolls with that. The burned doughnuts that will sit like lumps in your stomach and make you wonder why you ever ate them to begin with.
Just as I thought
, he says.
Nothing here for me
. He walks on, hurrying to his morning meeting.
Maybe I’ll have time to get coffee before
, he thinks.

What has changed between scenario one and scenario two? Nothing visible. The sensory information has remained identical. But somehow our hypothetical man’s mindset has shifted—and that shift has, quite literally, affected how he experiences reality. It has changed how he is processing information, what he is paying attention to, and how his surroundings interact with his mind.

It’s entirely possible. Our vision is highly selective as is—the retina normally captures about ten billion bits per second of visual information, but only ten thousand bits actually make it to the first layer of the visual cortex, and, to top it off, only 10 percent of the area’s synapses is dedicated to incoming visual information at all. Or, to put it differently, our brains are bombarded by something like eleven million pieces of data—that is, items in our surroundings that come at all of our senses—at once. Of that, we are able to consciously process only about forty. What that basically means is that we “see” precious little of what’s around us, and what we think of as objective seeing would better be termed selective filtering—and our state of mind, our mood, our thoughts at any given moment, our motivation, and our goals can make it even more picky than it normally is.

It’s the essence of the cocktail party effect, when we note our name out of the din of a room. Or of our tendency to notice the very things we are thinking about or have just learned at any given moment: pregnant
women noticing other pregnant women everywhere; people noting the dreams that then seem to come true (and forgetting all of the others); seeing the number 11 everywhere after 9/11. Nothing in the environment actually changes—there aren’t suddenly more pregnant women or prescient dreams or instances of a particular number—only your state does. That’s why we are so prone to the feeling of coincidence: we forget all those times we were wrong or nothing happened and remember only the moments that matched—because those are the ones we paid attention to in the first place. As one Wall Street guru cynically observed, the key to being seen as a visionary is to always make your predictions in opposing pairs. People will remember those that came true and promptly forget those that didn’t.

Our minds are set the way they are for a reason. It’s exhausting to have the Holmes system running on full all the time—and not very productive at that. There’s a reason we’re prone to filter out so much of our environment: to the brain, it’s noise. If we tried to take it all in, we wouldn’t last very long. Remember what Holmes said about your brain attic? It’s precious real estate. Tread carefully and use it wisely. In other words, be selective about your attention.

At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive: after all, aren’t we trying to pay attention to more, not less? Yes, but the crucial distinction is between quantity and quality. We want to learn to pay attention
better
, to become superior observers, but we can’t hope to achieve this if we thoughtlessly pay attention to everything. That’s self-defeating. What we need to do is allocate our attention mindfully. And mindset is the beginning of that selectivity.

Holmes knows this better than anyone. True, he can note in an instant the details of Watson’s attire and demeanor, the furnishings of a room down to the most minute element. But he is just as likely to not notice the weather outside or the fact that Watson has had time to leave the apartment and return to it. It is not uncommon for Watson to point out that a storm is raging outside, only to have Holmes look up and say that he hadn’t noticed—and in
Sherlock
, you will often find Holmes speaking to a blank wall long after Watson has retired, or left the apartment altogether.

Whatever the situation, answering the question of what, specifically, you want to accomplish will put you well on your way to knowing how to maximize your limited attentional resources. It will help direct your mind, prime it, so to speak, with the goals and thoughts that are actually important—and help put those that aren’t into the background. Does your brain notice the sweet smell or the grease on the napkin? Does it focus on Watson’s tan or the weather outside?

Holmes doesn’t theorize before he has the data, it’s true. But he does form a precise plan of attack: he defines his objectives and the necessary elements for achieving them. So in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, when Dr. Mortimer enters the sitting room, Holmes already knows what he wants to gain from the situation. His last words to Watson before the gentleman’s entrance are, “What does Dr. James Mortimer, the man of science, ask of Sherlock Holmes, the specialist in crime?” Holmes hasn’t yet met the man in question, but already he knows what his observational goal will be. He has defined the situation before it even began (and has managed to examine the doctor’s walking stick to boot).

When the doctor does appear, Holmes sets at once to ascertain the purpose of his visit, asking about every detail of the potential case, the people involved, the circumstances. He learns the history of the Baskerville legend, the Baskerville house, the Baskerville family. He inquires to the neighbors, the occupants of the Baskerville estate, the doctor himself, insofar as he relates to the family. He even sends for a map of the area, so that he can gather the full range of elements, even those that may have been omitted in the interview. Absolute attention to every element that bears on his original goal: to solve that which Dr. James Mortimer asks of Sherlock Holmes.

As to the rest of the world in between the doctor’s visit and the evening, it has ceased to exist. As Holmes tells Watson at the end of the day, “My body has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco. After you left I sent down to Stamford’s for the Ordnance map of this portion of the moor, and my spirit has hovered over it all day. I flatter myself that I could find my way about.”

Holmes has visited Devonshire in spirit. What his body did, he does
not know. He isn’t even being entirely facetious. Chances are he really wasn’t aware of what he was drinking or smoking—or even that the air in the room has become so unbreathable that Watson is forced to open all of the windows the moment he returns. Even Watson’s excursion into the outside world is part of Holmes’s attentional plan: he expressly asks his flatmate to leave the apartment so as not to distract him with needless inputs.

So, noticing everything? Far from it, despite the popular conception of the detective’s abilities. But noticing everything that matters to the purpose at hand. And therein lies the key difference. (As Holmes notes in “Silver Blaze” when he finds a piece of evidence that the inspector had overlooked, “I only saw it because I was looking for it.” Had he not had an a priori reason for the search, he never would have noticed it—and it wouldn’t have really mattered, not for him, at least.) Holmes doesn’t waste his time on just anything. He allocates his attention strategically.

So, too, we must determine our objective in order to know what we’re looking for—and where we’re looking for it. We already do this naturally in situations where our brains know, without our having to tell them, that something is important. Remember that party in chapter two, the one with that girl with the blue streak in her hair and that guy whose name you can’t be bothered to remember? Well, picture yourself back in that group, chatting away. Look around and you’ll notice many groups just like yours, spread all around the room. And just like yours, they are all chatting away. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. It’s exhausting if you stop to think about it, all this talking going on nonstop. That’s why you ignore it. It becomes background noise. Your brain knows how to take the environment and tune out most of it, according to your general goals and needs (specifically, dorsal and ventral regions in the parietal and frontal cortex become involved in both goal-directed—parietal—and stimulus-driven—frontal—attentional control). At the party, it’s focusing on the conversation you are having and treating the rest of the words—some of which may be at the exact same volume—as meaningless chatter.

And all of a sudden one conversation comes into clear focus. It’s not chatter anymore. You can hear every word. You turn your head. You snap
to attention. What just happened? Someone said your name, or something that sounded like your name. That was enough to signal to your brain to perk up and focus. Here was something that had relevance to you; pay attention. It’s what’s known as the classic cocktail party effect: one mention of your name, and neural systems that were sailing along snap into action. You don’t even have to do any work.

Most things don’t have such nicely built-in flags to alert you to their significance. You need to teach your mind to perk up, as if it were hearing your name, but absent that oh-so-clear stimulus. You need, in Holmes’s words, to know what 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. Discrete elements to focus on: the sweets themselves (find the negative in their appearance), the smells (why not focus on the exhaust smell from the street instead of the sweet baking? or burnt coffee?), and the overall environment (think forward to the meeting, to the wedding and the tuxedo, instead of zoning in on the current stimuli). I’m not saying that it’s actually easy to do—but at least the top-down processing that needs to happen is clear.