Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (14 page)

To observe, you must learn to separate situation from interpretation, yourself from what you’re seeing. System Watson wants to run away into the world of the subjective, the hypothetical, the deductive. Into the world that would make the most sense to you. System Holmes knows to hold back the reins.

A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.

It’s an exercise not unlike reading your own work out loud to catch any errors in grammar, logic, or style. Just like your observations are so entwined with your thoughts and perception that you may find it difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the objective reality from its subjective materialization in your mind, when you work on an essay or a story or a paper, or anything else really, you become so intimately acquainted with your own writing that you are liable to skip over mistakes and to read what the words should say instead of what they do say. The act of speaking forces you to slow down and catch those errors that are invisible to your eyes. Your ear notes them when your eye does not. And while it may seem a waste of time and effort to reread mindfully and attentively, out loud, it hardly ever fails to yield a mistake or flaw that you would have otherwise missed.

It’s easy to succumb to Watson’s conflating logic, to Huxtable’s certainty in what he says. But every time you find yourself making a judgment immediately upon observing—in fact, even if you don’t think you are, and even if everything seems to make perfect sense—train yourself to stop and repeat:
It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong
. Then go back and restate it from the beginning and in a different fashion than you did the first time around. Out loud instead of silently. In writing instead of in your head. It will save you from many errors in perception.

3. Be Inclusive

Let’s go back for a moment to
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. In the early chapters of the story, Henry Baskerville, the heir to the Baskerville estate, reports that his boot has gone missing. But not just one boot. Henry finds that the missing boot has miraculously reappeared the day after its disappearance—only to discover that a boot from another pair has vanished
in its stead. To Henry this is annoying but nothing more. To Sherlock Holmes it is a key element in a case that threatens to devolve into a paranormal, voodoo-theory-generating free-for-all. What to others is a mere curiosity to Holmes is one of the more instructive points in the case: the “hound” they are dealing with is an actual animal, not a phantasm. An animal who relies on his sense of smell in a fundamental fashion. As Holmes later tells Watson, the exchange of one stolen boot for another was “a most instructive incident, since it proved conclusively to my mind that we were dealing with a real hound, as no other supposition could explain this anxiety to obtain an old boot and this indifference to a new one.”

But that’s not all. Apart from the vanishing boot, there is the issue of a more obvious warning. While consulting with Holmes in London, Henry has received anonymous notes that urge him to stay away from Baskerville Hall. Once again, to everyone but Holmes these notes are nothing more than what they seem. For Holmes they form the second part of the key to the case. As he tells Watson:

“It may possibly recur to your memory that when I examined the paper upon which the printed words were fastened I made a close inspection for the water-mark. In doing so I held it within a few inches of my eyes, and was conscious of a faint smell of the scent known as white jessamine. There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended upon their prompt recognition. The scent suggested the presence of a lady, and already my thoughts began to turn toward the Stapletons. Thus I had made certain of the hound, and had guessed at the criminal before we ever went to the west country.”

There it is a second time: smell. Holmes doesn’t just read the note and look at it. He also smells it. And in the scent, not in the words or the appearance, is where he finds the clue that helps him identify the possible criminal. Absent smell, two central clues of the case would remain unidentified—and so they do to everyone but the detective. I am not suggesting you go out and memorize seventy-five perfumes. But you should
never neglect your sense of smell—or indeed any of your other senses—because they certainly won’t neglect you.

Consider a scenario where you’re buying a car. You go to the dealer and look at all the shining specimens sitting out on the lot. How do you decide which model is the right one for you? If I ask you that question right now, you will likely tell me that you’d weigh any number of factors, from cost to safety, appearance to comfort, mileage to gas use. Then you’ll pick the vehicle that best matches your criteria.

But the reality of the situation is far more complex. Imagine, for instance, that at the moment you’re in the lot, a man walks by with a mug of steaming hot chocolate. You might not even remember that he passed, but the smell triggers memories of your grandfather: he used to make you hot chocolate when you spent time together. It was your little ritual. And before you know it, you’re leaving the lot with a car like the one your grandfather drove—and have conveniently forgotten (or altogether failed to note) its less-than-stellar safety rating. And you very likely don’t even know why exactly you made the choice you did. You’re not wrong per se, but your selective remembering might mean a choice that you’ll later regret.

Now imagine a different scenario. This time there’s a pervasive smell of gasoline: the lot is across the street from a gas station. And you remember your mother warning you to be careful around gas, that it could catch fire, that you could get hurt. Now you’re focused on safety. You’ll likely be leaving the lot with a car that is quite 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 it is, for the most part. But it is also much more. Remember how in the hypothetical foray to the top of the Empire State Building, our hypothetical Holmes listened and smelled for planes, as strange as it seemed? Attention is about every one of your senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch. It is about taking in as much as we possibly can, through all of the avenues available to us. It is about learning not to leave
anything
out—anything, that is, that is relevant to the goals that you’ve set. And it is about realizing that all of our senses affect us—and will affect us whether or not we are aware of the impact.

To observe fully, to be truly attentive, we must be inclusive and not let anything slide by—and we must learn how our attention may shift without our awareness, guided by a sense that we’d thought invisible. That jasmine? Holmes smelled the letter deliberately. In so doing, he was able to observe the presence of a female influence, and a particular female at that. If Watson had picked up the letter, we can be sure he would have done no such thing. But his nose may very well have grasped the scent even without his awareness. What then?

When we smell, we remember. In fact, research has shown that the memories associated with smell are the most powerful, vivid, and emotional of all our recollections. And what we smell affects what we remember, how we subsequently feel, and what we might be inclined to think as a result. But smell is often referred to as the invisible sense: we regularly experience it without consciously registering it. A smell enters our nose, travels to our olfactory bulb, and makes its way directly to our hippocampus, our amygdala (an emotion-processing center), and our olfactory cortex (which not only deals with smells but is involved in complex memory, learning, and decision-making tasks), triggering a host of thoughts, feelings, and recollections—yet more likely than not, we note neither smell nor memory.

What if Watson, in all of his multiple-continent-spanning womanizing, happened to have dated a woman who wore a jasmine perfume? Let’s imagine the relationship a happy one. All of a sudden he may have found himself seeing with added clarity (remember, happy moods equal wider sight), but he may also have failed to note select details because of a certain rosy glow to the whole thing. Maybe the letter isn’t so sinister. Maybe Henry isn’t in all that much danger. Maybe it would be better to go have a drink and meet some lovely ladies—after all, ladies are lovely, aren’t they? And off we go.

And if the relationship had been violent, brutish, and short? Tunnel vision would have set in (bad mood, limited sight), and along with it a brushing aside of most of the elements of note.
Why should that matter? Why should I work harder? I am tired; my senses are overloaded; and I deserve a break. And why is Henry bothering us anyway with this nonsense? Paranormal dog, my foot. I’ve about had it.

When we are being inclusive, we never forget that all of our senses are constantly in play. We don’t let them drive our emotions and decisions. Instead, we actively enlist their help—as Holmes does with both boot and letter—and learn to control them instead.

In either of the Watson scenarios above, all of the doctor’s actions, from the moment of smelling the jasmine, will have been affected. And while the precise direction of the effect is unknowable, one thing is certain. Not only would he have failed to be inclusive in his attention, but his attention will have been hijacked by the eponymous System Watson into a subjectivity 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 powerful lot. And if we aren’t aware of them altogether, as so often happens, they can threaten to take over the carefully cultivated goals and objectivity that we’ve been working on.

Smell may be the most glaring culprit, but it is far from alone. When we see a person, we are likely to experience the activation of any number of stereotypes associated with that person—though we won’t realize it. When we touch something warm or cold, we may become likewise warm or cold in our disposition; and if we are touched by someone in a reassuring way, we may suddenly find ourselves taking more risk or being more confident than we otherwise would. When we hold something heavy, we are more likely to judge something (or someone) to be weightier and more serious. None of this has anything to do with observation and attention per se, except that it can throw us off a carefully cultivated path without our awareness. And that is a dangerous thing indeed.

We don’t have to be a Holmes and learn to tell apart hundreds of smells from a single whiff in order to let our senses work for us, to allow our awareness to give us a fuller picture of a scene that we would otherwise have. A scented note? You don’t need to know the smell to realize that it is there—and that it might be a potential clue. If you hadn’t paid attention to the fragrance, you would have missed the clue’s presence altogether—but you may have had your objectivity undermined nevertheless without even being aware of what has taken place. A missing
boot? Another missing boot? Maybe it’s about a quality other than the boot’s appearance—after all, it’s the old and ugly one that eventually disappeared for good. You don’t need to know much to realize that there may be another sensory clue here that would again be missed if you had forgotten about your other senses. In both cases, a failure to use all senses equals a scene not seen to its full potential, attention that has not been allocated properly, and subconscious cues that color the attention that
is
allocated in a way that may not be optimal.

If we actively engage each of our senses, we acknowledge that the world is multidimensional. Things are happening through our eyes, our nose, our ears, our skin. Each of those senses should rightly tell us something. And if it doesn’t, that should also tell us something: that a sense is missing. That something
lacks
smell, or is silent, or is otherwise absent. In other words, the conscious use of each sense can go beyond illuminating the present part of scene and show instead that part of a situation that is often forgotten: that which
isn’t
there, which is not present in the environment where by every rightful metric it should be. And absence can be just as important and just as telling as presence.

Consider the case of Silver Blaze, that famous missing racehorse that no one can track down. When Holmes has had a chance to examine the premises, Inspector Gregson, who has failed to find something as seemingly impossible to miss as a horse, asks, “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Why yes, Holmes responds, “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” But, protests the inspector, “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” To which Holmes delivers the punch line: “That was the curious incident.”

For Holmes, the absence of barking is the turning point of the case: the dog must have known the intruder. Otherwise he would have made a fuss.

For us, the absence of barking is something that is all too easy to forget. All too often, we don’t even dismiss things that aren’t there; we don’t remark on them to begin with—especially if the thing happens to be a sound, again a sense that is not as natural a part of attention and observation as sight. But often these missing elements are just as telling and just
as important—and would make just as much difference to our thinking—as their present counterparts.

We need not be dealing with a detective case for absent information to play an important role in our thought process. Take, for example, a decision to buy a cell phone. I’m going to show you two options, and I would like you to tell me which of them you would rather purchase.