Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (34 page)

Knowing is only part of the battle, of course. Amy still gets migraines more often than she would like. But at the very least, she can control some of the trigger factors much better than she ever could before. And she can spot symptoms earlier, too, especially if she’s knowingly done something she shouldn’t, like have some wine
and
cheese . . . on a rainy day. Then she can sometimes sneak in the medicine before the headache sets in for good, and at least for the moment she has it beat.

Not everyone suffers from migraines. But everyone makes choices and decisions, thinks through problems and dilemmas, on a daily basis. So here’s what I recommend to speed up our learning and help us integrate all of those steps that Holmes has so graciously shown us: we should keep
a decision diary. And I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean actually, physically, writing things down, just as Amy had to do with her migraines and triggers.

When we make a choice, solve a problem, come to a decision, we can record the process in a single place. We can put here a list of our observations, to make sure we remember them when the time comes; we can include, too, our thoughts, our inferences, our potential lines of inquiry, things that intrigued us. But we can even take it a step further. Record what we ended up doing. Whether we had any doubts or reservations or considered other options (and in all cases, we’d do well to be specific and say what those were). And then, we can revisit each entry to write down how it went.
Was I happy? Did I wish I’d done something differently? Is there anything that is clear to me in retrospect that wasn’t before?

For those choices for which we haven’t written any observations or made any lists, we can still try our best to put down what was going through our mind at the time.
What was I considering? What was I basing my decision on? What was I feeling in the moment? What was the context (was I stressed? emotional? lazy? was it a regular day or not? what, if anything, stood out?)? Who else, if anyone, was involved? What were the stakes? What was my goal, my initial motivation? Did I accomplish what I’d set out to do? Did something distract me?
In other words, we should try to capture as much as possible of our thought process 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 look through it all. All of those thoughts on all of those unrelated issues, from beginning to end. Chances are that we’ll see the exact same thing Amy did when she reread her migraine entries: that we make the same habitual mistakes, that we think in the same habitual ways, that we’re prey to the same contextual cues over and over. And that we’ve never quite seen what those habitual patterns are—much as Holmes never realizes how little credit he gives to others when it comes to the power of disguise.

Indeed, writing things down that you think you know cold, keeping track of steps that you think need no tracking, can be an incredibly useful habit even for the most expert of experts. In 2006, a group of physicians released a groundbreaking study: they had managed to lower the
rate of catheter-related bloodstream infections—a costly and potentially lethal phenomenon, estimated at about 80,000 cases (and up to 28,000 deaths) per year, at a cost of $45,000 per patient—in Michigan ICUs from a median rate of 2.7 infections in 1,000 patients to 0 in only three months. After sixteen and eighteen months, the mean rate per 1,000 had decreased from a baseline of 7.7 to 1.4 infections. How was this possible? Had the doctors discovered some new miracle technique?

Actually, they had done something so simple that many a physician rebelled at such a snub to their authority. They had instituted a mandatory checklist. The checklist had only five items, as simple as handwashing and making sure to clean a patient’s skin prior to inserting the catheter. Surely, no one needed such elementary reminders. And yet—with the reminders in place, the rate of infection dropped precipitously, to almost zero. (Consider the natural implication: prior to the checklist, some of those obvious things weren’t getting done, or weren’t getting done regularly.)

Clearly, no matter how expert at something we become, we can forget the simplest of elements if we go through the motions of our tasks mindlessly, regardless of how motivated we may be to succeed. Anything that prompts a moment of mindful reflection, be it a checklist or something else entirely, can have profound influence on our ability to maintain the same high level of expertise and success that got us there to begin with.

Humans are remarkably adaptable. As I’ve emphasized over and over, our brains can wire and rewire for a long, long time. Cells that fire together wire together. And if they start firing in different combinations, with enough repetition, that wiring, too, will change.

The reason I keep focusing on the necessity of practice is that practice is the only thing that will allow us to apply Holmes’s methodology in real life, in the situations that are far more charged emotionally than any thought experiment can ever lead you to believe. We need to train ourselves mentally for those emotional moments, for those times when the deck is stacked as high against us as it will ever be. It’s easy to forget how quickly our minds grasp for familiar pathways when given little time to think or when otherwise pressured. But it’s up to us to determine what those pathways will be.

It is most difficult to apply Holmes’s logic in those moments that matter the most. And so, all we can do is practice, until our habits are such that even the most severe stressors will bring out the very thought patterns that we’ve worked so hard to master.

SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

“You know my methods. Apply them!” “Well, Watson, what do you make of it?”
from
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes, p. 5.

“If I take it up, I must understand every detail”
from
His Last Bow
, “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” p. 1272.

“That razor brain blunted and rusted with inaction”
from
The Valley of Fear
, chapter 2:
Mr. Sherlock Holmes Discourses
, p. 11.

CHAPTER EIGHT

We’re Only Human

O
n a morning in May 1920, Mr. Edward Gardner received a letter from a friend. Inside were two small photographs. In one, a group of what looked to be fairies were dancing on a stream bank while a little girl looked on. In another, a winged creature (a gnome perhaps, he thought) sat near another girl’s beckoning hand.

Gardner was a theosophist, someone who believed that knowledge of God may be achieved through spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relation (a popular fusion of Eastern ideas about reincarnation and the possibility of spirit travel). Fairies and gnomes seemed a far cry from any reality he’d ever experienced outside of books, but where another may have laughed and cast aside pictures and letter both, he was willing to dig a little deeper. And so, he wrote back to the friend: Might he be able to obtain the photo negatives?

When the plates arrived, Gardner promptly delivered them to a Mr. Harold Snelling, photography expert extraordinaire. No fakery, it was said, could get past Snelling’s eye. As the summer drew on, Gardner
awaited the expert’s verdict. Was it possible that the photographs were something more than a clever staging?

By the end of July, Gardner got his answer: “These two negatives,” Snelling wrote, “are entirely genuine unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, show movement in the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc. In my opinion, they are both straight untouched pictures.”

Gardner was ecstatic. But not everyone was equally convinced. It seemed so altogether improbable. One man, however, heard enough to pursue the matter further: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle was nothing if not meticulous. In that, at least, he took his creation’s methodology to heart. And so, he asked for further validation, this time from an undisputed authority in photography, Kodak—who also happened to have manufactured the camera that had been used to take the picture.

Kodak refused to offer an official endorsement. The photographs were indeed single exposure, the experts stated, and showed no outward signs of being faked, 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 pictures could not possibly be real.

Conan Doyle dismissed that last bit as faulty logic, a circular argument if ever there was one. The other statements, however, seemed sound enough. No signs of fakery. Single exposure. It certainly seemed convincing, especially when added to Snelling’s endorsement. The only negative finding that Kodak had offered was pure conjecture—and who better than Holmes’s creator to know to throw those out of consideration?

There remained, however, one final piece of evidence to verify: what about the girls depicted in the photographs? What evidence, be it supportive or damning, could they offer? Alas, Sir Arthur was leaving on a trip to Australia that would not be put off, and so, he asked Gardner to travel in his stead to the scene of the pictures, a small West Yorkshire town called Cottingley, to speak with the family in question.

In August 1920, Edward Gardner met Elsie Wright and her six-years-younger
cousin, Frances Griffiths, for the first time. They’d taken the photographs, they told him, three years prior, when Elsie was sixteen and Frances ten. Their parents hadn’t believed their tale of fairies by the stream, they said, and so they had decided to document it. The photographs were the result.

The girls, it seemed to Gardner, were humble and sincere. They were well-raised country girls, after all, and they could hardly have been after personal gain, refusing, as they did, all mention of payment for the pictures. They even asked that their names be withheld were the photographs to be made public. And though Mr. Wright (Elsie’s father) remained skeptical and called the prints nothing more than a childish prank, Mr. Gardner was convinced that these photos were genuine: the fairies were real. These girls weren’t lying. Upon his return to London, he sent a satisfied report to Conan Doyle. So far, everything seemed to be holding together.

Still, Conan Doyle decided that more proof was in order. Scientific experiments, after all, needed to be replicated if their results were to be held valid. So Gardner traveled once more to the country, this time with two cameras and two dozen specially marked plates that couldn’t be substituted without drawing attention to the change. He left these with the girls with the instructions to capture the fairies again, preferably on a sunny day when the light was best.

He wasn’t disappointed. In early fall, he received three more photographs. The fairies were there. The plates were the original ones he’d supplied. No evidence of tampering was found.

Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced. The experts agreed (though, of course, one without offering official endorsement). The replication had gone smoothly. The girls seemed genuine and trustworthy.

In December, the famed creator of Mr. Sherlock Holmes published the original photographs, along with an account of the verification process, in
The Strand Magazine
—the home publication of none other than Holmes himself. The title: “Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event.” Two years later, he released a book,
The Coming of the Fairies
, which expanded on his initial investigation and included additional corroboration of the fairies’ existence by the clairvoyant Mr. Geoffrey
Hodson. Conan Doyle had made up his mind, and he wasn’t about to change it.