Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (6 page)

But that need not be the case. Inevitably, junk will creep into the attic. It’s impossible to be as perfectly vigilant as Holmes makes himself out to be. (You’ll learn later that he isn’t quite as strict, either. Useless junk may end up being flea market gold in the right set of circumstances.) But it
is
possible to assert more control over the memories that do get encoded.

If Watson—or Gregson, as the case may be—wanted to follow Holmes’s method, he would do well to realize the motivated nature of encoding: we remember more when we are
interested
and
motivated
. Chances are, Watson was quite capable of retaining his medical training—and the minutiae of his romantic escapades. These were things that were relevant to him and captured his attention. In other words, he was motivated to remember.

Psychologist Karim Kassam calls it the Scooter Libby effect: during his 2007 trial, Lewis “Scooter” Libby claimed no memory of having mentioned the identity of a certain CIA employee to any reporters of government officials. The jurors didn’t buy it. How could he not remember something so important? Simple. It wasn’t nearly as important at the time as it was in retrospect—and where motivation matters most is at the moment we are storing memories in our attics to begin with, and not afterward. The so-called Motivation to Remember (MTR) is far more important at the point of encoding—and no amount of MTR at retrieval will be efficient if the information wasn’t properly stored to begin with. As hard as it is to believe, Libby may well have been telling the truth.

We can take advantage of MTR by activating the same processes consciously when we need them. When we really want to remember something, we can make a point of paying attention to it, of saying to ourselves,
This, I want to remember
—and, if possible, solidifying it as soon as we can, whether it be by describing an experience to someone else or to ourselves, if no one else is available (in essence, rehearsing it to help consolidation). Manipulating information, playing around with it and talking it
through, making it come alive through stories and gestures, may be much more effective in getting it to the attic when you want it to get there than just trying to think it over and over. In one study, for instance, students who explained mathematical material after reading it once did better on a later test than those who repeated that material several times. What’s more, the more cues we have, the better the likelihood of successful retrieval. Had Gregson originally focused on all of the Utrecht details at the moment he first learned of the case—sights, smells, sounds, whatever else was in the paper that day—and had he puzzled over the case in various guises, he would be far more likely to recall it now. Likewise, had he linked it to his existing knowledge base—in other words, instead of moving a fresh box or folder into his attic, had he integrated it into an existing, related one, be it on the topic of bloody crime scenes with bloodless bodies, or cases from 1834, or whatever else—the association would later facilitate a prompt response to Holmes’s question. Anything to distinguish it and make it somehow more personal, relatable, and—crucially—memorable. Holmes remembers the details that matter to him—and not those that don’t. At any given moment, you only think you know what you know. But what you really know is what you can recall.

So what determines what we can and can’t remember at a specific point in time? How is the content of our attic activated by its structure?

The Color of Bias: The Attic’s Default Structure

It is autumn 1888, and Sherlock Holmes is bored. For months, no case of note has crossed his path. And so the detective takes solace, to Dr. Watson’s great dismay, in the 7 percent solution: cocaine. According to Holmes, it stimulates and clarifies his mind—a necessity when no food for thought is otherwise available.

“Count the cost!” Watson tries to reason with his flatmate. “Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle.”

Holmes remains unconvinced. “Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis,” he says, “and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulant. But I abhor the dull routine of existence.” And none of Dr. Watson’s best medical arguments will make a jot of difference (at least not for now).

Luckily, however, in this particular instance they don’t need to. A crisp knock on the door, and the men’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson, enters with an announcement: a young lady by the name of Miss Mary Morstan has arrived to see Sherlock Holmes. Watson describes Mary’s entrance:

Miss Morstan entered the room with a firm step and an outward composure of manner. She was a blonde young lady, small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in the most perfect taste. There was, however, a plainness and simplicity about her costume which bore with it a suggestion of limited means. The dress was a sombre grayish beige, untrimmed and unbraided, and she wore a small turban of the same dull hue, relieved only by a suspicion of white feather in the side. Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, but her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes were singularly spiritual and sympathetic. In an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents, I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature. I could not but observe that as she took the seat which Sherlock Holmes placed for her, her lip trembled, her hand quivered, and she showed every sign of intense inward agitation.

Who might this lady be? And what could she want with the detective? These questions form the starting point of
The Sign of Four
, an adventure that will take Holmes and Watson to India and the Andaman Islands, pygmies and men with wooden legs. But before any of that there is the lady herself: who she is, what she represents, where she will lead. In a few pages, we will examine the first encounter between Mary, Holmes, and Watson and contrast the two very different ways in which the men react to their visitor. But first, let’s take a step back to consider what happens in
our mind attic when we first enter a situation—or, as in the case of
The Sign of Four
, encounter a person. How do those contents that we’ve just examined actually become activated?

From the very first, our thinking is governed by our attic’s so-called structure: its habitual modes of thought and operation, the way in which we’ve learned, over time, to look at and evaluate the world, the biases and heuristics that shape our intuitive, immediate perception of reality. Though, as we’ve just seen, the memories and experiences stored in an individual attic vary greatly from person to person, the general patterns of activation and retrieval remain remarkably similar, coloring our thought process in a predictable, characteristic fashion. And if these habitual patterns point to one thing, it’s this: our minds love nothing more than jumping to conclusions.

Imagine for a moment that you’re at a party. You’re standing in a group of friends and acquaintances, chatting happily away, drink in hand, when you glimpse a stranger angling his way into the conversation. By the time he has opened his mouth—even before he has even quite made it to the group’s periphery—you have doubtless already formed any number of preliminary impressions, creating a fairly complete, albeit potentially inaccurate, picture of who this stranger is as a person. How is Joe Stranger dressed? Is he wearing a baseball hat? You love (hate) baseball. This must be a great (boring) guy. How does he walk and hold himself? What does he look like? Oh, is he starting to bald? What a downer. Does he actually think he can hang with someone as young and hip as you? What does he seem like? You’ve likely assessed how similar or different he is from you—same gender? race? social background? economic means?—and have even assigned him a preliminary personality—shy? outgoing? nervous? self-confident?—based on his appearance and demeanor alone. Or, maybe Joe Stranger is actually Jane Stranger and her hair is dyed the same shade of blue as your childhood best friend dyed
her
hair right before you stopped talking to each other, and you always thought the hair was the first sign of your impending break, and now all of a sudden, all of these memories are clogging your brain and coloring the way you see this new person, innocent Jane. You don’t even notice anything else.

As Joe or Jane start talking, you’ll fill in the details, perhaps rearranging
some, amplifying others, even deleting a few entirely. But you’ll hardly ever alter your initial impression, the one that started to form the second Joe or Jane walked your way. And yet what is that impression based on? Is it really anything of substance? You only happened to remember your ex–best friend, for instance, because of an errant streak of hair.

When we see Joe or Jane, each question we ask ourselves and each detail that filters into our minds, floating, so to speak, through the little attic window, primes our minds by activating specific associations. And those associations cause us to form a judgment about someone we have never even met, let alone spoken to.

You may want to hold yourself above such prejudices, but consider this. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures the distance between your conscious attitudes—those you are aware of holding—and your unconscious ones—those that form the invisible framework of your attic, beyond your immediate awareness. The measure can test for implicit bias toward any number of groups (though the most common one tests racial biases) by looking at reaction times for associations between positive and negative attributes and pictures of group representatives. Sometimes the stereotypical positives are represented by the same key: “European American” and “good,” for instance, are both associated with, say, the “I” key, and “African American” and “bad” with the “E” key. Sometimes they are represented by different ones: now, the “I” is for “African American” and “good,” while “European American” has moved to the “bad,” “E” key. Your speed of categorization in each of these circumstances determines your implicit bias. To take the racial example, if you are faster to categorize when “European American” and “good” share a key and “African American” and “bad” share a key, it is taken as evidence of an implicit race bias.
²

The findings are robust and replicated extensively: even those individuals who score the absolute lowest on self-reported measures of stereotype attitudes (for example, on a four-point scale ranging from Strongly
Female to Strongly Male, do you most strongly associate career with male or female?) often show a difference in reaction time on the IAT that tells a different story. On the race-related attitudes IAT, about 68 percent of over 2.5 million participants show a biased pattern. On age (i.e., those who prefer young people over old): 80 percent. On disability (i.e., those who favor people
without
any disabilities): 76 percent. On sexual orientation (i.e., those who favor straight people over gay): 68 percent. On weight (i.e., those who favor thin people over fat): 69 percent. The list goes on and on. And those biases, in turn, affect our decision making. How we see the world to begin with will impact what conclusions we reach, what evaluations we form, and what choices we make at any given point.

This is not to say that we will necessarily act in a biased fashion; we are perfectly capable of resisting our brains’ basic impulses. But it does mean that the biases are there at a very fundamental level. Protest as you may that it’s just not you, but more likely than not, it is. Hardly anyone is immune altogether.

Our brains are wired for quick judgments, equipped with back roads and shortcuts that simplify the task of taking in and evaluating the countless inputs that our environment throws at us every second. It’s only natural. If we truly contemplated every element, we’d be lost. We’d be stuck. We’d never be able to move beyond that first evaluative judgment. In fact, we may not be able to make any judgment at all. Our world would become far too complex far too quickly. As William James put it, “If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”

Our way of looking at and thinking about the world is tough to change and our biases are remarkably sticky. But tough and sticky doesn’t mean unchangeable and immutable. Even the IAT, as it turns out, can be bested—after interventions and mental exercises that target the very biases it tests, that is. For instance, if you show individuals pictures of blacks enjoying a picnic before you have them take the racial IAT, the bias score decreases significantly.

A Holmes and a Watson may both make instantaneous judgments—but the shortcuts their brains are using could not be more different. Whereas Watson epitomizes the default brain, the structure of our
mind’s connections in their usual, largely passive state, Holmes shows what is possible: how we can rewire that structure to circumvent those instantaneous reactions that prevent a more objective and thorough judgment of our surroundings.

For instance, consider the use of the IAT in a study of medical bias. First, each doctor was shown a picture of a fifty-year-old man. In some pictures, the man was white. In some, he was black. The physicians were then asked to imagine the man in the picture as a patient who presented with symptoms that resembled a heart attack. How would they treat him? Once they gave an answer, they took the racial IAT.

In one regard, the results were typical. Most doctors showed some degree of bias on the IAT. But then, an interesting thing happened: bias on the test did not necessarily translate into bias in treating the hypothetical patient. On average, doctors were just as likely to say they would prescribe the necessary drugs to blacks as to whites—and oddly enough, the more seemingly biased physicians actually treated the two groups more equally than the less biased ones.