Inside the mind of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most renowned character for his powers of thought and observation, and when it comes to using our minds we all want to think like Sherlock Holmes. What Sherlock Holmes offers isn’t just a way of solving crime. It is an entire way of thinking, an entire mindset.

But this extraordinary intellect is not just a gift of fiction, we too can learn to adopt these abilities, to improve our lives at work and at home.

In her book 'Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes' author Maria Konnikova outlines the Holmes thinking methodology and teaches us how to apply it to our own personal and professional lives.

The Holmes System vs The Watson System

Most psychologists today agree that our minds operate on a so called two system basis. One takes a more fast and reactionary approach while the other takes a more deliberate and a thorough effort.

Think of the Watson system as our naive selves, operating by the lazy thought habits, the ones that come most naturally, the so called path of least resistance, that we’ve spent our whole lives acquiring. And think of the Holmes system as our aspirational selves.

As we grow older, the blasé factor increases exponentially. "Been there, done that, don’t need to pay attention to this, and when in the world will I ever need to know or use that?" Before we know it, we become unengaged, lose curiosity and thus host passive, mindless habits. The key is to break from the Watson mode, and learn to think the Sherlock way. It takes work, but it helps us to become better thinkers and to reach our aspirational selves.

5 huge takeaways from the Holmes System

1) The Brain Attic.

Think of the mind as a massive room and the information you put inside your mind as the furniture. The furniture you put can be of your choice. Learning to rewire your thinking can be your furniture. It’s important to keep one thing in mind: we know only what we can remember at any given point. In other words, no amount of knowledge will save us if we can’t recall it at the moment we need it.

Have you ever found yourself reliving a memory with a friend , that time you both ordered the ice cream sundae instead of lunch and then spent the afternoon walking around the town center and heading over to the beach.. only to find that the friend has no idea what you’re talking about? It must have been someone else, he says. "Not me. I’m not a sundae type of guy." Only, you know it was him.

When we try to recall something, we won’t be able to do so if there is too much piled up in the way, and inevitably, junk will creep into the attic. It’s impossible to be as perfectly vigilant as Holmes makes himself out to be. But it is possible to assert more control over the information that does get encoded.

We remember more when we are interested and motivated. When we really want to remember something, we can make a point of paying attention to it, and of saying to ourselves, "This, I want to remember.". Manipulating information, playing around with it and talking it through, making it come alive through stories and gestures, and may be much more effective in getting it to the attic than when you want it to get there just trying to think it over and over.

In one study, 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!

2) Don't jump to conclusions too quickly.

We tend to form conclusions and opinions on just about everything we have around us based on our experiences and perceptions which are often biased. To see the power of biases look at the pictures below.

a) Which face is the more attractive? b) Which person is more competent?

If I were to flash these pictures at you for as little as a second, your opinion would already most likely agree with the judgments of hundreds of others.

These are not random faces but the faces of two rival political candidates, who ran in the 2004 U.S. senate election. And the rating you gave for competence will be highly predictive of the actual winner (it’s the man on the left; did your competence evaluation match up?)

In this case if one element as is here, the physical appearance strikes you as positive, you are likely to see the other elements as positive as well, and everything that doesn’t fit will easily and subconsciously be reasoned away. In approximately 70 percent of cases, competence ratings given in under a second of exposure will predict the actual results of political race.

Here is another example.

Let’s imagine that you need to decide on recruiting a certain person, let’s call her Amy as a potential teammate. Here is a bit about Amy. First, she is intelligent and industrious. Stop right there. Chances are you are already thinking, "Okay, yes, great, she would be a wonderful person to work with, intelligent and industrious are both things I’d love to see in a partner." But what if I was about to continue the statement with, “envious and stubborn”? No longer as good, right? But your initial bias will be remarkably powerful. You will be more likely to discount the latter characteristics and to weigh the former more heavily all because of your initial intuition. Reverse the two, and the opposite happens; no amount of intelligence and industriousness can save someone who you saw initially as envious and stubborn.

While the Holmesian approach here would be to not allow your emotions or first intuitions to override any new information presented to you and take time to evaluate it and to try our best to set the starting point back to a more neutral one, be it in judging a person or observing a situation or making a choice.

3) Meditation, a new approach.

When I say meditation, the images invoked for most people will include monks or yogis. Meditation is nothing more than the quiet distance that you need for mindful thought. It is the ability to create distance, in both time and space. It doesn’t even have to be, as people often assume, a way of experiencing nothing or be as boring as observing your breath rise and fall. As long as your mind is able to focus on something without getting distracted and continues to do so as the distractions inevitably arise, you are meditating.

And Meditation need not be blank. We can also use what’s known as visualization, a focus on a specific mental image that will replace that blankness with something more tangible and accessible. You can focus your energy on something that is more engaging than the rise and fall of your breath. Try this exercise for instance.

Think of a specific situation where you felt angry, your most recent fight with a close friend or your colleague, for instance. Do you have a moment in mind? Recall it as closely as you can, as if you were going through it again. Once you’re done, note how you feel and note far as you can what went wrong. Who was to blame? Why? Do you think it’s something that can be fixed?

Now, Picture the same situation. Only now, I want you to imagine that it is happening to two people who are not you. You are just a small fly on the wall, looking down at the scene and taking note of it. You are free to buzz around and observe from all angles and no one will see you. Once again, as soon as you finish, note how you feel. And then respond to the same questions as before.

You’ve just completed a classic exercise in mental distancing through visualization. It’s a process of picturing something but from a distance, and so, from a perspective that is inherently different from the actual one you have stored in your memory. From scenario one to scenario two, you have gone from a concrete to an abstract mindset; you’ve likely become calmer emotionally, seen things that you missed the first time around, and you may have even come away with a slightly modified memory of what happened. In fact, you may have even become wiser and better at solving problems overall, unrelated to the scenario in question (this is also a form of meditation).

When you distance yourself, you begin to process things more broadly, see connections that you couldn’t see from a closer vantage point. You think as if you had actually changed your location, while you remain seated in your chair.

4) Switching gears.

While encountering big and complex problems at work have you gotten very frustrated when you simply can't find a suitable solution to counter the problem and refused to stop working until you do.. simply to realize that you have gotten even more frustrated and confused than you were when you started?

Holmes refers to this as the three-pipe problem. A three-pipe problem, then: one that requires doing something other than thinking directly about the problem i.e., smoking a pipe in concentrated silence, or playing the violin. But for it to work it’s essential to choose the right activity, be it the pipe or the violin or an opera or something else entirely. Something that is engaging enough that it distracts you properly, and yet not so overwhelming that it prevents reflection from taking place in the background.

 It also needs to have some characteristics: it needs to be unrelated to what you are trying to accomplish (if you are deciding on an important purchase, you shouldn’t go shopping for something else); it needs to be something that doesn’t take too much effort on your part (if you’re trying to learn a new skill, for instance, your brain will be so preoccupied that it won’t be able to free up the resources needed to root through your attic); and yet it needs to be something that engages you on some level (if Holmes hated pipe smoking, he would hardly benefit from a three-pipe; likewise, if he found pipe smoking boring, his mind might be too dulled to do any real thinking).

There’s one activity that is almost tailor-made to work. And it is a simple one indeed: Walking. Walks have been shown repeatedly to stimulate creative thought and problem solving, especially if these walks take place in natural surroundings, like the woods, rather than in more urbanized environments (but both types are better than none). After a walk, people become better at solving problems; they persist longer at difficult tasks; and they become more likely to be able to grasp an insightful solution and see things in a broader perspective. And all from walking past some trees and some sky. Showering also has shown to stimulate thought.

When we switch gears, we in effect move the problem that we have been trying to solve from our conscious brain to our unconscious. While we may think we are doing something else—and indeed, our attentional networks become engaged in something else—our brains don’t actually stop work on the original problem. We may have left our attic to take a walk or play ping pong, but our staging area remains a place of busy activity, with various items being dragged into the light, various combinations being tried, and various approaches being evaluated.

And even if you don’t come to any conclusions or gain any perspective in your time off from a problem, chances are you will return to it both reenergized and ready to expend more effort.

Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik designed a study where a group of adults and children were given anywhere between eighteen and twenty-two tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles), but half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks over two times better than the completed ones.

This proves that your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working, and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. It’s a need for closure, a desire of our minds to resist uncertainty and unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, better, and to completion. And a motivated mind, as we already know, is a far more powerful mind.

5) Find your Watson.

Habit is useful. I’ll even go a step further and say that habit is essential. It frees us up our mind space to think of broader, more strategic issues instead of worrying about the nitty-gritty. It allows us to think on a higher level than we would otherwise be able to do. But the pitfall of habit is mindlessness. It is very easy to stop thinking once something becomes easy and automatic. In other words once something becomes a habit we shift from the Holmes System to the Watson System.

Think about your driving for instance. When you were learning to drive I bet you were mindful of the way you were driving and careful that you were driving properly. But then, all of a sudden, once you were confident in your driving you stopped giving it as much thought (notice how you find yourself drifting off while you're driving?).

Now imagine you were to give driving lessons to say, your niece. When you would talk something through to another person, break it down for their understanding, not only would you once again be forced to pay attention to what you're doing, but you might even see your own driving improving. You might see yourself thinking of the steps differently and becoming more mindful of what you're doing as we do it, if only to set a good example. You might see yourself looking at the road in a fresh way, to be able to formulate what it is that the new driver needs to know and notice, how she should watch and react. You might see patterns emerge that you hadn’t taken into account or been able to see the first time around, when you were so busy mastering driving. Not only will your cognitive resources be freer to see these things, but we will be present enough to take advantage it.

Likewise, Holmes needs Watson’s presence. Notice how in each case he is always teaching his companion, always telling him how he reached this or that conclusion, what his mind did and what path it took. And to do that, he must reflect back on the thought process. He must focus back in on what has become habit. He must be mindful of even those conclusions that he reached mindlessly.

Conclusion

In this digital age our world is changing. We have more resources than Holmes could have ever imagined. The confines of our mind attic have expanded. They key is to keep educating ourselves expanding our knowledge horizons and take advantage of these increased resources available to us than to let them take advantage of us.

We will never be perfect. But we can approach our imperfections mindfully, and in so doing let them make us into more capable thinkers in the long term.