Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Maria Konnikova is an engaging and insightful guide to this fascinating material, which will help you master your own mind. Holmes himself would have been proud to author this fine work! Holmes fan or not, the reader will find Mastermind to be bracing, fascinating, and above all -- and most important -- hopeful.
Using Holmes and Watson as both muse and metaphor, she shows us some of modern psychology's most important lessons for using our minds well. I probably won't be able to solve murders after having read Mastermind, but I will have much to reflect on. Uploaded by Unknown on May 5, Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. The result: the crime as an object of strict scientific inquiry, to be approached by the principles of the scientific method.
Its servant: the human mind. What Is the Scientific Method of Thought? Simple seeming enough. But how to go beyond that? Can we train our minds to work like that automatically, all the time? Holmes recommends we start with the basics. And that is something that not even every scientist acknowledges outright, so ingrained is it in his way of thinking.
Indeed, he may have a hard time telling you from where exactly he got the idea for a study —and why he first thought it would make sense. To his consternation, the texts appeared to leave students more confused than enlightened. Each book he examined was worse than the one prior. Finally, he came upon a promising beginning: a series of pictures, of a windup toy, an automobile, and a boy on a bicycle.
Alas, his elation was short lived. Why did it make it go? How did it make it go? And that is precisely what Holmes means when he tells us that we must begin with the basics, with such mundane problems that they might seem beneath our notice.
The simplicity is deceptive, as you will learn in the next two chapters. In your case, it may be a decision whether or not to change careers. Whatever the specific issue, you must define and formulate it in your mind as specifically as possible—and then you must fill it in with past experience and present observation. It has all been done before. Only then do you test. What does your hypothesis imply? And you will run through career change scenarios and try to play out the implications to their logical, full conclusion.
That, too, is manageable, as you will later learn. Times change. Circumstances change. That original knowledge base must always be updated. As our environment changes, we must never forget to revise and retest out hypotheses. The thoughtful can become unthinking through our failure to keep engaging, challenging, pushing. That, in a nutshell, is the scientific method: understand and frame the problem; observe; hypothesize or imagine ; test and deduce; and repeat. For what kind of scientist is that who lacks the ability to imagine and hypothesize the new, the unknown, the as-of-yet untestable?
This is the scientific method at its most basic. Holmes goes a step further. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. It will lay the groundwork for new habits of thinking that will make such observation second nature.
That is precisely what Holmes has taught himself—and can now teach us—to do. Not only can he solve the hardest of crimes, but he does so with an approach that seems, well, elementary when you get right down to it. This approach is based in science, in specific steps, in habits of thought that can be learned, cultivated, and applied. That all sounds good in theory. But how do you even begin? On the one hand, most of us have a long way to go.
But on the other hand, new thought habits can be learned and applied. Our brains are remarkably adept at learning new ways of thinking—and our neural connections are remarkably flexible, even into old age. At first it will seem unnatural. Nothing is taken at face value. Everything is scrutinized and considered, and only then accepted or not, as the case may be. Unfortunately, our minds are, in their default state, averse to such an approach.
In order to think like Sherlock Holmes, we first need to overcome a sort of natural resistance that pervades the way we see the world. Most psychologists now agree that our minds operate on a so-called two-system basis. One system is fast, intuitive, reactionary—a kind of constant fight-or- flight vigilance of the mind. The other is slower, more deliberative, more thorough, more logical —but also much more cognitively costly. As a matter of course, we go. Only when something really catches our attention or forces us to stop or otherwise jolts us do we begin to know, turning on the more thoughtful, reflective, cool sibling.
You can guess which is which. When we think as a matter of course, our minds are preset to accept whatever it is that comes to them. First we believe, and only then do we question. And while it takes no effort whatsoever to remain in true mode, a switch of answer to false requires vigilance, time, and energy.
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes it this way: our brains must believe something in order to process it, if only for a split second. Imagine I tell you to think of pink elephants. We understand and believe in the same instant. In the case of the pink elephants the disconfirming process is simple. The more complicated a concept or idea, or the less obviously true or false There are no poisonous snakes in Maine. True or false? But even that can be factually verified.
How about: The death penalty is not as harsh a punishment as life imprisonment. What now? Likewise, if we are busy, stressed, distracted, or otherwise depleted mentally, we may keep something marked as true without ever having taken the time to verify it—when faced with multiple demands, our mental capacity is simply too limited to be able to handle everything at once, and the verification process is one of the first things to go.
When that happens, we are left with uncorrected beliefs, things that we will later recall as true when they are, in fact, false. Are there poisonous snakes in Maine? Yes, as a matter of fact there are. And not everything that our intuition says is black and white is so in reality. In fact, not only do we believe everything we hear, at least initially, but even when we have been told explicitly that a statement is false before we hear it, we are likely to treat it as true.
For he, perhaps better than anyone else, can serve as a trusty companion, an ever-present model for how to accomplish what may look at first glance like a herculean task.
By observing Holmes in action, we will become better at observing our own minds. Stamford smiles enigmatically in response. To Sherlock Holmes, the world has become by default a pink elephant world. And by the end of this book, if you ask yourself the simple question, What would Sherlock Holmes do and think in this situation?
That thoughts that you never before realized existed are being stopped and questioned before being allowed to infiltrate your mind. That those same thoughts, properly filtered, can no longer slyly influence your behavior without your knowledge. And just like a muscle that you never knew you had—one that suddenly begins to ache, then develop and bulk up as you begin to use it more and more in a new series of exercises—with practice your mind will see that the constant observation and never-ending scrutiny will become easier.
It will become, as it is to Sherlock Holmes, second nature. You will begin to intuit, to deduce, to think as a matter of course, and you will find that you no longer have to give it much conscious effort. Holmes may be fictional, but Joseph Bell was very real. And maybe Sherlock Holmes so captures our minds for the very reason that he makes it seem possible, effortless even, to think in a way that would bring the average person to exhaustion. He makes the most rigorous scientific approach to thinking seem attainable.
Unlike Watson, though, we can learn to see the clarity before the fact. In essence, it comes down to one simple formula: to move from a System Watson— to a System Holmes—governed thinking takes mindfulness plus motivation. That, and a lot of practice. Mindfulness, in the sense of constant presence of mind, the attentiveness and hereness that is so essential for real, active observation of the world. Motivation, in the sense of active engagement and desire.
System Holmes offers the type of retracing of steps that requires attentive recall, so that we break the autopilot and instead remember just where and why we did what we did. We do things mindlessly to conserve our resources for something more important than the location of our keys.
To think like Sherlock Holmes, we must want, actively, to think like him. In fact, motivation is so essential that researchers have often lamented the difficulty of getting accurate performance comparisons on cognitive tasks for older and younger participants. The older adults are often far more motivated to perform well. They try harder. They engage more. They are more serious, more present, more involved. To them, the performance matters a great deal.
Not so younger adults. How, then, can you accurately compare the two groups? Motivated subjects always outperform.
Students who are motivated perform better on something as seemingly immutable as the IQ test—on average, as much as. Not only that, but motivation predicts higher academic performance, fewer criminal convictions, and better employment outcomes. If we are motivated to learn a language, we are more likely to succeed in our quest.
Indeed, when we learn anything new, we learn better if we are motivated learners. And then, of course, there is that final piece of the puzzle: practice, practice, practice. You have to supplement your mindful motivation with brutal training, thousands of hours of it. There is no way around it. Think of the phenomenon of expert knowledge: experts in all fields, from master chess players to master detectives, have superior memory in their field of choice. A chess player often holds hundreds of games, with all of their moves, in his head, ready for swift access.
Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson argues that experts even see the world differently within their area of expertise: they see things that are invisible to a novice; they are able to discern patterns at a glance that are anything but obvious to an untrained eye; they see details as part of a whole and know at once what is crucial and what is incidental. Even Holmes could not have begun life with System Holmes at the wheel.
You can be sure that in his fictional world he was born, just as we are, with Watson at the controls. For the most part, System Watson is the habitual one. But if we are conscious of its power, we can ensure that it is not in control nearly as often as it otherwise would be.
As Holmes often notes, he has made it a habit to engage his Holmes system, every moment of every day. In so doing, he has slowly trained his quick-to- judge inner Watson to perform as his public outer Holmes.
Through sheer force of habit and will, he has taught his instant judgments to follow the train of thought of a far more reflective approach. Accurate intuition, the intuition that Holmes possesses, is of necessity based on training, hours and hours of it. What Holmes has done is to clarify the process, break down how hot can become cool, reflexive become reflective. As their first case together draws to a close, Dr.
But in the following pages, you will learn to do the exact same thing for your every thought, from its very inception—just as Arthur Conan Doyle did in his defense of George Edalji, and Joseph Bell in his patient diagnoses.
Sherlock Holmes came of age at a time when psychology was still in its infancy. We are far better equipped than he could have ever been. Sherlock Holmes, p. One of the most widely held notions about Sherlock Holmes has to do with his supposed ignorance of Copernican theory.
If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work. And ignorance of the solar system is quite an omission for someone who we might hold up as the model of the scientific method, is it not? But two things about that perception bear further mention. And in true-to-canon form, Sherlock the BBC series does end on a note of scientific triumph: Holmes does know astronomy after all, and that knowledge saves the day—and the life of a little boy.
In fact, I would argue that he exaggerates his ignorance precisely to draw our attention to a second—and, I think, much more important—point. Behind the shutters, a tiny face peeking out at the world.
A small room with sloped sides and a foreign creature with a funny face waiting to pull the cord and turn the light off or on? Maybe it has a chimney. But whatever it looks like, it is a space in your head, specially fashioned for storing the most disparate of objects.
And yes, there is certainly a cord that you can pull to turn the light on or off at will. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain- attic. In the chapters that follow, we will trace the role of the brain attic from the inception to the culmination of the thought process, exploring how its structure and content work at every point —and what we can do to improve that working on a regular basis.
How it processes that information. How it sorts it and stores it for the future. How it may choose to integrate it or not with contents that are already in the attic space.
It can expand, albeit not indefinitely, or it can contract, depending on how we use it in other words, our memory and processing can become more or less effective. Our memories. Our past. The base of our knowledge, the information we start with every time we face a challenge.
It may take just as long, but we can learn to think differently. The basic structure may be there for good, but we can learn to alter its exact linkages and building blocks—and that alteration will actually rebuild the attic, so to speak, rewiring our neural connections as we change our habits of thought.
Just as with any renovation, some of the major overhauls may take some time. In other words, our brains can learn new skills quickly—and they can continue to do so throughout our lives, not just when we are younger. As for the contents: while some of those, too, are there to stay, we can be selective about what we keep in the future—and can learn to organize the attic so that those contents we do want are easiest to access, and those we either value less or want to avoid altogether move further into the corners.
There are marks of blood in the room, but there is no wound upon his person. Is the case as singular as all that? Gregson and his colleague, Inspector Lestrade, seem to think so. Not a clue in sight. Holmes, however, has an idea. Do you remember the case, Gregson? Presumably, both men had at one point been acquainted with the circumstances— after all, Gregson has had to train extensively for his current position—and yet the one has retained them for his use, while for the other they have evaporated into nonexistence.
It all has to do with the nature of the brain attic. Our default System Watson attic is jumbled and largely mindless. Gregson may have once known about Van Jansen but has lacked the requisite motivation and presence to retain his knowledge. Why should he care about old cases? In his attic, knowledge does not get lost. He has made a deliberate decision that these details matter.
And that decision has, in turn, affected how and what—and when—he remembers. Our memory is in large part the starting point for how we think, how our preferences form, and how we make decisions. He should know: he would not have even existed as we know him had Arthur Conan Doyle not retrieved his experiences with Dr.
Joseph Bell from memory in creating his fictional detective. In the earliest days of research, memory was thought to be populated with so- called engrams, memory traces that were localized in specific parts of the brain.
To locate one such engram—for the memory of a maze—psychologist Karl Lashley taught rats to run through a labyrinth. Rather, memory was widely distributed in a connected neural network—one that may look rather familiar to Holmes.
Today, it is commonly accepted that memory is divided into two systems, one short- and one long-term, and while the precise mechanisms of the systems remain theoretical, an atticlike view—albeit a very specific kind of attic—may not be far from the truth. From there, the stuff that you either actively consider important or that your mind somehow decides is worth storing, based on past experience and your past directives i. This is called consolidation. When you need to recall a specific memory that has been stored, your mind goes to the proper file and pulls it out.
Sometimes the file slips and by the time you get it out into the light, its contents have changed from when you first placed them inside—only you may not be aware of the change. In any case, you take a look, and you add anything that may seem newly relevant. Then you replace it in its spot in its changed form. Those steps are called retrieval and reconsolidation, respectively. Some things get stored; some are thrown out and never reach the main attic.
Contents shift, change, and re-form with every shake of the box where they are stored. Throw a few photo albums up there, and the pictures may get mixed together so that the images from one trip merge with those from another one altogether.
It stays on top, fresh and ready for your next touch though who knows what it may take with it on its next trip out. To cultivate our knowledge actively, we need to realize that items are being pushed into our attic space at every opportunity. It is all too easy to let the world come unfiltered into your attic space, populating it with whatever inputs may come its way or whatever naturally captures your attention by virtue of its interest or immediate relevance to you.
It must have been someone else, he says. Not me. Only, you know it was him. Conversely, have you ever been on the receiving end of that story, having someone recount an experience or event or moment that you simply have no recollection of? And you can bet that that someone is just as certain as you were that it happened just the way he recalls. But that, warns Holmes, is a dangerous policy. A boy will die and Benedict Cumberbatch will upset our expectations.
Instead, competing memories will vie for our attention. I may try to remember that crucial asteroid and think instead of an evening where I saw a shooting star or what my astronomy professor was wearing when she first lectured to us about comets. It all depends on how well organized my attic is—how I encoded the memory to begin with, what cues are prompting its retrieval now, how methodical and organized my thought process is from start to finish.
I may have stored something in my attic, but whether or not I have done so accurately and in a way that can be accessed in a timely fashion is another question altogether.
But that need not be the case. Inevitably, junk will creep into the attic. 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. Chances are, Watson was quite capable of retaining his medical training—and the minutiae of his romantic escapades. In other words, he was motivated to remember. How could he not remember something so important? 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.
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. 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.
Anything to distinguish it and make it somehow more personal, relatable, and—crucially— memorable. At any given moment, you only think you know what you know. But what you really know is what you can recall. How is the content of our attic activated by its structure? For months, no case of note has crossed his path. And so the detective takes solace, to Dr. According to Holmes, it stimulates and clarifies his mind—a necessity when no food for thought is otherwise available.
You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. I can dispense then with artificial stimulant. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. Hudson, enters with an announcement: a young lady by the name of Miss Mary Morstan has arrived to see Sherlock Holmes. 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. 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. 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? 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. Your speed of categorization in each of these circumstances determines your implicit bias. On the race-related attitudes IAT, about 68 percent of over 2.
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