What I've Been Reading

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. 

- William James

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova. In Maria's own words, if you get only one thing out of this book, it should be this: 

The most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn't multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose. 

I did stop and reflect on what I read and write here... human intelligence and exceptionalism are overrated but yet, I read and write a lot on the importance of knowledge (not exceptionalism). The reason being the former can be understood only with the latter (it is never a chicken and egg problem). In other words, parochial knowledge present in most adults is more harmful than no knowledge at all. 

If you have read Conan Doyle and/or watched the modern BBC version of Sherlock Homles then please do yourself a favor and read this book. 

Maria has sketched out some brilliant ideas on how to improve this scare faculty in most of the sapiens. You might want to excuse her for some of the physiological experiments/researches she quotes and focus your attention on how she captures Sherlock's methodological approach to intuition development. 

• Homles recommends we start with the basics. As he says in our first meeting with him, "Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer being by mastering more elementary problems." It not for nothing that Holmes calls the foundation of his inquiry "elementary." For, that is precisely what they are, the very basis of how something works, and what makes it what it is. 

• The scientific method in a nutshell: understand and frame the problem; observe; hypothesize (or imagine), and deduce, and repeat. To follow Sherlock Holmes is to learn to apply that same approach not just of external clues, but to your every thought - and then turn it around and apply it to every thought of every other person who may be involved, step by painstaking step. 

• This is the scientific method at its most basic. Holmes goes on step further. He applies the same principles to human beings: a Holmesian disciple will, "on meeting a fellow-moral, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the facilities of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for." Each observation, each exercise, each simple inference drawn from a simple fact will strengthen your ability to engage in ever-more-complex machinations. It will lay the groundwork for new habits of thinking that will make such observation second nature.

 (What a thought! It was Max, not Holmes who taught me these simple tricks of observation.)

• In order to break the autopiloted mode of thinking, we have to be motivated to think in a mindful, present fashion, to exert effort on what goes through our heads instead of going with the flow. To think like Sherlock Holmes, we must want, actively, to think like him. Motivated subjects always outperform. 

• The 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. 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. And because this foundation is in place, it takes a matter of seconds for him to make his initial observations of Watson's character. That's why Holmes calls it intuition. Accurate intuition, the intuition that Holmes possesses, is of necessity based on training, hours, and hours of it. 

• What we store in our brain's attic matters. Holmes famously didn't care if the Earth went around the sun or the moon. Holmes explains to Watson, "A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain attic." Brain attic is a precious real estate; tread carefully and use it wisely. 

• Uncluttered brain attic, yes but not stark. An attic that contained only the bare essentials for your professional success would be a sad little attic indeed. It would have hardly any material to work with, and it would be practically incapable of any great insight or imagination. Holmes's all-important caveat: the most surprising of articles can end up being useful in the most surprising of ways. You must open your mind to new inputs, however unrelated they may seem. 

• 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 being with. 

• Timeless advice from Holmes: "Read it up - you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."

• We pay attention to everything and nothing as a matter of course. Choosing wisely means being selective. It means not only looking but looking properly, looking with real thoughts. It means looking with the full knowledge that what you note - and how you note it - will form the basis of any future deductions you might make. It's about seeing the full picture, noting the details that matter, and understanding how to contextualize those details within a broader framework of thought. 

• The Holmes solution? Habit, habit, habit. That, and motivation. Become an expert of sorts at those types of decisions or observations that you want to excel at making. Reading people's professions, following their trains of thought, inferring their emotions and thinking from their demeanor. Sherlock illustrates four important elements: selectivity, objectivity, inclusivity, and engagement

• Observational process (Bayesian update): you can set goals to help you filter the world, but be careful lest you use these goals as blinders. Your goals, your priorities, your answer to the "what I want to accomplish" question must be flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. If the available information changes, so should you. Don't be afraid to deviate from the preset plan when it serves the greater objective. 

• Heisenberg uncertainty principle in action: the fact of observing changes the thing being observed. Even an empty room s no longer the same once you're inside. You cannot proceed as if it hasn't changed. This may sound like common sense, but it is actually much harder to understand in practice than it seems in theory. Understanding a situation in its fullness requires several steps, but the first and most fundamental is to realize that observation and deduction are not the same. To observe, you must learn to separate situation from interpretation, yourself from what you're seeing. 

• Another words of wisdom: Nonchoices are choices too. 

• An observant mind, an attentive mind, is a present mind. It is a mind that isn't wandering. It is a mind that is actively engaged in whatever it is that it happens to be doing. And it is a mind that allows System Holmes to step up, instead of letting System Watson run around like crazy, trying to do it all and see it all. 

• Richard Feynman frequently voiced his surprise at the lack of appreciation for what he thought was a central quality in both thinking and science. "It is surprising the people don't believe that there is imagination in science. Not only that view patently false but it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail what has already seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult."

• We tend to think of creativity as an all-or-nothing, you-have-it-or-you-don't characteristic of the mind. But that couldn't be further from the truth. Creativity can be taught. It is just like another muscle-attention, self-control - that can be exercised and grow stronger with use, training, focus, and motivation. 

• Holmes pays one of his rare compliments to Inspector Baynes: "You will rise high in your profession. You have instinct and intuition." What does Baynes do differently from his Scotland Yard counterparts to earn such praise? He anticipates human nature instead of dismissing it, arresting the wrong man on purpose with the goal of lulling the real criminal into a false complacency. 

• One of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action and switching all his thoughts on to lighter things whenever he had convinced himself that he could no longer work to advantage. 

• The most important thing that a change in physical perspective can do is prompt a change in mental perspective. Even Holmes, who unlike Watson doesn't need to be led by the hand and forcibly removed from Baker Street in order to profit from some mental distance, benefits from this property. 

• Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi once said: whenever a task proves difficult or takes time or doesn't have an obvious answer, I pretend I'm in jail. If I'm in jail time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it will take a week. What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.

• More wisdom: when all avenues are exhausted, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. 

• The improbable is not yet impossible. As we deduce, we are too prone to that satisficing tendency, stopping when something is good enough. Until we have exhausted the possibilities and are sure that we have done so, we aren't home clear. We must learn to stretch our experience, to go beyond our initial instinct. We must learn to look for evidence that both confirms and disconfirms and, most important, we must try to look beyond the perspective that is the all too natural one to take: our own. 

• Avoid mindless existence. Education never ends, Watson. Holmes's message to us isn't as one-dimensional as it may seem. Of course, it is good to keep learning: it keeps our minds sharp and alert and prevents us from settling in our ways. But for Holmes, education means something more and questioning your habits, of never allowing System Watson to take over altogether - even though he may have learned a great deal from System Holmes along the way. It's a way of constantly shaking up our habitual behaviors, and never forgetting that, no matter how expert we think are at something, we must remain mindful and motivated in everything we do. 

• Overconfidence is bad. Very bad indeed. Observe these four sets of circumstances where overconfidence predominates. First, overconfidence is most common when facing difficulty: for instance, when we have to make a judgment on a case where there' no way of knowing all the facts. This is called hard-easy effect. Second, overconfidence increases with familiarity. Third, overconfidence increases with information. Finally, overconfidence increases with action (as we actively engage, we become more confident in what we are doing). 

• The genius and humility of Sherlock can be inferred from the following sentence in Yellow Face: "Watson, if it should ever strike you that I getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you."

• Holmes may have his Norburys. But he has chosen to learn from them and make himself a better thinker in the process, every perfecting a mind that already seems sharp beyond anything else. We too, never stop learning, whether we know it or not. At the time of "The Red Circle," Holmes was forty-eight years old. By traditional standards, we might have thought him incapable of any profound change by that point in life. 

• 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 answer. 

 (You don't have to believe this but I have lived this not too long ago. The worst phase of my life when Max was suffering, me being an emotional wreck and surrounded by self-centered humans who have no to little understanding of the human-animal bond - had to make fast decisions, think clearly, and yeah, work-in-a-field which needs constant thinking to pay for Max's treatment. Yes, practice, practice, practice in good times - comes to your rescue during worst of times)

• Holmes even knew about the importance of fasting. "The faculties become refined when you starve them," says Holmes when Watson urges him to consume at least some food. "Why, surely as a doctor, my dear Watson, you must admit that what your digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the brain. I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. Therefore, it is the brain I must consider. 

• Watson understood his friend's need for solitude when Holmes asks him to be left alone: "I knew that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial."

• As Holmes warns over and over, it is the least remarkable crime that is often the most difficult. Nothing breeds complacency like routine and the semblance of normality. Nothing kills vigilance so much as the commonplace. Nothing kills the successful hunter like a complacency bred of that very success, the polar opposite of what enabled that success to begin with. 

• It's easy to see Sherlock Holmes as a hard, cold reasoning machine: the epitome of calculating logic. But that view of Holmes the Logical Automation couldn't be further from the truth. Quite the contrary. What makes Holmes who he is, what places him above detectives, inspectors, and civilians alike, is his willingness to engage in a nonlinear, embrace the hypothetical, entertain the conjecture, it's his capacity for creative thought and imaginative reflection. 

Certainly we should take care not to make the intellect the god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader. 

- Albert Einstien. 

Finally, understand this: 

Never forget that even Holmes had to train himself, that even he was not born thinking like Sherlock Holmes. Nothing just happens out of the blue. We have to work for it. But with proper attention, it happens. It is a remarkable thing, the human brain. 

As it turns out, Holmes's insights can apply to most anything. It's all about the attitude, the mindset, the habits of thinking, the enduring approach to the world that you develop. The specific application itself is far less important. 

Peter Belvin wrote another phenomenal book on Sherlock Holmes - A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes. You can check out my notes/review from 2013 here.