Precarious Memories, Sapiens & 2020

Why we creatures never tend to learn from history? From world wars to pandemics have already happened multiple times but yet we refuse to remember it leave alone learning from it. 

One thing I am certain about the future... well future as in this time next year, most sapiens would have eradicated the memories of Coronavirus and what we went through in 2020 (except the ones who lost their loved ones). 

By refusing to talk about it and think about it, they not only purge their memories but also deprive themselves of developing gratitude for ordinary times.  This is one of the fundamental issues with our brains and it is as dangerous as a nuclear bomb. 

Jen Gerson has an insightful column on the same - you will forget 2020. But you'll remember the parties to come: 

As our dread year 2020 lumbers to its preordained end, I can't help but think about the tricky matter of memory. Why is it that some crises and events seem forever etched into the stories that societies tell about themselves, while others fade into nothing? This has been an unbearable, even apocalyptic year for so many of us and yet I can't help but shake the sense that I will soon be shocked by just how aggressively we will pursue forgetfulness. Once the jabs are in and the bodies tallied, what words will be forbidden? What things will we not talk about?

The 1918 pandemic was another one of those terrible crises that society seemed too-eager to forget once it was over — in stark contrast to the First World War, which although horrific, actually cost fewer lives than that terrible flu. Historians like Alfred W. Crosby have pointed out that the pandemic was not only missing from many modern history texts, it was largely absent from the writing of many of the great Golden Age authors of the '20s. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway — the flu is barely mentioned. 

[---]

I think we seek to forget the stories that make us feel helpless, and the ones that seem to pull us apart. This happened in 1918, too. Diaries that recollect that event seem to suggest that the lockdowns and fear; the sense that one could not help each other or one's neighbours, left the social fabric forever altered. As noted in this Atlantic article, John Delano, a New Haven, Connecticut, resident, said in 1997: “They didn’t visit each other, bring food over, have parties all the time. The neighborhood changed. People changed. Everything changed.”

When one watches anti-mask protests and witnesses friends and family fall to the intellectual ravages of conspiracy theories on social media, does that not feel a little familiar? No one wants to memorialize a time in which it's impossible to think well of oneself and his neighbours. 

I think we're going to forget 2020. I think we're going to go to some effort to ensure this lost year stays that way.

In other words, Sapiens want to forget stories where they are not superheroes and heroes. Once again, it baffles me how we made it this far. 

Max 2021 Holiday Card

My world turned upside one year ago. I was 45 years old and for the first time, I saw death. I was alone with Max and saw him breathe for one last time. 

I was hoping he would recover and spend more years with me. But as though he knew that the world would be a completely different place in the next 100 days and he didn't want to be inside the vet's office alone while I was waiting in the car outside. 

For more than 18 months, he had shrugged off cancer inside him and lived the way Max always lived. It aches each moment when I realize I will never see him again. It aches when I know I cannot kiss his vet nose. It aches that I cannot bite his lips while wresting on the floor and those peaceful sleep cuddling next to each other happened for one last time last year this day. 

Pain is inevitable in life but suffering is optional. In those 18 months, he taught not to suffer but not suffering even with multiple rounds of chemo, radiation, and tons of medicine. I hope whatever I am feeling now is pain and not suffering. 

I miss my Max. Nothing interests me nor am I passionate about anything; all passions were spent in the way we lived together. The light of that passion is what keeps me still alive but I have no idea why. 

Albert O. Hirschmann Timeless Wisdom - Hamlet Was Wrong

This belief we have that the future is knowable is crazy. People need to have the freedom to take more chances.

- Malcolm Gladwell 

Albert O. Hirschmann is one of my heroes. Not only he has influenced me in understanding what matters in life (by zooming in and out of macro as well as micro) but also a rare human who helps me every day on how I think and frame the problems I solve at work.  

Max's 2013 holiday card  Observe, Observe Perpetually is my all-time favorite and that was the year I learned about Hirschmann (that too posthumously, what kind of a moron am I!). 

Malcolm Gladwell in this interview (thank you) talks about how Hirshmann lived his life using this simple phrase - "Prove Hamlet Wrong"

Shakespeare's Hamlet is famous for his indecisiveness and ironically, a lot of people connect with that (including thyself in my younger years). The genius of Hirschmann was that every time he countered uncertainty, he made it a habit to prove Hamlet was wrong. In other words, he refused to be paralyzed by indecisiveness and took spontaneous decisions. 

Nothing kills progress faster than indecision

This should never be confused with the bullshit of "carpet diem" nor using the phrase "gut feeling" to justify their self-centered lives.  These spontaneous decisions are based on years of honing one's intuitions based on the infinite and continuous feedback between emotions and reasons (remember Antonio Damasio's wisdom?). 

I spent my early years being Hamlet and looking back, the spontaneous decision of bringing Max home on 05/21/2006 is probably when I started following Hirschmann's mantra even before I heard of Hirschmann. To state the obvious; that decision was the best decision of my life. 

The core idea is to be an informed contrarian, not influenced by "standards" of the society plus more importantly, patience and persistence to understand and execute those decisions. 

Gladwell's original column on Hirshmann "The Gift Of Doubt" sums it beautifully in Hirshmann's own words:

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be. 

In other words, don't get tangled in trying to be creative but instead make it a simple daily habit and way of life. 

Jane Goodall's Interview With Krista Tippett

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

A lot of my frustrations come out on this blog regarding the incapacity of humans to understand animal suffering, human-animal bond, and lack of understanding of my relationship with Max. But these frustrations are ridiculous when compared to what Jane Goodall faced in the 1980s (I cannot even begin to imagine how it was in the 1500s and what Montaigne had to face with his fellow sapiens). 

Amazing progress has been made in the last 30 years because of a few human beings like Jane Goodall. Please ignore my frustrations, the truth is Max and I benefited immensely from this progress.

Peter Singer focused on morality and animal suffering but Jane Goodall focused on "why" they suffer. The answer is a rudimentary one - non-human animals have immense cognitive abilities and they are sentient, period.

Please do listen to this heartwarming interview...

KT: It’s worth underlining, because it’s so hard for people now to imagine, that as late as the latter half of the twentieth century, human beings thought that we were the only creatures who made tools.

JG: That’s what was, from science, believed. If somebody at that time had gone to the Pygmies in the rainforest in Congo, they could’ve told you.

When I finally was made to go to Cambridge University, by Louis Leakey—he said I needed a degree to get money—

KT: And, also, you were the eighth person in the history of Cambridge to come in to do graduate work without an undergraduate degree, which was almost unheard of.

JG: I was greeted by scientists who said, “You’ve done your study wrong. You can’t talk about personality, problem solving, or emotions,” because those were thought to be unique to us. I was actually taught, and it’s in the textbooks, that the difference between us and all other animals is one of kind. But my dog Rusty taught me when I was a child that that certainly wasn’t true: we’re not the only beings on the planet with personalities, minds, and emotions. We are part of, not separate from, the animal kingdom.

Arrogant Western science. I think it probably stems from religion. God made man, God made man different, God made man to have dominion over the birds and the animals and the fish and so on. But that is a wrong translation. The original Hebrew word is more like “steward,” not dominion.

KT: There’s social and emotional continuity with the natural world. We’re creatures, rather than just all the other creatures being creatures.

JG: It’s just very arrogant to think that way. I was told at Cambridge that you have to be absolutely objective, you must not have empathy with your subject. “You shouldn’t have named the chimpanzees,” they told me, “they should’ve had numbers.” To me, that was so wrong. When I was watching a chimpanzee family, for example, and one of the young ones did something a little strange, it’s because I was empathetic toward them that I thought, They do it because of . . . whatever. That gives you a platform, and you can stand on that platform and then analyze what you’ve seen in a scientific way. But it’s the empathy that gives that aha moment.

By 1986, I had my PhD, I’d built up a research station, and, best of all, I could spend hours alone in the rainforest. That’s where I felt that deep, spiritual connection to the natural world and, also, came to understand the interconnectedness of all living things in this tapestry of life, where each species, no matter how insignificant, plays a vital role in the whole pattern. And I imagined continuing in that way, well, for the rest of my life. Why not?

And it was when I published that big book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, and it had all my scientific observations, but it also had all the stories. Science is apt to scoff at a story; they are apt to scoff at anecdotes. But an anecdote can be a very carefully recorded observation. It’s an anecdote because you only see it once, but those anecdotes are sometimes the key to unlocking a puzzle. They’re terribly important. And a collection of anecdotes, stories, has been very, very important in my research.

So anyway, we organized a conference with the then-director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, Dr. Paul Heltne—I think there were six other study sites back then, and we invited scientists from each and, also, a few from noninvasive, captive research, like big zoo groups, for example. The main object was to see how chimp behavior differed from environment to environment.

[---]

KT: I believe that the title of your book, In the Shadow of Man, in 1971, was that chimpanzees live in the shadow of man, as we had evolved to overshadow them with our powers of thought and speech. But what you also then picked up was how we had evolved and become a threat to the natural world from which we emerged and with which we remained in kinship.

JG: The biggest difference between us, chimps, and other animals is the explosive development of our intellect. Because science is now acknowledging that animals are not the machines they once thought, there’s a huge flurry of information about animal intelligence. It ranges from chimpanzees using computers in clever ways, elephants with their very close social bonds and strong relationships between herd members, and crows, who turn out to be able to actually use and make tools. And pigs—we can come back to factory farms later, perhaps— pigs are as intelligent as dogs, more intelligent than some. And now we know the octopus is highly intelligent. We know trees communicate with each other.

So here we are, with this intellect that’s enabled us to do something very different from all the animal successes, and that’s design a rocket, for example, that went up to Mars. Bizarre, isn’t it, that the most intellectual creature that’s ever lived on the planet is destroying its only home? There’s a disconnect between that clever, clever brain and human heart, love, and compassion. Only when head and heart work in harmony can we attain our true human potential. 

Also, support and join Roots & Shoots - Jane Goodall's initiative to educate children on bringing positive change in their community.

What I've Been Reading

We are at one with all other creatures. Humans do not rank above other animals, or below them. There is no cosmic scale of value, no great chain of being; no external standard by which the worth of a life can be judged. Humans are humans, cats are cats. The difference is that, while cats have nothing to learn from us, we can learn from them how to lighten the load that comes with being human. 

One burden we can give up is the idea that there could be a perfect life. It is not that our lives are inevitably imperfect. They are richer than any idea of perfection. The good life is not a life you might have led or may yet lead, but the life you already have. Here, cats can be our teachers, for they do not miss the lives they have not lived. 

Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray. 

To state the obvious again; no one has influenced my thinking other than John Gray. Reading this is book is nothing but a guilty pleasure. Most of Gray's writings starts as a confirmation bias for me. 

Nevertheless, Gray motivates and helps me understand that I am not alone. Thank you, sir. 

Yuval Harri of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind fame is a splendid writer but John Gray has been writing better books for decades and much more to offer. I might be wrong, I do see Gray's influence in Harri's writing (check out their interview together). I wish more people read and understand John Gray's basic wisdom. 

Following are the ten lessons from the book; self-observation are in parenthesis:

1. Never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable

Trying to persuade human beings to be rational is like trying to teach cats to be vegans. Human beings use reason to bolster whatever they want to believe, seldom to find out if what they believe is true. This may be unfortunate, but there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it. If human unreason frustrates or endangers you, walk away.

(I understand this in theory and I do follow this in practice than most sapiens. But yet, I do forget this most important lesson often when in midst of sapiens. Call it Ulysses style self control; I spend most of my time with Neo, Fluffy, and Garph.) 

2. It is foolish to complain that you do not have enough time

If you think you do not have enough time, you do not know how to pass your time. Do what serves the purpose of yours and what you enjoy doing for its own sake. Live like this, and you will have plenty of time.

(Well, Max taught me this lesson 14 years ago and still dominates  lesson persists all my actions)

3. Do not look for meaning in your suffering

If you are unhappy, you may seek comfort in your misery, but you risk making it the meaning of your life. Do not become attached to your suffering, and avoid those who do.

(This I learned from Fluffy. I did go out of my misery against every cell in my body to bring Neo home within three days after Max passed away.)

4. It is better to be indifferent to others than to feel you have to love them

Few ideals have been more harmful than that of universal love. Better cultivate indifference, which may turn into kindness.

(Most of my disagreements with Sapiens come from this lesson. In these polite, white lies filled and politically correct disillusioned life has little place for people like me. I do understand that most people don't  follw this lesson, and naturally, I don't give a fuck about it) 

5. Forget about pursuing happiness, and you may find it

You will not find happiness by chasing after it, since you do not know what will make you happy. Instead, do what you find most interesting and you will be happy knowing nothing of happiness.

(Thomas Jefferson made the biggest mistake of his life by adding the phrase "pursuit of happiness". That mistake has eventually lead us to Huxley's Brave New World where people cannot emote even when Max passed away.) 

6. Life is not a story

If you think of your life as a story, you will be tempted to write it to the end. But you do not know how your life will end, or what will happen before it does. It would be better to throw the script away. The unwritten life is more worth living than any story you can invent.

(No kidding! Unwritten is more worth living indeed. My favorite quote Mind as a River has been a guiding force to drop my "story" in a heart beat)

7. Do not fear the dark, for much that is precious is found in the night

You have been taught to think before you act, and often that may be good advice. Acting on how you feel at the moment may be no more than obeying worn-out philosophies you have accepted without thinking. But sometimes it is better to follow an inkling that glimmers in the shadows. You never know where it may lead you.

(I have written many times over the years on how depression is an "oil change" for the brain and has always helped me to think clearly.)

8. Sleep for the joy of sleeping

Sleeping so that you can work harder when you wake up is a miserable way to live. Sleep for pleasure, not profit.

(Once again, Max taught me this.)

9. Beware anyone who offers to make you happy

Those who offer to make you happy do so in order that they themselves may be less unhappy. Your suffering is necessary to them, since without it they would have less reason for living. Mistrust people who say they live for others.

(Same as #5 and #4)

10. If you cannot learn to live a little more like a cat, return without regret to the human world of diversion

Living like a cat means wanting nothing beyond the life you lead. This means living without consolations, and that might be too much for you to bear. If so, take up an old-fashioned religion, preferably one that abounds in rituals. If you cannot find a faith that suits you, lose yourself in common life. The excitement and disappointments of romantic love, the pursuit of money and ambition, the charades of politics, and the clamour of the news will soon banish any sense of emptiness.

(I cannot ever return to the human world of diversion. I don't fit it nor I want to fit in. Just the mere thought of it gives me nightmares) 

There are thousands of more lessons I learned and still learning from Fluffy and Garph. I will continue to observe, incorporate those lessons into my life, and jot it down here until I fall. 

The point is a cat is just one of many from the non-human animal creed. There are zillion lessons Max taught me and Neo teaches from a different dimension. I learn rich and diverse lessons from individual's from a single species namely dog and cat, There are other second-hand lessons I learned from Elephants, African Grey Parrots, Octopus, Ravens, and Dolphins for starters. 

It is no accident that my time was filled with wonder every moment I spent with Max and now, the wonder continues in a different dimension with Fluffy, Garph, and Neo. 

My little world with an infinitesimal allocated time and a life with no significance became richer since I stepped outside of myself and tried to step into Max's world. I can only hope that I stepped out far enough; that is one of the reasons I want to experience psychedelics. 

To put it bluntly and paraphrasing John Gray - It's just plain boring to spend this precious life basking in my own and fellow sapiens' unwavering "imagined" radiance. 

Why I Loved & Will Always Love Biology

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.

This is biology.

– Bert Hubert, Our Amazing Immune System

I was just an average kid at school but by sheer coincidence, I was school first in biology and history.  I guess, what you subconsciously love comes out naturally. But I didn't pursue biology from high school for one reason and one reason only - I couldn't kill animals. Nevertheless, that love for biology only increased with time. 

James Summer has a brilliant hindsight observation on the same-shared love of biology - I should have loved biology:

I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.

In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail:

For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.

I wish my high school biology teacher had asked the class how an embryo could possibly differentiate—and then paused to let us really think about it. The whole subject is in the answer to that question. A chemical gradient in the embryonic fluid is enough of a signal to slightly alter the gene expression program of some cells, not others; now the embryo knows “up” from “down”; cells at one end begin producing different proteins than cells at the other, and these, in turn, release more refined chemical signals; ...; soon, you have brain cells and foot cells.

How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that? It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined?

Someone should have said this to me:

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.

This is biology.

– Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”

A Parasite's Perspective - Kevin Lafferty

Relationships Are Everlasting Stories

Out of the blue, I listen to this beautiful old Tamil song after decades. It minded me of those four days in October 2019... it had a happy ending. Max is not here anymore but he came home and that beckons everlasting peace in my short life. 

The English translation (which losses much of the essence) goes like this: 

Relationships are everlasting stories

Feelings are like short stories 

One story can conclude 

While its end might lead to another

Only happiness beckons hereafter 

Only happiness beckons hereafter 

[---]

Your heart feels heavy 

I am here from you

I will bear the burden 

The corner of your eyes 

Why are they wet?

I will soothe those tears 

Your sorrows would end 

The mist would clear 

Oh milky cloud 

I will blend in your renewed beauty 

[---]

Life is like a song

And the melody is growing 

Every day will be filled with happiness 

So far you have only seen sorrow

From now on there will be only happiness

A new melody of happiness is starting now

A fresh flow of water in the river,

And it's merging with the ocean

Similarly, our bond has joined again today 

And happiness is born

[---]

Relationships are everlasting stories

Feelings are like short stories 

One story can conclude 

While its end might lead to another

Only happiness beckons hereafter 

Only happiness beckons hereafter 

Max's first day, first photograph 05/21/2006

This relationship of ours was a short story but yet, it is a small part of the least understood and everlasting human-animal bond. 

These simple bonds will not only outlive self-centered humans but someday might save and protect this beautiful planet. 

Thank you Max for giving me a glimpse of life before I fall. 

Your Immune System Is Your Greatest Asset — Here’s How to Care for It

Complex systems need huge respect and patience. The immune system is the mother of all complex systems in a living body (more important than the brain). Food, microbiomes, a clean-chemical-free environment, exercise, calm mind are some of the myriads of simple things that make up a good immune system life long. 

But yeah, it easier to dwell in conspiracy theories than meditate constantly on complex systems. 

For the past 17 years, I have interviewed people with medical evidence for recovery from incurable illnesses. Like the now disproven idea of spontaneous generation, there’s also nothing spontaneous about spontaneous remission. In cases that were previously considered flukes with no medical or scientific value, there are actually identifiable factors associated with how these individuals created abundant health and vitality in the face of great odds. The healing of their immune systems is a critical part of their stories.

It turns out that you don’t have a heart problem, a diabetes problem, a blood pressure problem, a cancer problem, or an autoimmune problem as much as you have a chronic inflammation problem. Chronic inflammation is an immune system gone awry, damaging the body it was designed to protect. If you want to decrease the amount of chronic inflammation in your body, then you need to heal your immune system.

You have an amazing immune system, with brilliant cells and cell-subtypes, all of which want to unleash their superpowers and keep you healthy and vital. For that to occur, you need to give your cells the proper conditions. One of the most important things you can do is give yourself real food, mostly plants, and largely eliminate processed foods, sugar, and refined flours from your diet.

Food is either medicine or poison, depending on what it contains, so you want to eat a clean diet. Don’t over-medicate. Flush your lymphatic system regularly with lots of water. Get plenty of rest. Spend time with people you love who make you laugh.

- More here

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.