Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

by Maria Konnikova

  Consider “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” when Holmes decides at the last moment not to give up the suspect to Scotland Yard. “No I couldn’t do it, Watson,” he says to the doctor.

  “Once that warrant was made out, nothing on earth would save him. Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience. Let us know a little more before we act.”

  You don’t mindlessly follow the same preplanned set of actions that you had determined early on. Circumstances change, and with them so does the approach. You have to think before you leap to act, or to judge someone, as the case may be. Everyone makes mistakes, but some may not be mistakes as such, when taken in context of the time and the situation. (After all, we wouldn’t make a choice if we didn’t think it the right one at the time.) And if you do decide to keep to the same path, despite the changes, at least you will choose the so-called nonoptimal route mindfully, and with full knowledge of why you’re doing it. And you will learn to always “know a little more” before you act. As William James puts it, “We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of credulity. The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another; and may he whose plane tips in no way be the first to cast a stone!”

  Acknowledging Limitations

  The hunter knows his weak spots. If he has a blind side, he asks someone to cover it; or he makes sure it is not exposed, if no one is available. If he tends to overshoot, he knows that, too. Whatever the handicap, he must take it into account if he is to emerge successful from the hunt.

  In “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” Holmes realizes where the eponymous lady has disappeared to only when it is almost too late to save her. “Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson,” he says, once they return home, having beaten the clock by mere minutes, “it can only be as an example of that temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be exposed. Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest is he who can recognize and repair them. To this modified credit I may, perhaps, make some claim.”

  The hunter must err before he realizes where his weakness may lie. The difference between the successful hunter and the unsuccessful one isn’t a lack of error. It is the recognition of error, and the ability to learn from it and to prevent its occurrence in the future. We need to recognize our limitations in order to overcome them, to know that we are fallible, and to recognize the fallibility that we see so easily in others in our own thoughts and actions. If we don’t, we’ll be condemned to always believe in fairies—or to never believe in them, even should signs point to the need for a more open-minded consideration.

  Cultivating Quiet

  A hunter knows when to quiet his mind. If he allows himself to always take in everything that is there for the taking, his senses will become overwhelmed. They will lose their sharpness. They will lose their ability to focus on the important signs and to filter out the less so. For that kind of vigilance, moments of solitude are essential.

  Watson makes the point succinctly in The Hound of the Baskervilles, when Holmes asks to be left alone. His friend doesn’t complain. “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,” he writes.

  The world is a distracting place. It will never quiet down for you, nor will it leave you alone of its own accord. The hunter must seek out his own seclusion and solitude, his own quietness of mind, his own space in which to think through his tactics, his approaches, his past actions, and his future plans. Without that occasional silence, there can be little hope of a successful hunt.

  Constant Vigilance

  And most of all, a hunter never lets down his guard, not even when he thinks that no tiger in its right mind could possibly be out and about in the heat of the afternoon sun. Who knows, it might just be the day that the first-ever black tiger is spotted, and that tiger may have different hunting habits than you are used to (isn’t its camouflage different? wouldn’t it make sense that it would approach in an altogether different manner?). 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.

  Don’t be the hunter who missed his prey because he thought he’d gotten it all down so well that he succumbed to mindless routine and action. Remain ever mindful of how you apply the rules. Never stop thinking. It’s like the moment in The Valley of Fear when Watson says, “I am inclined to think—” and Holmes cuts him off in style: “I should do so.”

  Could there be a more appropriate image to that awareness of mind that is the pinnacle of the Holmesian approach to thought? A brain, first and foremost, and in it, the awareness of a hunter. The hunter who is never just inclined to think, but who does so, always. For that mindfulness doesn’t begin or end with the start of each hunt, the beginning of each new venture or thought process. It is a constant state, a well-rehearsed presence of mind even as he settles down for the night and stretches his legs in front of the fire.

  Learning to think like a hunter will go a long way toward making sure that we don’t blind ourselves to the obvious inconsistencies of fairy land when they stare us in the face. We shouldn’t rule them out, but we should be wary—and know that even if we really want to be the ones to discover the first real proof of their existence, that proof may still be in the future, or nowhere at all; in either case, the evidence should be treated just as severely. And we should apply that same attitude to others and their beliefs.

  The way you see yourself matters. View yourself as a hunter in your own life, and you may find yourself becoming more able to hunt properly, in a matter of speaking. Whether you choose to consider the possibility of fairies’ existence or not, you—the hunter you—will have done it thinkingly. You won’t have been unprepared.

  In 1983, the tale of the Cottingley Fairies came to as near an end as it ever would. More than sixty years after the photographs first surfaced, seventy-six-year-old Frances Griffiths made a confession: the photographs were fake. Or at least four of them were. The fairies had been her older cousin’s illustrations, secured by hat pins to the scenery. And the evidence of a belly button that Conan Doyle had thought he’d seen on the goblin in the original print was actually nothing more than that—a hat pin. The final photograph, however, was genuine. Or so said Frances.

  Two weeks later, Elsie Hill (née Wright) herself came forward. It’s true, she said, after having held her silence since the original incident. She had drawn the fairies in sepia on Windsor and Bristol board, coloring them in with watercolors while her parents were out of the house. She had then fastened them to the ground with hat pins. The figures themselves had apparently been traced from the 1915 Princess Mary Gift Book. And that last picture, that Frances had maintained was real? Frances wasn’t even there, Elsie told The Times. “I am very proud of that one—it was all done with my own contraption and I had to wait for the weather to be right to take it,” she said. “I won’t reveal the secret of that one until the very last page of my book.”

  Alas, the book was never written. Frances Griffiths died in 1986 and Elsie, two years later. To this day, there are those who maintain that the fifth photograph was genuine. The Cottingley Fairies just refuse to die.

  But maybe, just maybe, Conan Doyle the hunter would have escaped the same fate. Had he taken himself (and the girls) just a bit more critically, pried just a bit harder, perhaps he could have learned from his mistakes, as did
his creation when it came to his own vices. Arthur Conan Doyle may have been a Spiritualist, but his spirituality failed to take the one page of Sherlock Holmes that was nonnegotiable for the taking: mindfulness.

  W. H. Auden writes of Holmes,

  His attitude towards people and his technique of observation and deduction are those of the chemist or physicist. If he chooses human beings rather than inanimate matter as his material, it is because investigating the inanimate is unheroically easy since it cannot tell lies, which human beings can and do, so that in dealing with them, observation must be twice as sharp and logic twice as rigorous.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle valued few things as highly as he did heroism. And yet he failed to realize that the animals he was hunting were just as human as those that he created. He was not twice as sharp, twice as logical, twice as rigorous. But perhaps he could have been, with a little help from the mindset that he himself created for his own detective, someone who would surely have never forgotten that human beings can and do tell lies, that everyone can be mistaken and everyone is fallible, ourselves included.

  Conan Doyle could not know where science was headed. He did the best he could, and did so within the parameters that he had set for himself, and which, I might add, remain to this day. For, unlike William James’s confident prediction, our knowledge about the unseen forces that guide our lives, while light-years further than Sir Arthur could ever imagine when it comes to explaining natural phenomena, is still stuck circa 1900 when it comes to explaining psychical ones.

  But the point is greater than either Sherlock Holmes or Arthur Conan Doyle—or, for that matter, Daryl Bem or William James. We are all limited by our knowledge and context. And we’d do well to remember it. Just because we can’t fathom something doesn’t make it not so. And just because we screw up for lack of knowledge doesn’t mean we’ve done so irredeemably—or that we can’t keep learning. When it comes to the mind, we can all be hunters.

  SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING

  “And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” p. 1189.

  “If the devil did decide to have a hand in the affairs of men—.” “I knew that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend . . .” from The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 3: The Problem, p. 22.

  “One realized the red-hot energy that underlay Holmes’s phlegmatic exterior.” from His Last Bow, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” p. 1392.

  “When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the ‘pink ‘un’ protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a bet.” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” p. 158.

  “Once that warrant was made out, nothing on earth could save him.” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” p. 1158.

  “Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson, it can only be as an example of that temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be exposed.” from His Last Bow, “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” p. 342.

  “I am inclined to think—.” from The Valley of Fear, Part One, chapter 1: The Warning, p. 5.

  Postlude

  Walter Mischel was nine years old when he started kindergarten. It wasn’t that his parents had been negligent in his schooling. It was just that the boy couldn’t speak English. It was 1940 and the Mischels had just arrived in Brooklyn. They’d been one of the few Jewish families lucky enough to escape Vienna in the wake of the Nazi takeover in the spring of 1938. The reason had as much to do with luck as with foresight: they had discovered a certificate of U.S. citizenship from a long-since-dead maternal grandfather. Apparently, he had obtained it while working in New York City around 1900, before returning once more to Europe.

  But ask Dr. Mischel to recall his earliest memories, and chances are that the first thing he will speak of is not how the Hitler Youths stepped on his new shoes on the sidewalks of Vienna. Nor will it be of how his father and other Jewish men were dragged from their apartments and forced to march in the streets in their pajamas while holding branches in their hands, in a makeshift “parade” staged by the Nazis in parody of the Jewish tradition of welcoming spring. (His father had polio and couldn’t walk without his cane. And so, the young Mischel had to watch as he jerked from side to side in the procession.) Nor will it be of the trip from Vienna, the time spent in London in an uncle’s spare room, the journey to the United States at the outbreak of war.

  Instead, it will be of the earliest days in that kindergarten classroom, when little Walter, speaking hardly a word of English, was given an IQ test. It should hardly come as a surprise that he did not fare well. He was in an alien culture and taking a test in an alien language. And yet his teacher was surprised. Or so she told him. She also told him how disappointed she was. Weren’t foreigners supposed to be smart? She’d expected more from him.

  Carol Dweck was on the opposite side of the story. When she was in sixth grade—also, incidentally, in Brooklyn—she, too, was given an intelligence test, along with the rest of her class. The teacher then proceeded to do something that today would raise many eyebrows but back then was hardly uncommon: she arranged the students in order of score. The “smart” students were seated closest to the teachers. And the less fortunate, farther and farther away. The order was immutable, and those students who had fared less than well weren’t even allowed to perform such basic classroom duties as washing the blackboard or carrying the flag to the school assembly. They were to be reminded constantly that their IQ was simply not up to par.

  Dweck herself was one of the lucky ones. Her seat: number one. She had scored highest of all her classmates. And yet, something wasn’t quite right. She knew that all it would take was another test to make her less smart. And could it be that it was so simple as all that—a score, and then your intelligence was marked for good?

  Years later, Walter Mischel and Carol Dweck both found themselves on the faculty of Columbia University. (As of this writing, Mischel is still there and Dweck has moved to Stanford.) Both had become key players in social and personality psychology research (though Mischel the sixteen-years-senior one), and both credit that early test to their subsequent career trajectories, their desire to conduct research into such supposedly fixed things as personality traits and intelligence, things that could be measured with a simple test and, in that measurement, determine your future.

  It was easy enough to see how Dweck had gotten to that pinnacle of academic achievement. She was, after all, the smartest. But what of Mischel? How could someone whose IQ would have placed him squarely in the back of Dweck’s classroom have gone on to become one of the leading figures in psychology of the twentieth century, he of the famous marshmallow studies of self-control and of an entirely new approach to looking at personality and its measurement? Something wasn’t quite right, and the fault certainly wasn’t with Mischel’s intelligence or his stratospheric career trajectory.

  Sherlock Holmes is a hunter. He knows that there is nothing too difficult for his mastery—in fact, the more difficult something is, the better. And in that attitude may lie a large portion of his success, and a large part of Watson’s failure to follow in his footsteps. Remember that scene from “The Adventure of the Priory School,” where Watson all but gives up hope at figuring out what happened to the missing student and teacher?

  “I am at my wit’s end,” he tells Holmes.

  But Holmes will have none of it. “Tut, tut, we have solved worse problems.”

  Or, consider Holmes’s response to Watson when the latter declares a cipher “beyond human power to penetrate.”

  Holmes answers, “Perhaps there are points that have escaped your Machiavellian intellect.” But Watson’s attitude is surely not helping. “Let us continue the problem in the light of pure reason,” he directs him, and goes on, naturally, to decipher the note.

  In a way, Watson has beate
n himself in both cases before he has even started. By declaring himself at his wit’s end, by labeling something as beyond human power, he has closed his mind to the possibility of success. And that mindset, as it turns out, is precisely what matters most—and it’s a thing far more intangible and unmeasurable than a number on a test.

  For many years, Carol Dweck has been researching exactly what it is that separates Holmes’s “tut, tut” from Watson’s “wit’s end,” Walter Mischel’s success from his supposed IQ. Her research has been guided by two main assumptions: IQ cannot be the only way to measure intelligence, and there might be more to that very concept of intelligence than meets the eye.

  According to Dweck, there are two main theories of intelligence: incremental and entity. If you are an incremental theorist, you believe that intelligence is fluid. If you work harder, learn more, apply yourself better, you will become smarter. In other words, you dismiss the notion that something might possibly be beyond human power to penetrate. You think that Walter Mischel’s original IQ score is not only something that should not be a cause for disappointment but that it has little bearing on his actual ability and later performance.

  If, on the other hand, you are an entity theorist, you believe that intelligence is fixed. Try as you might, you will remain as smart (or not) as you were before. It’s just your original luck. This was the position of Dweck’s sixth-grade teacher—and of Mischel’s kindergarten one. It means that once in the back, you’re stuck in the back. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Sorry, buddy, luck of the draw.

  In the course of her research, Dweck has repeatedly found an interesting thing: how someone performs, especially in reacting to failure, largely depends on which of the two beliefs he espouses. An incremental theorist sees failure as a learning opportunity; an entity theorist, as a frustrating personal shortcoming that cannot be remedied. As a result, while the former may take something away from the experience to apply to future situations, the latter is more likely to write it off entirely. So basically, how we think of the world and of ourselves can actually change how we learn and what we know.