Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

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 often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.

We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.

A change in perspective, in physical location, quite simply forces mindfulness. It forces us to reconsider the world, to look at things from a different angle. And sometimes that change in perspective can be the spark that makes a difficult decision manageable, or that engenders creativity where none existed before.

for every standard deviation increase in cloud cover on the day of the college visit, a student is 9 percent more likely to actually enroll in that college.

Our education might stop, if we so choose. Our brains’ never does. The brain will keep reacting to how we decide to use it. The difference is not whether or not we learn, but what and how we learn.

Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don’t exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening—even

A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.

every time you find yourself making a judgment immediately upon observing—in fact, even if you don’t think you are, and even if everything seems to make perfect sense—train yourself to stop and repeat: It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Then go back and restate it from the beginning and in a different fashion than you did the first time around. Out loud instead of silently. In writing instead of in your head. It will save you from many errors in perception.

a failure to use all senses equals a scene not seen to its full potential, attention that has not been allocated properly, and subconscious cues that color the attention that is allocated in a way that may not be optimal.

How did the System Holmes machine become . . . a System Watson? Simple. Holmes says it himself: he had lost interest in the case. In his mind, it was already solved, down to the last detail—the visit, of which he thought so much that he decided it would be fine to disengage from everything else. And that’s a mistake he doesn’t normally make.

It’s fun to home in on that incongruity

Why do we so often fail at this final stage of perception? The answer lies in that very element we were discussing: engagement.

the better they recalled the topics of conversation, the more extremely off their predictions were. In other words, the busier their brains were, the less they adjusted after forming an initial impression.

We want to learn to pay attention better, to become superior observers, but we can’t hope to achieve this if we thoughtlessly pay attention to everything. That’s self-defeating. What we need to do is allocate our attention mindfully

Whatever the situation, answering the question of what, specifically, you want to accomplish will put you well on your way to knowing how to maximize your limited attentional resources. It will help direct your mind, prime it, so to speak, with the goals and thoughts that are actually important—and help put those that aren’t into the background.

Absent Holmes, the Watson storytelling approach is the natural, instinctive one. And absent Holmes’s insistence, it is incredibly difficult to resist our desire to form narratives, to tell stories even if they may not be altogether correct, or correct at all. We like simplicity. We like concrete reasons. We like causes. We like things that make intuitive sense (even if that sense happens to be wrong).

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

Holmes’s trick is to treat every thought, every experience, and every perception the way he would a pink elephant. In other words, begin with a healthy dose of skepticism instead of the credulity that is your mind’s natural state of being.

motivation predicts higher academic performance, fewer criminal convictions, and better employment outcomes. Children who have a so-called “rage to master”—a term coined by Ellen Winner to describe the intrinsic motivation to master a specific domain—are more likely to be successful in any number of endeavors, from art to science.