Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes - Maria Konnikova
Date read: 2020-12-28How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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Born out of her love for Sherlock Holmes, Maria Konnikova does a good job of explaining how you too could observe and deduct just like the famous detective. Good for anyone wanting to think differently or be more mindful with their work. She also touches upon biases, mind palaces, and meditation.
Contents:
My Notes
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. Don’t just assume anything is the way it is. Think of everything as being as absurd as an animal that can’t possibly exist in nature.
Your Mind Attic - Some things get stored; some are thrown out and never reach the main attic. What’s stored is organized according to some associative system—your brain decides where a given memory might fit—but if you think you’ll be retrieving an exact replica of what you’ve stored, you’re wrong. Contents shift, change, and re-form with every shake of the box where they are stored.
We remember more when we are interested and motivated.
“When all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
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.
Our minds love nothing more than jumping to conclusions. How our brains jump to conclusions is not how we are destined to act. Ultimately, our behavior is ours to control—if only we want to do so.
You can acknowledge that Jane reminds you of your high school frenemy, and then move past it. That emotional luggage doesn’t matter nearly as much as you may think it does.
The Affect Heuristic: how we feel is how we think. A happy and relaxed state makes for a more accepting and less guarded worldview.
The Availability Heuristic: we use what is available to the mind at any given point in time. And the easier it is to recall, the more confident we are in its applicability and truth.
In one of the classic demonstrations of the effect, individuals who had read unfamiliar names in the context of a passage later judged those names as famous—based simply on the ease with which they could recall them—and were subsequently more confident in the accuracy of their judgments.
If I were to stop you and explain every reason for your impressions, you may not change them (“But of course I’m still right!”), but at least you will know where they came from. And gradually, you may find yourself catching your mind before it leaps to a judgment—in which case you will be far more likely to listen to its wisdom.
Is something superfluous to the matter at hand influencing my judgment at any given point? (The answer will almost always be yes.) If so, how do I adjust my perception accordingly? What has influenced my first impression—and has that first impression in turn influenced others?
Become an expert of sorts at those types of decisions or observation that you want to excel at making. Like learning to tell the quality of food from a glance or the proper chess move from a board or your opponent’s intention in baseball, poker, or a business meeting from a gesture.
In the usual course of things, our brains pick and choose where to focus without much conscious forethought on our part. What we need to learn instead is how to tell our brains what and how to filter, instead of letting them be lazy and decide for us, based on what they think would make for the path of least resistance.
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.
So, too, we must determine our objective in order to know what we’re looking for—and where we’re looking for it.
When psychologist Peter Gollwitzer tried to determine how to enable people to set goals and engage in goal-directed behavior as effectively as possible, he found that several things helped improve focus and performance:
Your goals, your priorities, your answer to the “what I want to accomplish” question must be flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances.
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 remain as objective as you possibly can.
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.
But you should never neglect your sense of smell—or indeed any of your other senses—because they certainly won’t neglect you.
It is about learning not to leave anything out—anything, that is, that is relevant to the goals that you’ve set. And it is about realizing that all of our senses affect us—and will affect us whether or not we are aware of the impact.
When we touch something warm or cold, we may become likewise warm or cold in our disposition; and if we are touched by someone in a reassuring way, we may suddenly find ourselves taking more risk or being more confident than we otherwise would.
When we hold something heavy, we are more likely to judge something (or someone) to be weightier and more serious.
Omission Neglect: We fail to note what we do not perceive up front, and we fail to inquire further or to take the missing pieces into account as we make our decision. Some information is always available, but some is always silent—and it will remain silent unless we actively stir it up.
Reason without imagination is akin to System Watson at the controls. It seems to make sense and it’s what we want to do, but it’s too impulsive and quick. You cannot possibly assess and see the whole picture—even if the solution ends up being rather prosaic—if you don’t take a step back to let imagination have its say.
One of the main virtues of an imaginative approach: going beyond simple logic in interpreting facts and instead using that same logic to create hypothetical alternatives.
Works of art on the walls do the trick, too. The color blue. Pictures of famous creative thinkers. Happy faces. Happy music. (In fact, almost all positive cues.) Plants and flowers and scenes of nature. All of these tend to boost our creativity with or without our awareness.
You need to learn to let the two elements, the concrete, specific pieces (their details and colors, what they tell you, and what they suggest) and the broad, overall picture (the general impression that gives you a sense of the tableau as a whole), work together to help you put the puzzle together. Both are essential. The pieces have been gathered already through close observation; seeing how they fit can be accomplished only by the distance of imagination. It can be any of Trope’s distances—temporal, spatial, social, or hypothetical—but distance it must be.
A change in activity, to something seemingly unrelated to the problem in question, is one of the elements that is most conducive to creating the requisite distance for imagination to take hold.
Something that is engaging enough that it distracts you properly—and yet not so overwhelming that it prevents reflection from taking place in the background. Once you find your sin of choice, you can term the problems and decisions you face accordingly: three-pipe, two-movement, one-museum visit, you get the idea.
Walks have been shown repeatedly to stimulate creative thought and problem solving, especially if these walks take place in natural surroundings, like the woods, rather than in more urbanized environments (but both types are better than none—and even walking along a tree-lined street can help).
The power of learned associations is ubiquitous. We tend, for instance, to remember material better in the location where we first learned it. Students who take tests in the room where they did their studying tend to do better than if they take those same tests in a new environment. And the opposite is true: if a particular location is tied to frustration or boredom or distraction, it doesn’t make for a good study choice.
Satisficing: A blend of sufficing and satisfying: a response bias that errs on the egocentric side of plausible answers to a given question. As soon as we find an answer that satisfies, we stop looking, whether or not the answer is ideal or even remotely accurate.
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’ll 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. Otherwise you say, ‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.”
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.
Why do they keep pushing their original story, as if failing to note altogether that it is coming apart at the seams? It’s simple, really. We don’t like to admit our initial intuition to be false and would much rather dismiss the evidence that contradicts it.
We often aren’t mindful in our deduction, and the temptation to gloss over and jump to the end becomes ever stronger the closer we get to the finish line. Our natural stories are so incredibly compelling that they are tough to ignore or reverse.
Base rates, or our ignorance of them, are at the heart of deductive errors like the conjunction fallacy. They hamper observation, but where they really throw you off is in deduction, in moving from all of your observations to the conclusions they imply.
The Misinformation Effect: When we are exposed to misleading information, we are likely to recall it as true and to take it into consideration in our deductive process.
In fact, it’s when we have more, not less, information that we should be most careful. Our confidence in our deductions tends to increase along with the number of details on which we base them—especially if one of those details makes sense. A longer list somehow seems more reasonable, even if we were to judge individual items on that list as less than probable given the information at hand.
If we are told a story, we are more likely to find it compelling and true if we are also given more details, even if those details are irrelevant to the story’s truth. How do you combat this? Proceed with the same logic that you did before, evaluating each element separately and objectively as part of a consistent whole.
Think first, act later, and try our utmost to approach every decision with a fresh mind.
The more successful you are, the more likely you are to attribute everything to your ability—and not to the luck of the draw, which, in all future predictions, is an essential part of the equation.
The Hard-Easy Effect: We tend to be underconfident on easy problems and overconfident on difficult ones.
Overconfidence increases with information. If I know more about something, I am more likely to think I can handle it, even if the additional information doesn’t actually add to my knowledge in a significant way.
Our brains are learning whether we know it or not. If we are not strengthening connections, we are losing them. Pausing and reflecting is the first step to that process. It’s point zero of observation. Before we begin to gather detail, we need to know what detail, if any, we’ll be gathering.
He doesn’t deduce. Rather, he reflects and he plays around with options. He questions and he considers. Only after will he start to form his conclusions.
Deduce—only from what you’ve observed, and nothing more.
You should keep a decision diary. When we make a choice, solve a problem, come to a decision, we can record the process in a single place. We can put here a list of our observations, to make sure we remember them when the time comes; we can include, too, our thoughts, our inferences, our potential lines of inquiry, things that intrigued us. But we can even take it a step further. Record what we ended up doing. Whether we had any doubts or reservations or considered other options (and in all cases, we’d do well to be specific and say what those were). And then, we can revisit each entry to write down how it went. Was I happy? Did I wish I’d done something differently? Is there anything that is clear to me in retrospect that wasn’t before?
And then, when we’ve gathered a dozen (or more) entries or so, we can start to read back. In one sitting, we can look through it all. All of those thoughts on all of those unrelated issues, from beginning to end. Chances are that we’ll see the exact same thing Amy did when she reread her migraine entries: that we make the same habitual mistakes, that we think in the same habitual ways, that we’re prey to the same contextual cues over and over.