Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

You’ve likely had the experience where you need to deviate from a stable routine only to find that you’ve somehow forgotten to do so. Let’s say you need to stop by the drugstore on your way home. All day long, you remember your errand. You rehearse it; you even picture the extra turn you’ll have to take to get there, just a quick step from your usual route. And yet somehow, you find yourself back at your front door, without having ever stopped off. You’ve forgotten to take that turn and you don’t even remember passing it. It’s the habit mindlessly taking over, the routine asserting itself against whatever part of your mind knew that it needed to do something else.

It happens all the time. You get so set in a specific pattern that you go through entire chunks of your day in a mindless daze (and if you are still thinking about work? worrying about an email? planning ahead for dinner? forget it). And that automatic forgetfulness, that ascendancy of routine and the ease with which a thought can be distracted, is just the smallest part—albeit a particularly noticeable one, because we have the luxury of realizing that we’ve forgotten to do something—of a much larger phenomenon. It happens much more regularly than we can point to—and more often than not, we aren’t even aware of our own mindlessness. How many thoughts float in and out of your head without your stopping to identify them? How many ideas and insights have escaped because you forgot to pay attention? How many decisions or judgments have you made without realizing how or why you made them, driven by some internal default settings of whose existence you’re only vaguely, if at all, aware? How many days have gone by where you suddenly wonder what exactly you did and how you got to where you are?

This book aims to help. It takes Holmes’s methodology to explore and explain the steps necessary for building up habits of thought that will allow you to engage mindfully with yourself and your world as a matter of course. So that you, too, can offhandedly mention that number of steps to dazzle a less-with-it companion.

So, light that fire, curl up on that couch, and prepare once more to join Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson on their adventures through the crime-filled streets of London—and into the deepest crevices of the human mind.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Scientific Method of the Mind

S
omething sinister was happening to the farm animals of Great Wyrley. Sheep, cows, horses—one by one, they were falling dead in the middle of the night. The cause of death: a long, shallow cut to the stomach that caused a slow and painful bleeding. Farmers were outraged; the community, shocked. Who would want to cause such pain to defenseless creatures?

The police thought they had their answer: George Edalji, the half-Indian son of the local vicar. In 1903, twenty-seven-year-old Edalji was sentenced to seven years of hard labor for one of the sixteen mutilations, that of a pony whose body had been found in a pit near the vicar’s residence. Little did it matter that the vicar swore his son was asleep at the time of the crime. Or that the killings continued after George’s imprisonment. Or, indeed, that the evidence was largely based on anonymous letters that George was said to have written—in which he implicated himself as the killer. The police, led by Staffordshire chief constable captain George Anson, were certain they had their man.

Three years later, Edalji was released. Two petitions protesting his innocence—one, signed by ten thousand people, the other, from a group of three hundred lawyers—had been sent to the Home Office, citing a lack of evidence in the case. And yet, the story was far from over. Edalji may have been free in person, but in name, he was still guilty. Prior to his arrest he had been a solicitor. Now he could not be readmitted to his practice.

In 1906, George Edalji caught a lucky break: Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed creator of Sherlock Holmes, had become interested in the case. That winter, Conan Doyle agreed to meet Edalji at the Grand Hotel, at Charing Cross. And there, across the lobby, any lingering doubts Sir
Arthur may have had about the young man’s innocence were dispelled. As he later wrote:

He had come to my hotel by appointment, but I had been delayed, and he was passing the time by reading the paper. I recognized my man by his dark face, so I stood and observed him. He held the paper close to his eyes and rather sideways, proving not only a high degree of myopia, but marked astigmatism. The idea of such a man scouring fields at night and assaulting cattle while avoiding the watching police was ludicrous. . . . There, in a single physical defect, lay the moral certainty of his innocence.

But though Conan Doyle himself was convinced, he knew it would take more to capture the attention of the Home Office. And so, he traveled to Great Wyrley to gather evidence in the case. He interviewed locals. He investigated the scenes of the crimes, the evidence, the circumstances. He met with the increasingly hostile Captain Anson. He visited George’s old school. He reviewed old records of anonymous letters and pranks against the family. He traced the handwriting expert who had proclaimed that Edalji’s hand matched that of the anonymous missives. And then he put his findings together for the Home Office.

The bloody razors? Nothing but old rust—and, in any case, incapable of making the type of wounds that had been suffered by the animals. The dirt on Edalji’s clothes? Not the same as the dirt in the field where the pony was discovered. The handwriting expert? He had previously made mistaken identifications, which had led to false convictions. And, of course, there was the question of the eyesight: could someone with such astigmatism and severe myopia really navigate nocturnal fields in order to maim animals?

In the spring of 1907, Edalji was finally cleared of the charge of animal slaughter. It was less than the complete victory for which Conan Doyle had hoped—George was not entitled to any compensation for his arrest and jail time—but it was something. Edalji was readmitted to his legal practice. The Committee of Inquiry found, as summarized by Conan Doyle, that “the police commenced and carried on their investigations, not for the purpose of finding out who was the guilty party, but
for the purpose of finding evidence against Edalji, who they were already sure was the guilty man.” And in August of that year, England saw the creation of its first court of appeals, to deal with future miscarriages of justice in a more systematic fashion. The Edalji case was widely considered one of the main impetuses behind its creation.

Conan Doyle’s friends were impressed. None, however, hit the nail on the head quite so much as the novelist George Meredith. “I shall not mention the name which must have become wearisome to your ears,” Meredith told Conan Doyle, “but the creator of the marvellous Amateur Detective has shown what he can do in the life of breath.” Sherlock Holmes might have been fiction, but his rigorous approach to thought was very real indeed. If properly applied, his methods could leap off the page and result in tangible, positive changes—and they could, too, go far beyond the world of crime.

Say the name Sherlock Holmes, and doubtless, any number of images will come to mind. The pipe. The deerstalker. The cloak. The violin. The hawklike profile. Perhaps William Gillette or Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett or any number of the luminaries who have, over the years, taken up Holmes’s mantle, including the current portrayals by Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey, Jr. Whatever the pictures your mind brings up, I would venture to guess that the word
psychologist
isn’t one of them. And yet, perhaps it’s time that it was.

Holmes was a detective second to none, it is true. But his insights into the human mind rival his greatest feats of criminal justice. What Sherlock Holmes offers isn’t just a way of solving crime. It is an entire way of thinking, a mindset that can be applied to countless enterprises far removed from the foggy streets of the London underworld. It is an approach born out of the scientific method that transcends science and crime both and can serve as a model for thinking, a way of being, even, just as powerful in our time as it was in Conan Doyle’s. And that, I would argue, is the secret to Holmes’s enduring, overwhelming, and ubiquitous appeal.

When Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, he didn’t think much of his hero. It’s doubtful that he set out intentionally to create a model for
thought, for decision making, for how to structure, lay out, and solve problems in our minds. And yet that is precisely what he did. He created, in effect, the perfect spokesperson for the revolution in science and thought that had been unfolding in the preceding decades and would continue into the dawn of the new century. In 1887, Holmes became a new kind of detective, an unprecedented thinker who deployed his mind in unprecedented ways. Today, Holmes serves an ideal model for how we can think better than we do as a matter of course.

In many ways, Sherlock Holmes was a visionary. His explanations, his methodology, his entire approach to thought presaged developments in psychology and neuroscience that occurred over a hundred years after his birth—and over eighty years after his creator’s death. But somehow, too, his way of thought seems almost inevitable, a clear product of its time and place in history. If the scientific method was coming into its prime in all manner of thinkings and doings—from evolution to radiography, general relativity to the discovery of germs and anesthesia, behaviorism to psychoanalysis—then why ever not in the principles of thought itself?

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s own estimation, Sherlock Holmes was meant from the onset to be an embodiment of the scientific, an ideal that we could aspire to, if never emulate altogether (after all, what are ideals for if not to be just a little bit out of reach?). Holmes’s very name speaks at once of an intent beyond a simple detective of the old-fashioned sort: it is very likely that Conan Doyle chose it as a deliberate tribute to one of his childhood idols, the philosopher-doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a figure known as much for his writing as for his contributions to medical practice. The detective’s character, in turn, was modeled after another mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell, a surgeon known for his powers of close observation. It was said that Dr. Bell could tell from a single glance that a patient was a recently discharged noncommissioned officer in a Highland regiment, who had just returned from service in Barbados, and that he tested routinely his students’ own powers of perception with methods that included self-experimentation with various noxious substances. To students of Holmes, that may all sound rather familiar. As Conan Doyle wrote to Bell, “Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation
which I have heard you inculcate, I have tried to build up a man who pushed the thing as far as it would go—further occasionally. . . .” It is here, in observation and inference and deduction, that we come to the heart of what it is exactly that makes Holmes who he is, distinct from every other detective who appeared before, or indeed, after: the detective who elevated the art of detection to a precise science.

We first learn of the quintessential Sherlock Holmes approach in
A Study in Scarlet
, the detective’s first appearance in the public eye. To Holmes, we soon discover, each case is not just a case as it would appear to the officials of Scotland Yard—a crime, some facts, some persons of interest, all coming together to bring a criminal to justice—but is something both more and less. More, in that it takes on a larger, more general significance, as an object of broad speculation and inquiry, a scientific conundrum, if you will. It has contours that inevitably were seen before in earlier problems and will certainly repeat again, broader principles that can apply to other moments that may not even seem at first glance related. Less, in that it is stripped of any accompanying emotion and conjecture—all elements that are deemed extraneous to clarity of thought—and made as objective as a nonscientific reality could ever be. The result: the crime as an object of strict scientific inquiry, to be approached by the principles of the scientific method. Its servant: the human mind.

What Is the Scientific Method of Thought?

When we think of the scientific method, we tend to think of an experimenter in his laboratory, probably holding a test tube and wearing a white coat, who follows a series of steps that runs something like this: make some observations about a phenomenon; create a hypothesis to explain those observations; design an experiment to test the hypothesis; run the experiment; see if the results match your expectations; rework your hypothesis if you must; lather, rinse, and repeat. Simple seeming enough. But how to go beyond that? Can we train our minds to work like that automatically, all the time?

Holmes 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 begin by mastering more elementary problems.” The scientific method begins with the most mundane seeming of things: observation. Before you even begin to ask the questions that will define the investigation of a crime, a scientific experiment, or a decision as apparently simple as whether or not to invite a certain friend to dinner, you must first explore the essential groundwork. It’s not for nothing that Holmes calls the foundations 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.