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Online Extras: News to Note

January 3, 2013

Slate: Do you think like Sherlock Holmes?





Mindfulness allows Holmes to observe those details that most of us don't even realize we don't see. It's not just the steps. It's the facial expressions, the sartorial details, the seemingly irrelevant minutiae of the people he encounters. It's the sizing up of the occupants of a house by looking at a single room. It's the ability to distinguish the crucial from the merely incidental in any person, any scene, any situation. And, as it turns out, all of these abilities aren't just the handy fictional work of Arthur Conan Doyle. They have some real science behind them. After all, Holmes was born of Dr. Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle's mentor at the University of Edinburgh, not some, well, more fictional inspiration. Bell was a scientist and physician with a sharp mind, a keen eye and a notable prowess at pinpointing both his patients' disease and their personal details. Conan Doyle once wrote to him, "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."



One evening, Neisser noticed that when he looked out the window at twilight, he had the ability to see either the twilight or the reflection of the room on the glass. Focusing on the one made the other vanish. No matter what he did, he couldn't pay active attention to both. He termed this phenomenon "selective looking" and went on to study its effects in study after study of competing attentional demands. Show a person two superimposed videos, and he fails to notice when card players suddenly stop their game, stand up and start shaking hands — or fails to realize that someone spoke to him in one ear while he's been listening to a conversation with the other. In a real-world illustration of the innate inability to split attention in any meaningful way, a road construction crew once paved over a dead deer in the road. They simply did not see it, so busy were they ensuring that their assignment was properly carried out.

Inattentional blindness, more than anything else, illustrates the limitations of our attentional abilities. Try as we might, we can never see both twilight and reflection. We can't ever multitask the way we think we can. Each time we try, either the room or the world outside it will disappear from conscious processing. That's why Holmes is so careful about where and when he deploys that famed keenness of observation. Were he to spread himself too thin — imagine modern-day Holmes, be it Benedict Cumberbatch or Jonny Lee Miller, pulling out his cell to check his email as he walks down the street and has a conversation at the same time, something you'll never see either of these current incarnations actually doing — he'd be unable to deploy his observation as he otherwise would. Enter the email, exit the Baker Street steps — and then some.

It's not an easy task, that constant cognitive vigilance, the eternal awareness of our own limitations and the resulting strategic allocation of attention. Even Holmes, I'm willing to bet, couldn't reach that level of mindfulness and deliberate thought all at once. It came with years of motivation and practice. To think like Holmes, we have to both want to think like him and practice doing so over and over and over, even when the effort becomes exhausting and seems a pointless waste of energy. Mindfulness takes discipline.

Even after I discovered my propensity for sneaking over to email or Twitter when I wasn't quite sure what to write next, the discovery alone wasn't enough to curb my less-than-ideal work habits. I thought it would be. And I tried, I really did. But somehow, up that browser window popped, seemingly of its own volition. What, me? Attempt to multitask while writing my book? Never.

And so, I took the Odyssean approach: I tied myself to the mast to resist the sirens' call of the Internet. I downloaded Freedom, a program that blocked my access completely for a specified amount of time, and got to writing. The results shocked me. I was woefully bad at maintaining my concentration for large chunks of time. Over and over, my fingers made their way to that habitual key-press combination that would switch the window from my manuscript to my online world — only to discover that that world was off-limits for another . . . how long is left? Has it really been only 20 minutes?


Until that concrete evidence of effectiveness, I had never quite believed that focused attention would make such a big difference. As much research as I'd read, as much science as I'd examined, it never quite hit home. It had taken Freedom, but I was finally taking Sherlock Holmes at his word. I was learning the benefits of both seeing and observing — and I was no longer trading in the one for the other without quite realizing what I was doing.


I did my best to resist. Now, something that was once thoughtless habit became a guilt-inducing twinge. I would force myself to replace the phone without checking it, to take off my headphones and look around, to resist the urge to place a call just because I was walking to an appointment and had a few minutes of spare time. It was hard. But it was worth it, if only for my enhanced perceptiveness, for the quickly growing pile of material that I wouldn't have even noticed before, for the tangible improvements in thought and clarity that came with every deferred impulse. It's not for nothing that study after study has shown the benefits of nature on our thinking: Being surrounded by the natural world makes us more reflective, more creative, sharper in our cognition. But if we're too busy talking on the phone or sending a text, we won't even notice that we've walked by a tree.



Thinking like Sherlock Holmes isn't just a way to enhance your cognitive powers. It is also a way to derive greater happiness and satisfaction from life.

Konnikova is the author of "Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes." Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, the New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal. She lives in New York City.

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