Mastermind: How to Think
Like Sherlock Holmes,
by Maria Konnikova
NY: Penguin, 2013
$16 pbk.
First Impressions:
When it comes to stories of
the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, you’re either a fanatical
follower or you’d pick up almost anything else before the desperation of a
rainy evening alone in someone else’s remote cabin would tempt you to open A
Study in Scarlet or The Sign of
Four. Holmes fans simply cannot get
enough of the master, while the rest of us politely cover our yawns when when a
fan mentions his name. Yes, I admit it: I’m in the latter group. I don’t even
like the movie versions much.
But hand me a book on how the
mind works, and I’m as eager as a puppy with a new toy. Hand me Dan Ariely’s Predictably
Irrational or Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking,
Fast and Slow or anything by Temple
Grandin, and I’ll be opening the
book while you’re still talking. How we human beings perceive and remember and
reason and draw conclusions, including our making of egregious errors, never
fails to fascinate me. The promise of Maria Konnikova’s book on the mental
processes of Sherlock Holmes is that we, the readers, can learn to remember
better, think more clearly, thinking less like Dr. Watson and More like Sherlock
Holmes. Okay, I'm in.
Because who – I ask you, who?
-- wants to stand there like a chump (or like Dr. Watson), mouth hanging open,
in reverent awe of Mr. Holmes? Don’t we want to come up with the solution to the mystery? I’m not out to
collar murderers, but I would certainly like to know where the charger to my
cell phone is hiding or figure out where the Farberware Dutch oven has
disappeared to.
The “scientific method” of
observation, though, doesn’t sound like my way of being in the world. It sounds
so cold, so detached, so objective. Quite anti-social, in fact, don’t you
think? The skepticism the author cites as fundamental to scientific observation
reminds me of Descartes’ radical doubt thought experiment. Is it really
possible – would it even be desirable – to go through every minute of every day
doubting before believing? What could that possibly mean?
When the author makes the
distinction between fast and slow thinking, I’m more comfortable. My husband
says of my decision process in general, “She grinds exceeding slow, but she
grinds exceeding fine.” I’m a slow thinking by nature. But not always, of
course, slow enough: the default setting Konnikova calls “System Watson” is
always poised to jump in quickly. Like the left brain when the person holding
the pencil is asked to draw a house, “System Watson” is there jumping up and
down and waving its hand in the air and saying, “I have the answer!” The left
brain wants to draw “what it knows” without bothering to see what’s in front of
the eyes at that moment, and “System Watson” wants to go only on the evidence
of its eyes in that moment, without reference to further observation or salient
memories.
My favorite way of
conceptualizing Konnikova’s “System Holmes,” in fact, is to think of it as the
calm, quiet, open receptiveness of meditation. In our drawing class, we learned
techniques to frustrate the noisy, know-it-all left brain so it would get out
of the way and let us draw what we were seeing – really to let us see. Holmes uses ‘seeing’ in a pejorative sense,
but in the lexicon of drawing class Holmesian ‘seeing’ is ‘knowing,’ the left
brain running forward with answers before true observation has taken place.
Here’s a true story: I had
been looking for my “lost” cell phone charger for two or three days before I
started reading Mastermind. Arriving at page 22, I closed the book, sat calmly
for less than 60 seconds, got up and went right to where the charger had been
all along.
What’s the secret? My parents
had emphasized throughout my childhood and adolescence that “retracing your
steps” from the last place you can picture in memory having the lost object was
the key to finding it. That isn’t a new idea to me. Purging the search of panic
and frustration, setting aside judgment (e.g., “I’ve already looked there; it
can’t be there”), I’m discovering, is as important as the retracing of steps.
Caveat!!! Beware!!! Konnikova does not promise instant results. She might
even be dismayed by my story of finding a lost object before finishing the
first chapter of her book! To improve our thinking, we need, she says, to be interested and motivated. She also emphasizes that it will take practice, practice, practice to retrain our minds. Interest, motivation, practice?
That sounds like learning to draw, too! I’m hooked!
Summary and Conclusions
I finally had to give up hope
of keeping the pages of this book pristine. If a book is to be more than
entertainment for the time it takes it read it, if it is to be a tool, I have
to make it my own in some way. A library book, then, would be bristling with
Post-Its, and those slips of paper would have scribbled notes on them, and
there might be additional folded sheets of paper inside with more notes and
page numbers. With a paperback book of my own (this applies generally to nonfiction),
I may begin with Post-It notes, but the more there is to remember and keep
straight, the more likely I am to make, first, discreet little dog ears, then
light pencil check marks in the margins, and finally – throwing all caution to
the winds – underlining madly. My copy of Mastermind went through all these stages.
The book might have been
written differently, and then I might not have resorted to underlining, or at
least not as much, but Konnikova makes no allowances for chatting or tweeting
attention spans. This is a book,
with paragraphs are long and discursive. There are occasional section headings
but no numbered or bulleted lists and no graphic displays illustrating the
“brain attic” in states of order vs. disarray. Shorter and fewer sentences,
with more signage along the way, may have improved this book’s chances at
bestsellerdom. It would certainly have made it faster and easier to read. – But
would it have made the book better?
What might first seem an
unfortunate shortcoming can appear as a virtue in a different light. Just as
there is no shortcut to thinking like Sherlock Holmes (you don’t read this book
one evening and wake up a problem-solving genius the next morning), just as
leaping to conclusions can prevent consideration of important evidence, and
just as stopping to reflect on how much we actually know (as opposed to
everything we’re tempted to think we know), just so a book that forces thinking
to slow down and forces it over the same ground again and again may be the book
best suited to fulfilling the author’s promise to her readers: You can improve your thinking, but you must be interested
and motivated, and it will take practice,
practice, practice.
Many of the problem-solving pitfalls cited in Mastermind will be familiar to readers of literature going back
to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s work on heuristics and biases in the
1970s and 1980s, work that has been amplified since by many other scholarly
studies and popular books. Konnikova’s genius, if you will, is not only to draw
all this work together but to present it in a familiar literary frame, so that
the well-known characters of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes exemplify,
respectively, error-prone and largely accurate and error-avoiding thought.
Examples from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories that illustrate her points are well
chosen.
I have a few minor quibbles.
One concerns deductive logic. Konnikova is accurate when noting that formal
logic is something different from what Holmes means by deduction. She is on
less firm ground when explaining formal logic, which is not, as she seems to
say it is, limited to Aristotelian syllogisms. The syllogism is one but not the
only valid deductive form. In the same chapter she gives an example of an
invalid form without explaining why the true statement in the conclusion cannot
be relied on, only saying there is a problem with the reasoning. If formal
logic is to be brought in at all, a paragraph or two might be added to clarify
the difference between valid and invalid forms. Otherwise, it were better left
out entirely.
Will this book find the
audience it deserves or only the audience deserving of the book? “I’m not
always known for my conciseness,” the author admits candidly in her
Acknowledgements. But I have already admitted myself that too concise a
Holmesian program might lead astray more minds than it improved.
Do Arthur Conan Doyle readers
grab at studies by Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely? Maybe not, and this may be
exactly the strength (in addition to the charm) of Konnikova’s book. A new
audience for works on reasoning!
-- And then, on the other hand, maybe it will
nudge me in a direction I’ve long resisted, back to Sherlock Holmes!
The
holiday bazaar is sponsored this year by the newly formed Northport Arts
Association, the same lively, enthusiastic, idea-driven bunch who brought us
Leelanau UnCaged in September. Carrying over from previous years’ bazaars
(sponsored by a different group) is the idea of donating a portion of money
from sales to the Leelanau Children’s Center. 
With
the sale on Waukazoo Street this year (instead of over on Mill Street – a different
world!), I’m hoping Northport shoppers will keep in mind that today is also
Small Business Saturday. Did you rush off to the big box stores yesterday?
Today’s the day to think small and to think local. 
