Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF

important than the location of our keys.
    But in order to break from that autopiloted mode, we have to be motivated to think in a mindful, present fashion, to exert effort on what goes through our heads instead of going with the flow. To think like Sherlock Holmes, we must want , actively, to think like him. In fact, motivation is so essential that researchers have often lamented the difficulty of getting accurate performance comparisons on cognitive tasks for older and younger participants. Why? The older adults are often far more motivated to perform well. They try harder. They engage more. They are more serious, more present, more involved. To them, the performance matters a great deal. It says something about their mental capabilities—and they are out to prove that they haven’t lost the touch as they’ve aged. Not so younger adults. There is no comparable imperative. How, then, can you accurately compare the two groups? It’s a question that continues to plague research into aging and cognitive function.
    But that’s not the only domain where it matters. Motivated subjects always outperform. Students who are motivated perform better on something as seemingly immutable as the IQ test—on average, as much as .064 standard deviations better, in fact. Not only that, but motivation predictshigher 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. If we are motivated to learn a language, we are more likely to succeed in our quest. Indeed, when we learn anything new, we learn better if we are motivated learners. Even our memory knows if we’re motivated or not: we remember better if we were motivated at the time the memory was formed. It’s called motivated encoding.
    And then, of course, there is that final piece of the puzzle: practice, practice, practice. You have to supplement your mindful motivation with brutal training, thousands of hours of it. There is no way around it. Think of the phenomenon of expert knowledge: experts in all fields, from master chess players to master detectives, have superior memory in their field of choice. Holmes’s knowledge of crime is ever at his fingertips. A chess player often holds hundreds of games, with all of their moves, in his head, ready for swift access. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson argues that experts even see the world differently within their area of expertise: they see things that are invisible to a novice; they are able to discern patterns at a glance that are anything but obvious to an untrained eye; they see details as part of a whole and know at once what is crucial and what is incidental.
    Even Holmes could not have begun life with System Holmes at the wheel. You can be sure that in his fictional world he was born, just as we are, with Watson at the controls. He just hasn’t let himself stay that way. He took System Watson and taught it to operate by the rules of System Holmes, imposing reflective thought where there should rightly be reflexive reaction.
    For the most part, System Watson is the habitual one. But if we are conscious of its power, we can ensure that it is not in control nearly as often as it otherwise would be. As Holmes often notes, he has made it a habit to engage his Holmes system, every moment of every day. In so doing, he has slowly trained his quick-to-judge inner Watson to perform as his public outer Holmes. Through sheer force of habit and will, he has taught his instant judgments to follow the train of thought of a far more reflective approach. And because this foundation is in place, it takes a matter ofseconds for him to make his initial observations of Watson’s character. That’s why Holmes calls it intuition. Accurate intuition, the intuition that Holmes possesses, is of