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

necessity based on training, hours and hours of it. An expert may not always realize consciously where it’s coming from, but it comes from some habit, visible or not. What Holmes has done is to clarify the process, break down how hot can become cool, reflexive become reflective. It’s what Anders Ericsson calls expert knowledge: an ability born from extended and intense practice and not some innate genius. It’s not that Holmes was born to be the consulting detective to end all consulting detectives. It’s that he has practiced his mindful approach to the world and has, over time, perfected his art to the level at which we find it.
    As their first case together draws to a close, Dr. Watson compliments his new companion on his masterful accomplishment: “You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.” A high compliment indeed. But in the following pages, you will learn to do the exact same thing for your every thought, from its very inception—just as Arthur Conan Doyle did in his defense of George Edalji, and Joseph Bell in his patient diagnoses.
    Sherlock Holmes came of age at a time when psychology was still in its infancy. We are far better equipped than he could have ever been. Let’s learn to put that knowledge to good use.
    SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING
    “How the deuce did he know . . .” from A Study in Scarlet , chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes, p. 7. 1
    “Before turning to those moral and mental aspects . . .” “How much an observant man might learn . . .” “Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis . . .” from A Study in Scarlet , chapter 2: The Science of Deduction, p. 15.

CHAPTER TWO
    The Brain Attic: What Is It and What’s in There?
    O ne of the most widely held notions about Sherlock Holmes has to do with his supposed ignorance of Copernican theory. “What the deuce is [the solar system] to me?” he exclaims to Watson in A Study in Scarlet . “You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” And now that he knows that fact? “I shall do my best to forget it,” he promises.
    It’s fun to home in on that incongruity between the superhuman-seeming detective and a failure to grasp a fact so rudimentary that even a child would know it. And ignorance of the solar system is quite an omission for someone who we might hold up as the model of the scientific method, is it not? Even the BBC series Sherlock can’t help but use it as a focal point of one of its episodes.
    But two things about that perception bear further mention. First, it isn’t, strictly speaking, true. Witness Holmes’s repeated references to astronomy in future stories—in “The Musgrave Ritual,” he talks about “allowances for personal equation, as the astronomers would have it”; in “The Greek Interpreter,” about the “obliquity of the ecliptic”; in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” about “a planet leaving its orbit.” Indeed, eventually Holmes does use almost all of the knowledge that he denies having at the earliest stages of his friendship with Dr. Watson. (And in true-to-canon form, Sherlock the BBC series does end on a note of scientific triumph: Holmes does know astronomy after all, and that knowledge saves the day—and the life of a little boy.)
    In fact, I would argue that he exaggerates his ignorance precisely to draw our attention to a second—and, I think, much more important—point. His supposed refusal to commit the solar system to memory serves to illustrate an analogy for the human mind that will prove to be centralto Holmes’s thinking and to our ability to emulate his methodology. As Holmes tells Watson, moments after the Copernican incident, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”
    When I first heard the term brain attic —back