Maria Konnikova: Unclutter Your Brain Attic Like Sherlock Holmes | Big Think

Maria Konnikova: Unclutter Your Brain Attic Like Sherlock Holmes
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How can we train our brains to think like Sherlock Holmes? This question occupies Konnikova's book, and her answer can be summed up in one word: mindfulness. Mindfulness is "staying in the present moment and learning how to concentrate and how to focus your mind so that it really can avoid any distractions, can avoid anything that might kind of get it off track, Konnikova tells us.

This "scientific method of mind" makes use of the brain as an "attic" in the sense that the space in the brain is a finite resource. To think like Sherlock you need to optimize your mental resources and then figure out how you can take the things you've stored and access them in a way where you can "see the bigger picture and not just these random components" that you put there.
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MARIA KONNIKOVA:

Maria Konnikova is the New York Times bestselling author of The Confidence Game (Viking/Penguin 2016) and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (Viking/Penguin, 2013). She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where she writes a regular column with a focus on psychology and culture, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, California Sunday, Pacific Standard, The New Republic, WIRED, and The Smithsonian, among numerous other publications. Maria is a recipient of the 2015 Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship, and is a Schachter Writing Fellow at Columbia University's Motivation Science Center. She formerly wrote the “Literally Psyched" column for Scientific American and the popular psychology blog “Artful Choice" for Big Think. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she studied psychology, creative writing, and government, and received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Maria Konnikova: It’s important to remember that Holmes wasn’t born Holmes. Holmes was born like you and me but probably with greater potential for certain elements of observation, but he learned over time to think like Sherlock Holmes. At the beginning, he probably thought more like Watson because that’s more of our natural state. He’s able to attain what he does because he’s become an expert of sorts at observing.

He’s become an expert at person perception. What I mean by this is he has thousands and thousands of hours of practice, and that practice has been interwoven with feedback. So I look at you and I tell you something about yourself. And you say, “No, that’s actually wrong. That has nothing to do with me at all.” Or you say, “Wow. How did you know that?” So I’m learning which details matter, which details don’t matter, which observations are logical, which ones are false. And over time I build up that expertise that will allow me to look at you and in one second say, “Hey, Watson, I think you’ve been in Afghanistan.” And it seems like it’s completely just out of the blue, oh, my God, how did he know that? But then if you go back, you’ll see that this is not intuition in the sense of just “I knew it.” It’s intuition in the sense of expertise, in the sense of judgment that has been honed over years and years of practice.

So, for Holmes, the entire thought process is akin to a scientist who is doing a research experiment, so someone who is doing - who is following the scientific method. So for him the mind is like an attic, and what that means is you can store only so much in it. The space is finite. And what you store and how you store it is incredibly important as you try to figure out, how do I optimize my mental resources? How do I then take the things I’ve stored and access them? How do I organize them so that there are connections between them so that I can use them and make them as part of kind of a broader whole so I can see the bigger picture and not just these random components that I put there?

So, what a researcher would do at the beginning of an experiment is to say, what is my question? And that’s exactly what Holmes does. He says, what is my goal? What do I want to accomplish? Before he ever opens a case, before he ever meets a client, he already wants to know what is it that I want to get from this meeting. And so he comes into the meeting with a prepared mindset. His attic has already been primed, so to speak, to take in certain inputs and to not allow other inputs in. This is important because attention is incredibly finite, and so we don’t have just endless resources...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/lessons-in-mindfulness-from-sherlock-holmes

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