But I have news for you: our life is not a social psychology experiment. We are never required to be active observers. No one is asking us to recall, in exact order, a conversation or to make a speech of which we hadn’t been aware previously. No one is forcing us to limit our engagement. The only ones that do that is us, ourselves. Be it because we’ve lost interest, as Holmes did with Mr. Pycroft’s case, or because we’re too busy thinking about a jury trial in the future to focus on the man in the present, like Watson, when we disengage from a person or a situation it is our prerogative. We can just as well not do it.
When we want to engage, believe me, we can. And not only will we then make fewer mistakes of perception, but we will become the types of focused, observant people that we may have thought we were incapable of becoming. Even children who have been diagnosed with ADHD can find themselves able to focus on certain things that grab them, that activate and engage their minds. Like video games. Time after time, video games have proven able to bring out the attentional resources in people that they never suspected they had. And what’s more, the kind of sustained attention and newfound appreciation of detail that emerges from the process of engagement can then transfer to other domains, beyond the screen. Cognitive neuroscientists Daphné Bavelier and C. Shawn Green, for instance, have found repeatedly that so-called “action” video games—games characterized by high speed, high perceptual and motor load, upredictability, and the need for peripheral processing—enhance visual attention, low-level vision, processing speed, attentional, cognitive, and social control, and a number of other faculties across domains as varied as the piloting of unmanned drones and laparoscopic surgery. The brain can actually change and learn to sustain attention in a more prolonged fashion—and all because of moments of engagement in something that actually mattered.
We began the chapter with mind wandering, and that is where we will end it. Mind wandering is anathema to engagement. Be it mind wandering from lack of stimulation, mind wandering from multitasking (basically, most of modern existence), or mind wandering because of a forced laboratory paradigm, it cannot coexist with engagement. And so, it cannot coexist with mindful attention, the Attention that we need for Observation.
And yet we constantly make the active choice to disengage. We listen to our headphones as we walk, run, take the subway. We check our phones when we are having dinner with our friends and family. We think of the next meeting while we are in the current one. In short, we occupy our minds with self-made memorization topics or distracting strings of numbers. The Daniel Gilberts of the world don’t need to do it for us. In fact, Dan Gilbert himself tracked a group of over 2,200 adults in their regular days through iPhone alerts, asking them to report on how they were feeling, what they were doing, and whether or not they were thinking of something other than the activity they had been involved in when they received the alert. And you know what he found? Not only do people think about something other than what they’re doing about as often as they think about what they are doing—46.9 percent of the time, to be exact—but what they are actually doing doesn’t seem to make a difference; minds wander about equally no matter how seemingly interesting and engaging or boring and dull the activity.
An observant mind, an attentive mind, is a present mind. It is a mind that isn’t wandering. It is a mind that is actively engaged in whatever it is that it happens to be doing. And it is a mind that allows System Holmes to step up, instead of letting System Watson run around like crazy, trying to do it all and see it all.
I know a psychology professor who turns off her email and Internet access for two hours every day, to focus exclusively on her writing. I think there’s much to learn from that self-enforced discipline and distance. It’s certainly an approach I wish I took more often than I do. Consider the results of a recent nature intervention by a neuroscientist who wanted to demonstrate what could happen if people took three days to be completely wireless in the wild: creativity, clarity in thought, a reboot of sorts of the brain. We can’t all afford a three-day wilderness excursion, but maybe, just maybe, we can afford a few hours here and there where we can make a conscious choice: focus.
SHERLOCK HOLMES FURTHER READING
“I noticed that [his hand] was all mottled over . . .” “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” from A Study in Scarlet, chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes, p. 7.
“I knew you came from Afghanistan.” “Before turning to those moral and mental aspects . . .” from A Study in Scarlet, chapter 2: The Science of Deduction, p. 15.
“What does Dr. James Mortimer, the man of science, ask of Sherlock Holmes, the specialist in crime?” from The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes, p. 5.
“My body has remained in this armchair . . .” from The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 3: The Problem, p. 22.
“Let us continue our reconstruction.” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Priory School,” p. 932.
“It may possibly recur to your memory that when I examined the paper upon which the printed words were fastened . . .” from The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 15: A Retrospection, p. 156.
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “Silver Blaze,” p. 1.
“At the single table sat the man whom we had seen in the street . . .” from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” p. 51.
“Surely the man’s appearance would go far with any jury?” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” p. 829.
CHAPTER FOUR
Exploring the Brain Attic: The Value of Creativity and Imagination
A young solicitor, John Hector McFarlane, wakes up one morning to find his life upended: overnight he has become the single most likely suspect in the murder of a local builder. He barely has time to reach Sherlock Holmes to tell his story before he is swept off to Scotland Yard, so damning is the evidence against him.
As he explains to Holmes before he is whisked away, he had first met the victim, a certain Jonas Oldacre, only the prior afternoon. The man had arrived at McFarlane’s offices and asked him to copy and witness his will—and to Mr. McFarlane’s surprise, that will left him all of the builder’s property. He was childless and alone, explained Oldacre. And once upon a time, he had known McFarlane’s parents well. He wanted to commemorate the friendship with the inheritance—but, he urged, McFarlane was not to breathe a word of the transaction to his family until the following day. It was to be a surprise.
That evening the builder asked the solicitor to join him for dinner, so that they might afterward go over some important documents in connection with the estate. McFarlane obliged. And that, it seems, was that. Until, that is, the following morning’s papers described Oldacre’s death—and the burning of his body in the timber yard at the back of his house. The most likely suspect: young John Hector McFarlane, who not only stood to inherit the dead man’s estate, but had also left his walking stick (bloodied) at the scene of the crime.
McFarlane is summarily arrested by Inspector Lestrade, leaving Holmes with his strange tale. And though the arrest seems to make sense—the inheritance, the stick, the nighttime visit, all the indications that point to McFarlane’s guilt—Holmes can’t help but feel that something is off. “I know it’s all wrong,” Holmes tells Watson. “I feel it in my bones.”
Holmes’s bones, however, are in this instance going against the preponderance of evidence. As far as Scotland Yard is concerned, the case is as close to airtight as they come. All that remains is to put the final touches on the police report. When Holmes insists that all is not yet clear, Inspector Lestrade begs to differ. “Not clear? Well, if that isn’t clear, what could be clear?” he interjects.
“Here is a young man who learns suddenly that, if a certain older man dies, he will succeed to a fortune. What does he do? He says nothing to anyone, but he arranges that he shall go out on some pretext to see
his client that night. He waits until the only other person in the house is in bed, and then in the solitude of a man’s room he murders him, burns his body in the wood-pile, and departs to a neighbouring hotel.”
As if that weren’t enough, there’s more: “The blood-stains in the room and also on the stick are very slight. It is probable that he imagined his crime to be a bloodless one, and hoped that if the body were consumed it would hide all traces of the method of his death—traces which, for some reason, must have pointed to him. Is not all this obvious?”
Holmes remains unconvinced. He tells the inspector:
“It strikes me, my good Lestrade, as being just a trifle too obvious. You do not add imagination to your other great qualities, but if you could for one moment put yourself in the place of this young man, would you choose the very night after the will had been made to commit your crime? Would it not seem dangerous to you to make so very close a relation between the two incidents? Again, would you choose an occasion when you are known to be in the house, when a servant has let you in? And, finally, would you take the great pains to conceal the body, and yet leave your own stick as a sign that you were the criminal? Confess, Lestrade, that all this is very unlikely.”
But Lestrade just shrugs his shoulders. What does imagination have to do with it? Observation and deduction, sure: these are the lynchpins of detective work. But imagination? Isn’t that just a flimsy retreat of the less hard-minded and scientific professions, those artistic dalliers who couldn’t be further from Scotland Yard?
Lestrade doesn’t understand just how wrong he is—and just how central a role imagination plays, not just to the successful inspector or detective but to any person who would hold himself as a successful thinker. If he were to listen to Holmes for more than clues as to a suspect’s identity or a case’s line of inquiry, he would find that he might have less need of turning to him in the future. For, if imagination does not enter into the picture—and do so before any deduction takes place—all of those observations, all of that understanding of the prior chapters will have little value indeed.
Imagination is the essential next step of the thought process. It uses the building blocks of all of the observations that you’ve collected to create the material that can then serve as a solid base for future deduction, be it as to the events of that fateful Norwood evening when Jonas Oldacre met his death or the solution to a pesky problem that has been gnawing at you at home or at work. If you think that you can skip it, that it is something unscientific and frivolous, you’ll find yourself having wasted much effort only to arrive at a conclusion that, as clear and obvious as it may seem to you, could not be further from the truth.
What is imagination, and why is it so important? Why, of all things to mention to Lestrade, does Holmes focus on this particular feature, and what is it doing in something as strict-sounding as the scientific method of the mind?
Lestrade isn’t the first to turn his nose up at the thought of imagination playing a role in good old scientific reason, nor is Holmes alone in his insistence to the contrary. One of the greatest scientific thinkers of the twentieth century, Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, frequently voiced his surprise at the lack of appreciation for what he thought was a central quality in both thinking and science. “It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science,” he once told an audience. Not only is that view patently false, but “it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.”
It’s tough to find a better summation and definition of the role of imagination in the scientific process of thought. Imagination takes the stuff of observation and experience and recombines them into something new. In so doing, it sets the stage for deduction, the sifting through of imaginative alternatives to decide: out of all of the possibilities you’ve imagined, which is the definite one that best explains all of the facts?
In imagining, you bring into being something hypothetical, something that may or may not exist in actuality but that you have actively created in your own mind. As such, what you imagine “is different from what has been thought of.” It’s not a restatement of the facts, nor is it a simple line from A to B that can be drawn without much thought. It is your own synthesis and creation. Think of imagination as a kind of essential mental space in your attic, where you have the freedom to work with various contents but don’t yet have to commit to any storage or organizational system, where you can shift and combine and recombine and mess around at will and not be afraid of disturbing the main attic’s order or cleanliness in any way.
That space is essential in the sense of there not being a functional attic without it: you can’t have a storage space that is filled to the brim with boxes. How would you ever come inside? Where would you pull out the boxes to find what you need? How would you even see what boxes were available and where they might be found? You need space. You need light. You need to be able to access your attic’s contents, to walk inside and look around and see what is what.
And within that space, there is freedom. You can temporarily place there all of the observations you’ve gathered. You haven’t yet filed them away or placed them in your attic’s permanent storage. Instead, you lay them all out, where you can see them, and then you play around. What patterns emerge? Can something from permanent storage be added to make a different picture, something that makes sense? You stand in that open space and you examine what you’ve gathered. You pull out different elements, try out different combinations, see what works and what doesn’t, what feels right and what doesn’t. And you come away with a creation that is unlike the facts or observations that have fed into it. It has its roots in them, true, but it is its own unique thing, which exists only in that hypothetical state of your mind and may or may not be real or even true.
But that creation isn’t coming out of the blue. It is grounded in reality. It is drawing upon all those observations you’ve gathered up to that point, “consistent in every detail with what has already been seen.” It is, in other words, growing organically out of those contents that you’ve gathered into your attic through the process of observation, mixed with those ingredients that have always been there, your knowledge base and your understanding of the world. Feynman phrases it thus: “Imagination in a tight straightjacket.” To him, the straightjacket is the laws of physics. To Holmes, it is essentially the same thing: that base of knowledge and observation that you’ve acquired to the present time. Never is it simply a flight of fancy; you can’t think of imagination in this context as identical to the creativity of a fiction writer or an artist. It can’t be. First, for the simple reason that it is grounded in the factual reality that you’ve built up, and second, because it “must be definite and not a vague proposition.” Your imaginings have to be concrete. They have to be detailed. They don’t exist in reality, but their substance must be such that they could theoretically jump from your head straight into the world with little adjustment. Per Feynman, they are in a straightjacket—or, in Holmes’s terms, they are confined and determined by your unique brain attic. Your imaginings must use it as their base and they must play by its rules—and those rules include the observations you’ve so diligently gathered. “The game is,” continues Feynman, “to try to figure out what we know, what’s possible? It requires an analysis back, a checking to see whether it fits, it’s allowed according to what is known.”
And in that statement lies the final piece of the definition. Yes, imagination must come from a basis in real, hard knowledge, from the concreteness and specificity of your attic. And yes, it serves a greater purpose: a setup for deduction, be it of a scientific truth, a solution to a murder, or a decision or problem in your own life that is far removed from both. An
d in all these instances, it must deal with certain constraints. But it is also free. It is fun. It is, in other words, a game. It is the most playful part of a serious endeavor. Not for nothing does Holmes utter the famed refrain “The game is afoot,” in the opening lines of “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.” That simple phrase conveys not only his passion and excitement but his approach to the art of detection and, more generally, of thought: it is a serious thing indeed, but it never loses the element of play. That element is necessary. Without it, no serious endeavor stands a chance.
We tend to think of creativity as an all-or-nothing, you-have-it-or-you-don’t characteristic of the mind. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Creativity can be taught. It is just like another muscle—attention, self-control—that can be exercised and grow stronger with use, training, focus, and motivation. In fact, studies have shown that creativity is fluid and that training enables people to become more creative: if you think your imagination can grow with practice, you will become better at imaginative pursuits. (There, again, is that persistent need for motivation.) Believing you can be as creative as the best of them and learning creativity’s essential components is crucial to improving your overall ability to think, decide, and act in a way that would more befit a Holmes than a Watson (or a Lestrade).
Here we explore that mind space, that stage for synthesis, recombination, and insight. That deceptively lighthearted arena that will allow Holmes to solve the case of the Norwood builder—for solve it he will; and as you’ll see, Lestrade’s confidence in the obvious will prove both misguided and short-lived.
Learning to Overcome Imaginative Doubt
Picture the following. You are led into a room with a table. On the table are three items: a box of tacks, a book of matches, and a candle. You are told that you have only one assignment: attach the candle to the wall. You can take as much time as you need. How do you proceed?