Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, released January 3, 2013, is a book written by Maria Konnikova. This book explores ways to improve mindfulness, logical thinking and observation using Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional character Sherlock Holmes as an exemplar. Konnikova intertwines her analysis of Holmes's "habits of mind" with findings from the modern-day fields of neuroscience and psychology and offers advice on how to become a more rational thinker.
Overview
In Mastermind, Konnikova uses what she refers to as the Watson System and the Holmes System to categorize and discuss people's habits of mind; their mindfulness and decision-making processes. The Watson System, according to Konnikova, is the more natural of the two: rapid, intuitive, reactionary, and credulous. The Holmes System is slow, methodical, logical, and comprehensive.Konnikova helps the reader conceptualize acts of memory formation, retention and retrieval by borrowing Holmes's problem-solving metaphor: the brain attic. If the brain is an attic, with finite space, then each bit of information placed there needs to be chosen carefully, organized and stored in a way that is both useful and accessible. "When we are forced to do multiple things at once," Konnikova says, "not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general well-being suffers a palpable hit."
Konnikova recommends developing "a healthy dose of skepticism", along with inquisitiveness, mindfulness, restraint, and a desire to "look for evidence that both confirms and disconfirms" closely held beliefs. She provides readers with a number of research-based suggestions for increasing self-awareness and emphasizes the need for life-long learning to cultivate "Holmes-style creativity:" practise mental and physical distancing when working out problems, reduce distractions, challenge one's own "built-in reactions and first impressions" to reduce the Watson-like habit of reaching conclusions before all the evidence is in or becoming distracted by superfluous details.