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...

[mrmann]

You know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a genius when people talk about one of his characters as if he is a real person. :D

[BizarrSisters]

Holmes isn't real, but Conan Doyle actually based Sherlock on a teacher he had, who just happened to be a master in the science of deduction. 

[mathewman]

for those who say that 'Sherlock Holmes is not real, ' you are partially right but you are also partially wrong. Sir Author Conan Doyle created his fictional character based on a real person whom he used to know. so Sherlock is actually a fictional version of that real person. and yes, there are people who have extraordinary observation skills which can be learned by special type of training.

[bvgg]

This is so so good. Selective attention is crucial to developing your own personality and strengthening your strengths and striving towards your goals with efficiency. I find.

[jamietaylor]

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein

[LibertyPen]

Reason is a beauty to behold. Very nicely done.

[twitchrareswedishkierrabbit]

Why are you undervaluing her ambition in analyzing sherlock's seat? It's obvious that she knows he isn't a real being. But his mind is real. Whoever came up with the being of sherlock holmes must have met, or been a passionate machine like himself. Sociopaths will always revolutionize ideas, maybe his diagnose isn't even a problem. Isn't it just our feeble minds in comparision who thinks he's facing more issues then solutions? Maria explaining it here is not a reason for you to get fixated around her not-being-a perfect talker.

[LEGASItv]

In this book, Maria unpacked the mental strategies that lead to clearer thinking and deeper insights. She draws on 21st-century neuroscience and psychology to “illuminate Holmes’ most fascinating cases.” She writes at length on the scientific method of the mind, the brain attic, the art of observation, imagination, deduction and the importance of self-knowledge.

For me, this book is not easy to read (I didn’t read this book thru like most of my other books. I paused for about 3 months) but since my fascinated for Sherlock Holmes, fictional character created by Author Conan Doyle, is greater than the task of finishing this book, I finally did it. I read 'The Power of Habit' by Charles Duhigg and some parts of Daniel Kahneman’s 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' before and I found these books are almost similar to ‘Mastermind’ (or ‘Mastermind’ is actually similar with these other books). Some readers fairly commented that this book would be much better if she used a real character instead of a fictional character. I agree and disagree. I refuse to comment further. I suggest you watch Konnikova’s talks first on YouTube :)

[bluegiant]

She is right thou. My aunt can do what Sherlock does. But again she is freaking smart with an IQ of 180+
She can subconsciously see from details of you, where you lost something in your room(for example)
People think it's psychic, but this explanation is pretty spot on.
I think the explanation of Daniel Kahneman in the book Thinking Fast and Slow, about intuition is also pretty spot on.

[HenrySoule]

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

[thewb]

Darren Brown the illusionist/hypnotist has mastered this art of deduction in reading people. He has made videos on YouTube and a Netflix special. It’s actually quite amazing, a real life Sherlock Holmes.

[Zandonus]

The big badass philosophers like Plato, Augustine, Aristotle were so good at what they were doing because they remembered hundreds of books by heart. How did they do it? They made a garden in their mind- Each tree, bush or flower patch is a book, the details of it are in the placement of it, how the leaves look, what colors correspond to what topics, all about the connections.

[Noontide]

I really liked this video. I'm a huge Holmes fan and hope they would release the next season already.

[Sreehari-rzux]

Everybody is talking about a master logician, who practically was a doctor. But there were MANY! To learn, is easy. I observe learning techniques, (not for academic stuff) and they help me to recognize many factors about a person. Confidence pays a great deal here.

[marcvesper]

The difference between intuition and empiricism is whether or not the data-collection and processing is mostly unconscious or mostly conscious.

[asimov]

Not only mindfulness and observation, but I think the most important aspect is the understanding of the dependence of causality - of causes and effect - of dependent origination of all things, how they are arising through causes (and sustained by conditions). And the complete non-construction and non-assuming. Then this burning flame of observation, mere silence, is directed at any object to discover it's nature and its origin, without construction or any created suppositions.

[averydiaz]

I’m so mad at myself, the second you stop focusing you start playing yourself xD

[BigotesMcbuff]

Experience in every field, not just scientific, can allow you to go tackle something with a prepared mindset. To prepare yourself to concentrate on the "signal" and push aside the "noise". I know at work I can now do that with almost any piece of machinery. I know to avoid looking at the overwhelming noise of events around it and concentrate only on the sources of energy to the point that's causing trouble. Some people can do this innately but it's very rare.

[NJD]

Maria Sharapova + Anna Kournikova + Spelling error = Maria Konnikova

Am I Sherlock Holmes now?

[polymathperspective]

What is funny is I am autodidact polymath 20 fields of mastery that I have innovated and made discoveries. She is describing exactly how my brain works from thousands of hours in different fields I weave them together to solve problems as real life Sherlock Holmes. Cryptologic linguist, human intelligence collector etc. above all else deductive reasoning sends me to precise locations and tells me what happened even hundreds of years ago. Extracting information out of locations and objects