Free Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova Page A

have played out differently had we taken Holmes’s approach as a guide? You see Joe’s baseball hat or Jane’s blue streak, the associations—positive or negative as they may be—come tumbling out. You’re feeling like this is the person you do or do not want to spend some time getting to know . . . but before our Stranger opens his mouth, you take just a moment to step back from yourself. Or rather, step more into yourself. Realize that the judgments in your head had to come from somewhere—they always do—and take another look at the person who is making his way toward you. Objectively, is there anything on which to base your sudden impression? Does Joe have a scowl? Did Jane just push someone out of the way? No? Then your dislike is coming from somewhere else. Maybe if you reflect for just a second, you will realize that it is the baseball hat or the blue streak. Maybe you won’t. In either case, you will have acknowledged, first off, that you have already predisposed yourself to either like or dislike someone you haven’t even met; and second, that you have admitted that you must correct your impression. Who knows, it might have been right. But at least if you reach it a second time, it will be based on objective facts and will come after you’ve given Joe or Jane a chance to talk. Now you can use the conversation to actually observe—physical details, mannerisms, words. A wealth of evidence that you will treat with the full knowledge that you have already decided, on some level and atsome earlier point, to lend more weight to some signs than to others, which you will try to reweigh accordingly.
    Maybe Jane is nothing like your friend. Maybe even though you and Joe don’t share the same love of baseball, he is actually someone you’d want to get to know. Or maybe you were right all along. The end result isn’t as important as whether or not you stopped to recognize that no judgment—no matter how positive or negative, how convincing or seemingly untouchable—begins with an altogether blank slate. Instead, by the time a judgment reaches our awareness, it has already been filtered thoroughly by the interaction of our brain attics and the environment. We can’t consciously force ourselves to stop these judgments from forming, but we can learn to understand our attics, their quirks, tendencies, and idiosyncrasies, and to try our best to set the starting point back to a more neutral one, be it in judging a person or observing a situation or making a choice.
    A Prime Environment: The Power of the Incidental
    In the case of Mary Morstan or Joe and Jane Stranger, elements of physical appearance activated our biases, and these elements were an intrinsic part of the situation. Sometimes, however, our biases are activated by factors that are entirely unrelated to what we are doing—and these elements are sneaky little fellows. Even though they may be completely outside our awareness—in fact, often for that very reason—and wholly irrelevant to whatever it is we’re doing, they can easily and profoundly affect our judgment.
    At every step, the environment primes us. In the “Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” Watson and Holmes are aboard a train to the country. As they pass Aldershot, Watson glances out the window at the passing houses.
    “Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
    But Holmes shook his head gravely.
    “Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything withreference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
    Holmes and Watson may indeed be looking at the same houses, but what they see is altogether different. Even if Watson manages to