Since his first appearance in 1887, Sherlock Holmes has become an industry — the Guinness Book of World Records notches him as the most-played movie character in history, with some 200 actors playing the role— and a metaphor for clear thinking.
Psychologist Maria Konnikova's "Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes" unpacks the Holmesian method of inquiry in the language of cognitive science.
From her research, we'll take a look at how anyone can observe and deduce like the fictional detective.
Observe the details.
When Holmes first met Dr. Watson, his soon to be partner in solving crimes, the detective made a certain and offhand claim: "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."
Watson's reply: "How on Earth did you know that?"
Holmes, naturally, deduced it:
"I knew you came from Afghanistan...
The train of reasoning ran, 'Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and this is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.'"
That is deep-level observation, Konnikova says. Holmes sees his new acquaintance's symptoms of tropics, sickness, and injury, and is able to see how they fit together — deducing his personal history from his appearance.
We can learn the same by learning to paying attention.
Pay attention to the basics.
When Holmes famously quips that the solution of a case is "elementary," he's not simply dismissing the detective work as easy. Rather, he's talking about elements, the essentials of a situation.
Holmes says:
"Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems."
As a physicist begins with the laws relevant to a problem, a detective begins with the facts of a case before adding in interpretation.
"Whatever the specific issue, you must define and formulate it in your mind as specifically as possible — and then you must fill it in with past experience and present observation," Konnikova writes. "As Holmes admonishes Lestrate and Gregson when the two detectives fail to note a similarity between the murder being investigated and an earlier case, 'There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.'"
Use all of your senses.
In the novel "Hound of the Baskervilles," Holmes assembles clues not just by reading everything he can find, but involving all his senses.
As he tells Watson:
"It may possibly recur to your memory that when I examined the paper upon which the printed words were fastened I made a close inspection for the water-mark. In doing so I held it within a few inches of my eyes, and was conscious of a faint smell of the scent known as white jessamine. There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended on their prompt recognition. The scent suggested the presence of a lady, and already my thoughts began to turn toward the Stapletons. Thus I had made certain of the hound, and had guessed at the criminal before we ever went to the west country."
While we don't need to go and memorize the smell of 75 perfumes, Konnikova says, we shouldn't neglect our senses — since they influence our decisions in ways we don't even realize.
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"This beautiful aerial shot of my home, which I call the Winter house (center), includes the flower room, carport and studio in the one long structure to the left, the Summer house to the far right, one of the horse paddocks and my beautiful peony garden in full bloom below."
"I love the intersection of the four big horse paddocks and the way the fencing makes everything so architecturally pleasing," she wrote. "The grass in these paddocks is cut very short, preventing too much rich grazing which causes the Freisians to get fat."
This is Stewart's gorgeous stable "block" with stable house, carriage house, and farm offices. "My Chow Chow, Ghenghis Khan, loves to play in the small paddock on the upper right, which is sectioned off from the large horse paddock by an electric fence. If you look closely, you can see Dominic near the gate in the boxwood allee."
The property also has a flower garden, equipment shed, corn crib, hoop house, vegetable greenhouse, blueberry garden, hay barn, and greenhouse.
And since it's Martha Stewart, of course the gardens are extremely well-organized.
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