Read Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes for Free Online

in the days of firelight and the old crimson hardcover—all I could picture in my seven-year-old head was the cover of the black-and-white Shel Silverstein book that sat prominently on my bookshelf, with its half-smiling, lopsided face whose forehead was distended to a wrinkled triangle, complete with roof, chimney, and window with open shutters. Behind the shutters, a tiny face peeking out at the world. Is this what Holmes meant? A small room with sloped sides and a foreign creature with a funny face waiting to pull the cord and turn the light off or on?
    As it turns out, I wasn’t far from wrong. For Sherlock Holmes, a person’s brain attic really is an incredibly concrete, physical space. Maybe it has a chimney. Maybe it doesn’t. But whatever it looks like, it is a space in your head, specially fashioned for storing the most disparate of objects. And yes, there is certainly a cord that you can pull to turn the light on or off at will. As Holmes explains to Watson, “A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic.”
    That comparison, as it turns out, is remarkably accurate. Subsequent research on memory formation, retention, and retrieval has—as you’ll soon see—proven itself to be highly amenable to the attic analogy. In the chapters that follow, we will trace the role of the brain attic from the inception to the culmination of the thought process, exploring how its structure and content work at every point—and what we can do to improve that working on a regular basis.
    The attic can be broken down, roughly speaking, into two components: structure and contents. The attic’s structure is how our mind works: how it takes in information. How it processes that information. How it sorts itand stores it for the future. How it may choose to integrate it or not with contents that are already in the attic space. Unlike a physical attic, the structure of the brain attic isn’t altogether fixed. It can expand, albeit not indefinitely, or it can contract, depending on how we use it (in other words, our memory and processing can become more or less effective). It can change its mode of retrieval ( How do I recover information I’ve stored? ). It can change its storage system ( How do I deposit information I’ve taken in: where will it go? how will it be marked? how will it be integrated? ). At the end, it will have to remain within certain confines—each attic, once again, is different and subject to its unique constraints—but within those confines, it can take on any number of configurations, depending on how we learn to approach it.
    The attic’s contents, on the other hand, are those things that we’ve taken in from the world and that we’ve experienced in our lives. Our memories. Our past. The base of our knowledge, the information we start with every time we face a challenge. And just like a physical attic’s contents can change over time, so too does our mind attic continue to take in and discard items until the very end. As our thought process begins, the furniture of memory combines with the structure of internal habits and external circumstances to determine which item will be retrieved from storage at any given point. Guessing at the contents of a person’s attic from his outward appearance becomes one of Sherlock’s surest ways of determining who that person is and what he is capable of.
    As we’ve already seen, much of the original intake is outside of our control: just like we must picture a pink elephant to realize one doesn’t exist, we can’t help but become acquainted—if only for the briefest of moments—with the workings of the solar system or the writings of Thomas Carlyle should Watson choose to