Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (38 page)

Dweck herself was one of the lucky ones. Her seat: number one. She had scored highest of all her classmates. And yet, something wasn’t quite right. She knew that all it would take was another test to make her less smart. And could it be that it was so simple as all that—a score, and then your intelligence was marked for good?

Years later, Walter Mischel and Carol Dweck both found themselves on the faculty of Columbia University. (As of this writing, Mischel is still there and Dweck has moved to Stanford.) Both had become key players in social and personality psychology research (though Mischel the sixteen-years-senior one), and both credit that early test to their subsequent career trajectories, their desire to conduct research into such supposedly fixed things as personality traits and intelligence, things that could be measured with a simple test and, in that measurement, determine your future.

It was easy enough to see how Dweck had gotten to that pinnacle of academic achievement. She was, after all, the smartest. But what of Mischel? How could someone whose IQ would have placed him squarely in the back of Dweck’s classroom have gone on to become one of the leading figures in psychology of the twentieth century, he of the famous marshmallow studies of self-control and of an entirely new approach to looking at personality and its measurement? Something wasn’t quite
right, and the fault certainly wasn’t with Mischel’s intelligence or his stratospheric career trajectory.

Sherlock Holmes is a hunter. He knows that there is nothing too difficult for his mastery—in fact, the more difficult something is, the better. And in that attitude may lie a large portion of his success, and a large part of Watson’s failure to follow in his footsteps. Remember that scene from “The Adventure of the Priory School,” where Watson all but gives up hope at figuring out what happened to the missing student and teacher?

“I am at my wit’s end,” he tells Holmes.

But Holmes will have none of it. “Tut, tut, we have solved worse problems.”

Or, consider Holmes’s response to Watson when the latter declares a cipher “beyond human power to penetrate.”

Holmes answers, “Perhaps there are points that have escaped your Machiavellian intellect.” But Watson’s attitude is surely not helping. “Let us continue the problem in the light of pure reason,” he directs him, and goes on, naturally, to decipher the note.

In a way, Watson has beaten himself in both cases before he has even started. By declaring himself at his wit’s end, by labeling something as beyond human power, he has closed his mind to the possibility of success. And that mindset, as it turns out, is precisely what matters most—and it’s a thing far more intangible and unmeasurable than a number on a test.

For many years, Carol Dweck has been researching exactly what it is that separates Holmes’s “tut, tut” from Watson’s “wit’s end,” Walter Mischel’s success from his supposed IQ. Her research has been guided by two main assumptions: IQ cannot be the only way to measure intelligence, and there might be more to that very concept of intelligence than meets the eye.

According to Dweck, there are two main theories of intelligence: incremental and entity. If you are an incremental theorist, you believe that intelligence is fluid. If you work harder, learn more, apply yourself better, you will become smarter. In other words, you dismiss the notion that something might possibly be beyond human power to penetrate. You
think that Walter Mischel’s original IQ score is not only something that should not be a cause for disappointment but that it has little bearing on his actual ability and later performance.

If, on the other hand, you are an entity theorist, you believe that intelligence is fixed. Try as you might, you will remain as smart (or not) as you were before. It’s just your original luck. This was the position of Dweck’s sixth-grade teacher—and of Mischel’s kindergarten one. It means that once in the back, you’re stuck in the back. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Sorry, buddy, luck of the draw.

In the course of her research, Dweck has repeatedly found an interesting thing: how someone performs, especially in reacting to failure, largely depends on which of the two beliefs he espouses. An incremental theorist sees failure as a learning opportunity; an entity theorist, as a frustrating personal shortcoming that cannot be remedied. As a result, while the former may take something away from the experience to apply to future situations, the latter is more likely to write it off entirely. So basically, how we think of the world and of ourselves can actually change how we learn and what we know.

In a recent study, a group of psychologists decided to see if this differential reaction is simply behavioral, or if it actually goes deeper, to the level of brain performance. The researchers measured response-locked event-related potentials (ERPs)—electric neural signals that result from either an internal or external event—in the brains of college students as they took part in a simple flanker task. The students were shown a string of five letters and asked to quickly identify the middle letter. The letters could be congruent—for instance, MMMMM—or they might be incongruent—for example, MMNMM.

While performance accuracy was generally high, around 91 percent, the specific task parameters were hard enough that everyone made some mistakes. But where individuals differed was in how both they—and, crucially, their brains—responded to the mistakes. Those who had an incremental mindset (i.e., believed that intelligence was fluid) performed better following error trials than those who had an entity mindset (i.e., believed intelligence was fixed). Moreover, as that incremental mindset increased, positivity ERPs on error trials as opposed to correct trials
increased as well. And the larger the error positivity amplitude on error trials, the more accurate the post-error performance.

So what exactly does that mean? From the data, it seems that a growth mindset, whereby you believe that intelligence can improve, lends itself to a more adaptive response to mistakes—not just behaviorally but neurally. The more someone believes in improvement, the larger the amplitude of a brain signal that reflects a conscious allocation of attention to errors. And the larger that neural signal, the better the subsequent performance. That mediation suggests that individuals with an incremental theory of intelligence may actually have better self-monitoring and control systems on a very basic neural level: their brains are better at monitoring their own, self-generated errors and at adjusting their behavior accordingly. It’s a story of improved online error awareness—of noticing mistakes as they happen, and correcting for them immediately.

The way our brains act is infinitely sensitive to the way we, their owners, think. And it’s not just about learning. Even something as theoretical as belief in free will can change how our brains respond (if we don’t believe in it, our brains actually become more lethargic in their preparation). From broad theories to specific mechanisms, we have an uncanny ability to influence how our minds work, and how we perform, act, and interact as a result. If we think of ourselves as able to learn, learn we will. And if we think we are doomed to fail, we doom ourselves to do precisely that, not just behaviorally but at the most fundamental level of the neuron.

But mindset isn’t predetermined, just as intelligence isn’t a monolithic thing that is preset from birth. We can learn, we can improve, we can change our habitual approach to the world. Take the example of stereotype threat, an instance where others’ perception of us—or what we think that perception is—influences how we in turn act, and does so on the same subconscious level as all primes. Being a token member of a group (for example, a single woman among men) can increase self-consciousness and negatively impact performance. Having to write down your ethnicity or gender before taking a test has a negative impact on math scores for females and overall scores for minorities. (On the GREs, for instance, having race made salient lowers black students’ performance.)
Asian women perform better on a math test when their Asian identity is made salient, and worse when their female identity is. White men perform worse on athletic tasks when they think performance is based on natural ability, and black men when they are told it is based on athletic intelligence. It’s called stereotype threat.

But a simple intervention can help. Women who are given examples of females successful in scientific and technical fields don’t experience the negative performance effects on math tests. College students exposed to Dweck’s theories of intelligence—specifically, the incremental theory—have higher grades and identify more with the academic process at the end of the semester. In one study, minority students who wrote about the personal significance of a self-defining value (such as family relationships or musical interests) three to five times during the school year had a GPA that was 0.24 grade points higher over the course of two years than those who wrote about neutral topics—and low-achieving African Americans showed improvements of 0.41 points on average. Moreover, the rate of remediation dropped from 18 percent to 5 percent.

What is the mindset you typically have when it comes to yourself? If you don’t realize you have it, you can’t do anything to combat the influences that come with it when they are working against you, as happens with negative stereotypes that hinder performance, and you can’t tap into the benefits when they are working for you (as can happen if you activate positively associated stereotypes). What we believe is, in large part, how we are.

It is an entity world that Watson sees when he declares himself beaten–black and white, you know it or you don’t, and if you come up against something that seems too difficult, well, you may as well not even try lest you embarrass yourself in the process. As for Holmes, everything is incremental. You can’t know if you haven’t tried. And each challenge is an opportunity to learn something new, to expand your mind, to improve your abilities and add more tools to your attic for future use. Where Watson’s attic is static, Holmes’s is dynamic.

Our brains never stop growing new connections and pruning unused ones. And they never stop growing stronger in those areas where we
strengthen them, like that muscle we encountered in the early pages of the book, that keeps strengthening with use (but atrophies with disuse), that can be trained to perform feats of strength we’d never before thought possible.

How can you doubt the brain’s transformational ability when it comes to something like thinking when it is capable of producing talent of all guises in people who had never before thought they had it in them? Take the case of the artist Ofey. When Ofey first started to paint, he was a middle-aged physicist who hadn’t drawn a day in his life. He wasn’t sure he’d ever learn how. But learn he did, going on to have his own one-man show and to sell his art to collectors all over the world.

Ofey, of course, is not your typical case. He wasn’t just any physicist. He happens to have been the Nobel Prize–winning Richard Feynman, a man of uncommon genius in nearly all of his pursuits. Feynman had created Ofey as a pseudonym to ensure that his art was valued on its own terms and not on those of his laurels elsewhere. And yet there are multiple other cases. While Feynman may be unique in his contributions to physics, he certainly is not in representing the brain’s ability to change—and to change in profound ways—late in life.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses—better known as Grandma Moses—did not begin to paint until she was seventy-five. She went on to be compared to Pieter Bruegel in her artistic talent. In 2006, her painting
Sugaring Off
sold for $1.2 million.

Václav Havel was a playwright and writer—until he became the center of the Czech opposition movement and then the first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia at the age of fifty-three.

Richard Adams did not publish
Watership Down
until he was fifty-two. He’d never even thought of himself as a writer. The book that was to sell over fifty million copies (and counting) was born out of a story that he told to his daughters.

Harlan David Sanders—better known as Colonel Sanders—didn’t start his Kentucky Fried Chicken company until the age of sixty-five, but he went on to become one of the most successful businessmen of his generation.

The Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn competed in his first Olympic
games in 1908, when he was sixty years old. He won two gold and one bronze medals, and when he turned seventy-two, he became the oldest Olympian ever and the oldest medalist in history after his bronze-winning performance at the 1920 games. The list is long, the examples varied, the accomplishments all over the map.

And yes, there are the Holmeses who have the gift of clear thought from early on, who don’t have to change or strike out in a new direction after years of bad habits. But never forget that even Holmes had to train himself, that even he was not born thinking like Sherlock Holmes. Nothing just happens out of the blue. We have to work for it. But with proper attention, it happens. It is a remarkable thing, the human brain.

As it turns out, Holmes’s insights can apply to most anything. It’s all about the attitude, the mindset, the habits of thinking, the enduring approach to the world that you develop. The specific application itself is far less important.

If you get only one thing out of this book, it should be this: the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn’t often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.

The message may be getting across. A recent
New York Times
piece spoke of the new practice of squatting while texting: remaining in parked cars in order to engage in texting, emailing, Twittering, or whatever it is you do instead of driving off to vacate parking spaces. The practice may provoke parking rage for people looking for spots, but it also shows an increased awareness that doing anything while driving may not be the best idea. “It’s time to kill multitasking” rang a headline at the popular blog
The 99%.

We can take the loudness of our world as a limiting factor, an excuse as to why we cannot have the same presence of mind that Sherlock Holmes did—after all, he wasn’t constantly bombarded by media, by technology, by the ever more frantic pace of modern life. He had it so much easier. Or, we can take it as a challenge to do Holmes one better. To show that it doesn’t really matter—we can still be just as mindful as he ever was, and then some, if only we make the effort. And the greater the effort, we
might say, the greater the gain and the more stable the shift in habits from the mindless toward the mindful.