Big Think Mentor | "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes", Google+ Hangout with Maria Konnikova

As part of Big Think Mentor, which is Big Think's lifelong learning channel on YouTube, I’m Jason Gots. And we're very, very happy today to be joined by Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. In her workshop on Big Think Mentor, she teaches thinking skills from the master sleuths, including observation, deduction, and imaginative problem solving, among others. And we're here as a follow-up to that workshop with Sid Burgess, who's a member of Big Think Mentor's learning community.

Welcome, Maria, we're delighted that you're here.

Maria Konnikova: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for this; I've never done a Google Plus Hangout before. And this is our first ever, so bear with us. If there's background noise or any other technical interruptions, or, you know, suddenly the Google Plus animation of a mustache appears on one of us...

So, I think what we'll do is start with, essentially, this is a follow-on to Maria's workshop on Mentor, which is called How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. You can get there by going to youtube.com/user/bigthinkmentor, and we're asking follow-up questions. I have some questions. We've got other questions from members of Mentor's community. And we'll start with Sid. And Sid, if you'd like to introduce yourself, you know, say a couple of words about what brought you to Mentor or what you're up to, and then go ahead and ask Maria your questions.

Sid Burgess: Yeah, so I think - I'm Sid Burgess. I think I'm just kind of addicted to the notion of trying to hone personal skills to try to improve your life from day to day. I enjoy the topic in general, so I've been a big fan of the channel even before you guys went to Big Think Mentor, so I'm really kind of excited to be part of this. I had a question just to kind of kick things off. I really was curious what some of the mentors were wanting to get out of this whole experience themselves? We sort of are used to kind of receiving this feedback or receiving these good ideas, but part of the brilliance of this whole kind of community is that everybody's getting something out of it too, as well. So I'm just kind of curious what you're looking to get out of Big Think Mentor?

Maria Konnikova: Well, I'm looking to get out of it -- that's a wonderful question. Questions just like the one that you asked. So when you really have people who interact with you and who ask new questions, you look at things in a different way, and it makes you think about topics that you wouldn't think about otherwise, which I think is really important. So whenever I answer questions from readers, whenever I give talks and answer questions from the audience, there are always questions that repeat, but there's always something new. And I say, "Huh, that's really interesting." And then I start thinking about it and it lets me develop my ideas. It's kind of like the Holmes-Watson relationship, actually, to bring it back to that. I think that Watson really improves Holmes' thinking. And Holmes becomes much better throughout the stories the more he interacts with Watson because Watson asks provocative questions. He always forces Holmes to stop and think why he's doing what he's doing. And that kind of back-and-forth is incredibly important to keep your thinking sharp, to keep yourself stimulated. I don't think that anyone should ever really work in a vacuum. Even though writing is often a very solitary profession, that interaction, I think, is incredibly important.

Sid Burgess: Great. Jason, do you want me to ask my second question?

Jason Gots: Absolutely. Go right ahead.

Sid Burgess: All right. So the second one is, it's one that I've actually had kind of moiling around in my mind for a while, is this notion of being too distracted and multitasking. And you brought up in one of your videos, so I really wanted to ask you this specifically. I enjoy going with my favorite place in the world; it really doesn't matter which one it is, is the coffee shop. I just enjoy sitting in the coffee shop and just kind of watching the world go by and people watching, as we like to say. But almost more than that too, I just enjoy kind of almost in a sense of meditation, taking in all the sights and sounds of whatever city that I'm in and trying to process them almost simultaneously. So I wanted to just ask you how would you describe maybe in a way that would help improve that mental exercise in a way that differentiates that from kind of the multitasking or the endorphin-driven kind of electronic distractions that we hear a lot about? Can you maybe differentiate the two a little bit and maybe how we can focus on the better one?

Maria Konnikova: Sure. So what you like to do is definitely not multitasking. That's kind of uni-tasking at its best because you're doing something very specific. You're kind of watching; you're letting your senses take everything in. So I think the myth about multitasking is that you can't be looking at multiple things at once and have that not be multitasking. You can't be doing multiple activities at once. So your brain can't be thinking, "Okay, I want to do this, but I also want to do this. I'm watching these people, but also I'm focused on what I'm going to order at the coffee shop, what I'm going to have for lunch, what I'm going to do after I leave the coffee shop, what else I have planned for the city." If you were thinking all these things at the same time, then you'd be multitasking. But if you're kind of in the moment and just soaking everything in, using all of your senses, that's really sensory, you know, taking in the moment in a very mindful fashion, which is the purpose of mindfulness. So I think those are two very, very different experiences. And in order to really, I think, get a lot out of what you do and get more out of that type of people watching, which, by the way, I think is really interesting and fascinating and helps you just develop as a person and develop your thinking and develop your powers of observation, is really realize that that's exactly what you're doing. And do your best to avoid distracting thoughts. So if you see someone, and that puts your mind along the lines of, oh hey, that person reminds me of my friend X, and suddenly you're thinking about friend X and your mind is going on a tangent, realize that that's happening. Stop yourself and come back to just observing and taking everything in. I think that's how you can make the most out of that experience.

Sid Burgess: Okay, great. I have other questions from other Mentor members who would've liked to have been with us today but could not for technical reasons. So we got Matthew J. Clark asking, what are the current theories about why task switching causes fatigue? And that's how he worded the question, and unfortunately folks aren't here to do follow up.

Maria Konnikova: Of course. So we know that attention is an incredibly finite resource. So there's really only so much of it to go around, and we can train our attention so that we become better, but we'll never be able to make it infinite. And so one of the things that task switching does is use up mental energy, so you need resources to switch your focus from one thing to another, and the theory is actually very simple: the more your mind is doing, the more resources it needs. And so every time you switch your attention, you're actually switching circuits, you're switching your focus, you're switching the neural mechanisms behind it, and that expends energy. Literally, you can replenish it by having glucose or other things that actually boost your energy levels. So it's a very, very literal thing that happens. Your brain is actually getting tired; you're actually losing resources, and you're actually becoming less able to do other things because you used those resources for the task switching, now you no longer have them to pay attention to the tasks that you're doing. There's a lot of real interesting work that shows that people who multitask frequently are less efficient at task switching because they're always — they don't know how to take those resources and really use them to their full potential. Which I think is really fascinating because it ends up that heavy multitaskers become worse at the very thing that they should be very good at.

Sid Burgess: Right. I've read some of that research and it's fascinating because the sort of plugged-in millennial folks who you would think would be the best at this actually, the more they multitask, it seems, the worse they get.

Maria Konnikova: Yup, they become worse at being able to filter out distractions. And that's a good thing if you want to make sure that you are paying attention to everything, but you also get off-task very frequently and very easily, which is not a good thing. So not being able to filter out distractions can make you worse at task switching to the tasks you actually want to be switching to, if that makes sense, because you might be like, "Oh hey, there's this distraction; maybe I'll do that instead."

Sid Burgess: So in this regard, do you think that sort of we're all doomed given the technological, you know, that sort of multitasking world that folks are growing up in now or are there things people can do to counteract that? There's concerns about people being addicted...

Maria Konnikova: Sure. No, I don't think we're all doomed at all. I think that technology is wonderful and that we just need to be aware of how much of a pull it exerts on us and how difficult that can be to avoid. So what I would say is we need to learn to train our attention because, as with anything, attention is like a muscle. It's an analogy that you hear over and over in psychology — self-control like a muscle, you know, everything basically you can say hey it's like a muscle because it's an analogy that works incredibly well. So if you train it, it gets stronger, it gets better, you are able to lift more weight, we have more endurance. And similarly with attention, the more you train yourself to uni-task and to only pay attention to one thing at a time, the longer and longer and longer you're able to maintain your focus. So what's happening when people say that they can't pay attention is that they haven't trained their attention. They've forgotten what it is to have a single-minded focus. And because they haven't trained it, their attention actually has gotten worse. So I think that people, you know, when they say they can't pay attention, they really can't. It doesn't just happen overnight. And so what we can do is try to monitor ourselves and really learn to do one thing at a time. For me, there's been a lot that I've had to do to actually maximize my own potential. When I was writing Mastermind, I realized how Internet-addicted I was, and I actually needed to install Freedom, which is an Internet blocking software on my computer, so that I wouldn't go online. And it was really hard for me, but eventually I was able to stay offline for four, five hours at a time. And I turned my phone off because otherwise, I'd be too tempted to check my Internet on the iPhone because, unfortunately, Freedom doesn't yet block all your devices. And now I don't really need it nearly as often because I know I do it and I've already trained myself not to. It's still nice once in a while. I think we all need to give ourselves mental breaks and realize that the Internet is wonderful, but sometimes, it's good to just focus and not let those email notifications, those Twitter notifications, all those things that can just suck our attention, not let them interfere.

Sid Burgess: Gotcha.

Maria Konnikova: And speaking of attention, for our viewers, the noise that sounds like the ocean is most likely some - Maria lives in a fairly noisy neighborhood. Nothing we can really do about that, so that's what that is.

Okay, let me continue with people's questions because I can do follow-ups here all day. Matthew also asks, how can you habituate an input from one sense so that it does not interfere with the attention you give to another sense? For example, reading body language while having a conversation.

Maria Konnikova: Well, I think that there are actually two different issues here. Habituation is a very specific term when it comes to psychology, and you don't do it; it just happens. It's something that's incredibly, incredibly natural. So as soon as there's a stimulus that you're hearing often, you do become habituated to it. So, for instance, one of my favorite examples comes from my personal experience. My freshman year of college, I had a huge church right outside my windows and the bells would ring. And on weekends, the bells would ring and I was a college freshman; I wanted to sleep. And at first, they'd always woke me up. And I got to the point where I didn't even hear them; I didn't realize that the bells were ringing. And it's not that I made a conscious effort to habituate; your brain learns to block out the noises that it hears all the time. And the same can be true of vision, so that's why you often, you know, if you ask me what I passed on my way to work every day, I might not be able to answer. We think, "Oh, I know exactly what I've passed," but because I do it every day, I don't pay attention to it because I've become habituated to all of those sights, and I may not even notice that a store has closed or a new store has opened instead unless something draws my attention to it, and I'm out of my habituated state. So it just happens, and what we can do is actually not habituate ourselves and try to, if we don't want to. The active part is not habituation but withstanding habituation, if that makes sense.

Sid Burgess: Gotcha.

Maria Konnikova: Okay, so one other question from another Mentor member, John Francequa, asks, "Watson is really helpful to Holmes; do you have tools or ideas for solutions to create our own imaginary Watson or other ways to get a similar benefit without having a Watson if we don't have one?"

Maria Konnikova: Yeah, it's interesting, and I'd stop short of saying have imaginary people conversations in your head just because you could take that a little bit too far. But you can learn to kind of argue with yourself and to always — that's actually how I get a lot of my thinking done. I say, "Okay, this is what I think. What's the counterargument to that or why do I think that way?" So force yourself almost to be in the debater mindset always. It doesn't just make you more critical of yourself; it makes you critical of all the information that you're taking in, of everything that you're reading, of everything that you're watching, of all the constant news and other inputs that you get every day. If you just don't take it in as a given and say that it makes sense, rather, always play devil's advocate and say, "Wait, that doesn't make sense." Because in a large way that's exactly what Watson does. The other good thing to do is get yourself a Watson. In the sense of, get yourself someone with whom you can discuss things, someone who listens to you. It's really good to talk things through, and I think you often find that you see gaps in logic when you say something out loud that before you never really voiced. And so one of the ways you can do that is if you think that you know what you're doing, actually pretend that you need to explain it to somebody else and explain it out loud, or you can even write it out. So writing is a good exercise to which you can say, "Hey, did I really understand this?" because writing shows gaps in logic very, very strongly. So if I write something and I'm like, "Wait, that made total sense in my head," but on the page it suddenly doesn't make sense, I have to try to figure out why that's the case. And anyone can do that. You don't need anyone else; you don't need to talk to yourself; you don't need to imagine conversations. All you have to do is write out your argument as if you were explaining it to someone else or write out your thinking as if you were explaining it to someone else.

Sid Burgess: That's interesting.

Maria Konnikova: That's why it can be helpful to keep a journal. I know that I've experienced that in writing a journal, that you start writing your thoughts about things and you're surprised to, like, your perspective on them is completely different from what you might have thought that it was in your head.

Jason Gots: So, I have a couple of questions of my own, and maybe in the interest of time, I'll ask just one of them and then see if Sid has a follow-up, and then we'll close out. I'm looking over here at another computer; that's why I'm not looking at everyone.

Many of the points you make...

Maria Konnikova: Multitasking.

Jason Gots: Yes, I'm a multi-media multitasking very well. Many of the points you make in the workshop add up to the fact that we can't trust our own commonsense. And in your book, of course, Mastermind, our minds make up stories; they're biased to pay attention to some things and ignore others. And in order to solve problems more effectively, we need to examine our assumptions rigorously and consider the data in ways that don't necessarily come naturally to us, which is very counterintuitive in some ways to at least the culture I grew up in, American culture, of trust yourself and trust what your common sense in a sense. Not only is this practically hard as we're biased to trust ourselves, it might also be emotionally hard in that many of us construct our identities and sense of self-worth, security, etc. around self-trust, around trusting our own sort of commonsense. What are your thoughts about how to manage, like if somebody is training themselves to be more skeptical, more critical of their own thinking, how to manage that transition emotionally and otherwise?

Maria Konnikova: I think that's a really interesting question. And I think that the way that I view it is it's not don't trust yourself; it's don't trust yourself when you have no reason to do so, when you have no experience in something. So experts can trust all of their instincts and their commonsense in their areas of expertise. And the problem comes when non-experts have quote unquote common-sense opinions that really are just coming out of nowhere. And we do that all the time. There are areas where we're experts, but then we do the exact same thing in areas where we're not really experts. So if you think, for instance, I see this person and he's acting shifty to me, my commonsense is he's doing something wrong. You shouldn't distress that commonsense because you're an expert at looking at people and in reading body language. You've done that your entire life. So something as simple as that you actually are an expert and you should listen to yourself. Even if you're not really sure why you think something, you might be picking up on cues. The trick is to ask yourself why do I think this person is acting suspicious? Am I actually reading body language or am I using non-expertise? Am I putting someone else in this situation and this person just reminds me of someone I don't like; so now I think they're shifty? So it's not about not trusting yourself per se; it's about examining the reasons for your assumptions and always saying, "Okay, am I actually making this judgment based on some sort of expertise or am I like one of those people who makes a decision about whether or not I'm going to hire someone in the first 30 seconds of an interview just because I liked them or didn't like them?" In which case there's no expertise there. You don't know anything about the person. So I think it depends on judgment and it depends on what you're using to get there, if that makes sense.

Sid Burgess: Yeah, that definitely makes sense.

Jason Gots: Okay, so I think I'll ask one more question, and then will turn it over to Sid. This is about the value of creativity and imagination. How well do psychologists at this point understand creativity? I imagine it's not something - it's not a subject that gets heavy research dollars thrown at it. Have their insights yet yielded anything that you would think of as a practical useful approach to teaching or enhancing people's creativity beyond letting your mind do its thing, you know, daydreaming, etc.?

Maria Konnikova: Yeah, I think that we're starting to understand creativity, but it's a really, really hard thing to study because there are many different types of creativity. There are many manifestations of creativity. It's not like an overarching entity. You are or you are not creative. You can be creative in different ways and there are different ways of having creative insights. So psychologists are a little bit limited in that they have to study things in a laboratory, and so they have to have an artificial paradigm. And so they try to figure out, well okay, how can I approximate creativity? So that's why you get a lot of these studies that looked at the Eureka moment, the aha moment, where you are able to put things together in a new way. That's one way that you can study creativity, and we're learning a lot about that. We're learning how people can become better at that, but once again, that's a very, very specific type of creative thinking, and being good at those eureka problems is not the same thing as being more creative overall. What we do know is that something that everyone can do is that for whatever reason, being in nature helps people become better at problem solving. So being surrounded by trees, by water, those types of things, for whatever reason, makes people better able to have insights into think of imaginative solutions. So it's not just Eureka moments; it's also, you know, you become better about brainstorming; the quality of your brainstorm ideas becomes deeper. And the more that we actually — the more we learn to pay attention, the more we focus on things. That's also the other part of the puzzle. There is this focus part of creativity. People always say that it's taking the breaks, and those breaks are incredibly important, but you have to realize that for Holmes and for any other creative person, there's also a lot of hard work that comes before, and you can't distract yourself while you're doing that. So Holmes does have these bouts of intense thinking and concentration where he's really mulling over the problem before he takes his break. He takes his break; he already had a lot of that worked through. And whenever you hear of people like Moncovae or anyone else who is often used as an example of breakthrough creativity, you may spend weeks, hours, you know, years sometimes mulling over problems. And so the insight comes in a second, but there are different parts of that. So I think we can train our concentration. We can take more walks in natural habitats, and those are the things we definitely know can help. It's a field that’s getting more and more attention. I think people would really love to know how to become more creative. And the good news is that you can become more creative, and I think that everyone has a certain degree of creativity in them. It's not the type of thing -- you can't say, "Oh, I'm not a creative person." I don't think "not creative" people exist.

Sid Burgess: Great.

Maria Konnikova: So listen up all you people who, like me, think of yourselves as creative and live in big cities. Time to get out into the park.

And one of the most interesting points I think, Maria, that you make in your book Mastermind and in the Big Think Mentor workshop How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes is this fact that Sherlock Holmes is a creative problem solver. That he does take information and recombine it in imaginative ways. We tend to associate creativity falsely with the arts often and think of science and being a detective as somehow more kind of rational, linear, analytical, not creative. And I think that's a really, really important point that you make.

Jason Gots: Okay, so with that said, Sid, did you have any follow-up questions you'd like to ask before we wind this up?

Sid Burgess: I have a simple one, and maybe it would be a good way to close. I'm kind of curious, Maria, did you ever have or what was an aha moment for you in reading any of the Holmes stories?

Maria Konnikova: What was the aha moment for me? Or was there a particular aha moment for you reading in his stories where it just kind of hits you and like that makes perfect sense in the way that he was approaching a problem?

Maria Konnikova: Well, I definitely had an aha moment when I realized that I wanted to write about Holmes, and I started rereading all the stories. And it was more of a reading all of them in very close succession, very, very closely, you know, underlining, highlighting, writing notes in the margins, kind of doing this very close reading. And my aha moment was that Sherlock Holmes really is a different type of thinker from the thinker that I remember from childhood and the thinker that he's often portrayed as being because he's so imaginative and creative and warm and not a cold machine at all. And it was very — to me, it was one of those, "Huh, why do people always think of him as this logical automaton, as a computer, when he's anything but? When all the things that make him Sherlock Holmes are things that a computer can't accomplish." And that, to me, was...

Sid Burgess: Or feel.

Maria Konnikova: Exactly. Exactly. It was really eye-opening because even from my childhood from reading the stories, I didn't remember that. I instead had that kind of the stereotype of he's this computer. He's just this perfectly logical person. He's anything but.

Jason Gots: Okay, great. So I want to thank everyone out there in the live audience for joining us today, and Sid Burgess from our Big Think Mentor community, and a special thanks to Maria Konnikova for being with us. You've been watching our Big Think Mentor Hangout with Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Visit youtube.com/user/bigthinkmentor to take Maria's workshop on thinking skills from the master detective and learn life skills for personal and professional growth. I'm Jason Gots, an editor with Big Think, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Sid and Maria, thank you.

Maria Konnikova: Thank you.