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    How to Think Like Sherlock: Improve Your Powers of Observation, Memory and Deduction
    How to Think Like Sherlock: Improve Your Powers of Observation, Memory and Deduction
    How to Think Like Sherlock: Improve Your Powers of Observation, Memory and Deduction
    Ebook145 pages1 hour

    How to Think Like Sherlock: Improve Your Powers of Observation, Memory and Deduction

    By Daniel Smith

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    About this ebook

    'You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.'

    Such were the words of the master detective Sherlock Holmes to Dr Watson, as he noted how his friend failed to implement Holmes's techniques. In How to think like Sherlock you will learn how to increase your powers of observation, memory, deduction and reasoning using the tricks and techniques of the world's most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. The book incorporates the latest techniques and theories across a range of topics: NLP, memory mapping, body language, information shifting and speed reading - this is a supremely practical book that will make you look at the world in a new light, and more importantly, impress those around you. Packed full of case studies, quotes and trivia from Arthur Conan Doyle's original novels and short stories, the book also includes a series of fun tasks and games for you to complete that will ensure that when you reach the end of the book you will be thinking like Sherlock Holmes, the master of the science of deduction. You will never look at a shirt cuff, trouser hem or scuff of dirt on a shoe in the same way again!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateOct 11, 2012
    ISBN9781843179719
    How to Think Like Sherlock: Improve Your Powers of Observation, Memory and Deduction
    Author

    Daniel Smith

    Daniel Smith is a non-fiction author and editor who has written across a range of subjects, including politics, economics and social history. He is the author of The Little Book of Big Ideas: 150 Concepts and Breakthroughs that Transformed History and the 'How to Think Like ...' series for Michael O'Mara Books, which has been published in 25 languages and sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. He is also a scriptwriter for the award-winning podcast series, Real Dictators and A Short History of . . . He lives in London with his wife and two children.

    Read more from Daniel Smith

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    Reviews for How to Think Like Sherlock

    3/5

    12 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Not a lot of substance
    • 2/5
      Quick, disappointing read. Gimmicky and worn logic puzzles (some requiring a decidedly British familiarity), a handful of Holmes quizzes and a few erroneous problems. For one, the answer implied information not given; for another the problem definition was wrong ("two words" to be found when the solution was two two-word answers)...so, bad editing or just bad writing?

      Not recommended
    • 3/5
      A neat little book on memory techniques and the best way to approach situations in a manner that is similar to Sherlock Holmes. It includes a number of puzzles for you to test your new skills on, some harder than others.
    • 3/5
      not too shabby :D good, quick read, and great way to kill some time
    • 1/5
      No sabe que incluso el mbti es falso. Y se basa en ese juego mal considerado examen psicológico
    • 5/5
      amayzaing

    Book preview

    How to Think Like Sherlock - Daniel Smith

    I:

    Preparing the Mind

    Understanding Sherlock

    ‘I play the game for the game’s own sake.’

    ‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE BRUCE-PARTINGTON PLANS’

    Dear old Sherlock has rather acquired a reputation over the years as an anti-social, unfeeling machine with a fearsome streak of arrogance. Such a description is not entirely unjustified. Even faithful Watson – in one of his more exasperated moments – described him as ‘a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence’. Then, in a more considered moment, Watson called him ‘the best and wisest man whom I had ever known’.

    In truth, Holmes nestled somewhere uncomfortably between these two descriptions. The ordinary, everyday world largely bored him, which could make him seem distant, disinterested and even callous. This was an unfortunate side effect of his on-going quest for excitement, for the unusual, for the sort of problem that could only be solved by his particular type of mind.

    ‘I know, my dear Watson,’ said Holmes in ‘The Red-Headed League’, ‘that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life.’ It was this desire to rise above the mundane that so often drove him, sometimes onwards and upwards, sometimes into extreme danger and sometimes toward the terrible black dogs of his depression.

    What cannot be in doubt is that the Great Detective took on all his work wholeheartedly, risking his own wellbeing in pursuit of his chief goal: defeating the worst criminal minds in the land. It was work that imperilled his life but which fulfilled a deep-seated need within him for intellectual challenge and heart-stopping adrenalin rushes. Take this short extract from ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, which exquisitely captures Holmes as the thrill of the chase takes him over:

    Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognise him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick, impatient snarl in reply.

    There were many counterpoints to these moments of exhilaration. In the absence of suitable cases to invigorate his soul, Holmes displayed classic signs of depression and resorted to such unsavoury outlets for his energies as cocaine abuse. ‘I get in the dumps at times,’ he told Watson in A Study in Scarlet, ‘and don’t open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right.’

    Equally destructive was his inability to consider his own basic physiological requirements when faced with an unresolved conundrum. In these circumstances, Watson memorably recorded how he ‘would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view until he had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his data were insufficient’. Had he been a fan of those signs one sometimes finds in a certain kind of office environment, he might well have had one on his desk at 221B Baker Street that read: ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here. But it helps!’

    All of which is to say, being Holmes was no easy option, and to follow in his intellectual footsteps is not a journey for the faint-hearted. Holmes went about his work because he had no other choice – it was what made him who he was. Without it, there was little to define him. He alluded to his enormous sense of duty in A Study in Scarlet: ‘There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.’ Meanwhile, Watson would say of him that ‘like all great artists’ he ‘lived for his art’s sake’.

    Do You Have the Personality?

    ‘The strong, masterful personality of Holmes dominated the tragic scene …’

    ‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLITARY SCIENTIST’

    We all make sweeping judgements about people. Him over there is arrogant, her in the corner is needy, and as for her friend … well, where do I start?

    The truth is that many of the judgements we make about personality are instinctive and say as much about us as they do about the person we are judging. The study of personality can never amount to an exact science. However, there is a body of long-established research into personality that gives us a good basis for discussion. So how does your personality type match up against that of Holmes?

    The founding father of the psychological classification of personality types is Carl Jung, who published his landmark study Psychological Types in 1921. He outlined two pairs of cognitive functions. On the one hand, the ‘perceiving’ (or ‘irrational’) functions of sensation and intuition, while on the other hand, the ‘judging’ (or ‘rational’) functions of thinking and feeling. In layman’s terms, sensation is perception as derived from the senses; thinking is the process of intellectual and logical cognition. Intuition is perception as derived from the subconscious while feeling is the result of subjective and empathetic estimation.

    As if all this weren’t quite complicated enough, Jung threw in another element: an individual’s personality may be classified as extrovert (literally ‘outward-turning’) or introvert (‘inward-looking’). In Jung’s analysis, each individual has elements of all four functions to a greater or lesser degree, with each manifesting in an introverted or extroverted way.

    Jung’s philosophy was subsequently developed by many different parties over the years. Among them were the mother-and-daughter team of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a trademarked assessment first published in 1962 that categorises personality into one of sixteen types based on four dichotomies:

    Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I)

    Sensing (S) – Intuition (N)

    Thinking (T) – Feeling (F)

    Judging (J) – Perception (P)

    Personality types are represented by a four-letter code comprising the relevant abbreviations noted above. Of course, Sherlock Holmes never underwent such a personality test because he pre-dates them, is fictional, and would have had no truck with psychobabble. However, others have retrospectively attempted to assess him, with a broad consensus that he would probably lie somewhere between an INTP and ISTP classification: introverted, favouring

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