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For Holmes, the entire thought process is akin to a scientist who is doing a research
experiment, so someone who is doing - who is following the scientific method. So for
him the mind is like an attic and what that means is you can store only so much in it.
The space is finite. And what you store and how you store it is incredibly important as
you try to figure out, how do I optimize my mental resources? How do I then take the things
I've stored and access them? How do I organize them so that there are connections between
them so that I can use them and make them as part of kind of a broader whole so I can
see the bigger picture and not just these random components that I put there?
What a researcher would do at the beginning of an experiment is to say, what is my question?
And that's exactly what Holmes does. He says, what is my goal? What do I want to accomplish?
Before he ever opens a case, before he ever meets a client, he already wants to know,
what is it that I want to get from this meeting? And so he comes into the meeting with a prepared
mindset. His attic has already been primed, so to speak, to take in certain inputs and
to not allow other inputs in. This is important because attention is incredibly finite and
so we don't have just endless resources. So we can't pay attention to everything; we do
need to be selective to what we pay attention to.
Now the scientist after kind of setting this hypothesis would say, okay, how would I go
about testing it? That's, once again, exactly what Sherlock Holmes does. After he sets his
goals, he goes about observing and collecting data and asking, okay, how do I answer this
question? And what is it about this conversation, about this person, about this situation, whatever
it happens to be, that will enable me to gather the data that I will then be able to use to
see whether my hypothesis holds up?
Then he does this thing that every great scientist does and, I think, mediocre scientists probably
do not, which is take a step back and learn to look at the data, recombine it, look at
different possibilities, be imaginative with that data to see is, there anything that I
didn't think of beforehand? Is my mind still open? Do I still know what's going on? Does
this data somehow make me think of new ideas? Think of new approaches? Think of things that
I hadn't thought of in the past?
And so he has this incredible space for imagination, and I think that that is an essential part
of the scientific method as well. You know, scientists from Feynman to Einstein have really
valued the importance of imagination and have spoken a lot about it. So the reason I'm stressing
this is because people tend to forget it when they think about the scientific method.
Finally what you do is you go back to the data and you look at the - kind of what you've
done with it and you see what makes sense based on my observations. Have I framed the
question properly? Have I accomplished my goal? Or do I need to start over? Because
it's an iterative process. You may need to go through this method over and over and over
until you finally come to a conclusion. And that's kind of the final step of Holmes' approach.
He always keeps his education going. He realizes that the scientific method doesn't have an
end. You're always going to have to go back the beginning. It's going to be a constant
feedback loop.