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How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: The Power of Observation, with Maria Konnikova, psychologist
Paying attention seems incredibly simple. You say, “Oh, of course, I pay attention all the time.” But actually it’s one of the most difficult things that we do. Most people don’t realize just how finite our attention is; it’s really a limited resource. For one, we can never pay attention to more than one thing at a time. So when we think we’re multitasking, we’re not doing that. We’re actually switching between tasks very quickly, and our brain gets exhausted when it does that. Our brain doesn’t like to task switch. So we’re going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth and we’re depleting our attentional resources.
Be objective
The first step is to be objective. You need to understand that you’re not a blank slate; I’m not a blank slate. No one comes into the world just with no preconceptions, with no biases. If you and I are witnessing the exact same event and then five minutes later we’re both asked to write a paragraph about it, our paragraphs are going to be very different because we’re both going to see them from our own unique perspectives. And those perspectives are not objective; they’re highly subjective. So you might notice some things that I don’t notice. I might notice some things that you don’t notice. We’re going to internalize them differently. We’re going to interpret them differently. And then we’re going to report them as objective fact when in reality they’re just our subjective perception of what it is that we observed.
And so the lesson for being objective is to understand this about yourself, to understand that your attic will inherently filter the information through your mindset no matter what, there’s no way around this, and to try to do your best to understand that and to work within your limitations. Now, the more you do this and the more that you understand your own attic, the more aware you will become of the specific biases that you are most prone to. So you normally might notice, you know, if you’re at a party, you might notice everyone who’s talking loudly because that really bothers you and you’ll say, “That was the loudest party in the world,” when really there were just two obnoxious people but those were – you didn’t hear anyone else. All you heard were those two obnoxious people. But over time, if you keep on saying that and then you check back and your friends were like, “No, what are you talking about? The party was great. It wasn’t loud at all.” You’ll say, “Hey, maybe I’m biased in this direction.”
Be selective
The second step is to be selective. We only have so many attentional resources to go around. I can’t stress that enough. And every single minute we’re bombarded by hundreds of thousands of inputs. We don’t process consciously anything that isn’t kind of directly there. So a lot of things hit our retina, but never hit our brains so we don’t really know that we saw it. Knowing that, we need to be very selective about how we allocate our attention. We have to be strategic about it. We have to say, “Okay, I have this attention.” Maybe it’s a stack of coins. “I have ten coins and if I use five coins over here, I’m not going to have those five coins anymore. I’m only going to have five left.” So knowing that I’m starting with this stack of ten, where am I going to put them? What are the most important things for me to get out of this situation, out of this encounter, out of this conversation?
Be inclusive
Once you’ve decided what you’re going to pay attention to, you need to be inclusive in how you pay attention. We tend to suffer from omission neglect, which means that we only pay attention to what’s there and we tend to forget what isn’t there. So imagine I’m a cell phone salesman and I present you with two phones – Phone A and Phone B. And I tell you Phone A has six hours of talk time, Phone B has four hours of talk time. I realize those are absurdly short but just go with me on this one. Phone A weighs one pound. Phone B weighs two pounds. So far it seems like phone A is going to be the winner, and then I’ll tell also you Phone A has ten gigs of storage and Phone B only has five. Once again Phone A seems to be the clear winner. But I might have forgotten to tell you that Phone A also emits radiation at a very high-level and Phone B does not. If you never asked me, you wouldn’t know this. And so you wouldn’t realize that you were getting a phone that, while on the surface better, can be much more detrimental to your health. Had you asked me, had you known to ask for this information, you would have come away with a different decision.
We do this all the time. We just look at what we’re presented with; we forget what we aren’t presented with. So if you’re going to be inclusive, you’ll ask these sorts of questions. You’ll remember that you need to pay attention to what isn’t there, not just what is there. You’ll also remember that you need to use all of your senses. When we’re paying attention, we’re not just eyes. We’re also ears, we’re also nose, we’re also skin. We are kind of – we have all of these senses at our disposal.
Be engaged
I think the most important thing that underlies everything and make this entire process much easier is to be engaged. One of the reasons Sherlock Holmes is so good at what he does is because he enjoys it. He’s present in it. To him, this is fun. He says, “The game is afoot” about what he’s doing. It is a game to him. That makes it much easier to pay attention, to be present, to be selective, to be inclusive, to do all of these other things.
There’s a lot of work that shows that engagement or flow, as it’s been called, really facilitates performance, facilitates cognitive ability, facilitates memory. If we’re engaged in something, it’s going to be a very different experience for us than if were bored with it, if we’re just doing it because we have to do it, if we feel like we’re being compelled. And so the sense of engagement, the sense of curiosity, the sense of having your mind really yearn for something and enjoy doing it, that’s incredibly important in being good at something.