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Brooks Herrington
Mrs. Stanford
ENG 234
16 May 2016
Thinking Like Sherlock Holmes
Nowadays, when people think or process things, they tend to leave out many important
details. This can be fixed by simply looking deeper into the meaning of the smaller things and
thinking about what they are there for or the main reason of why they are there. Sherlock Holmes
helps provide an example of how to think deeper and how to properly observe situations when
they are presented to him. He observes and analyzes every detail that he sees which allows him
to advance in the mysteries that he was hired to solve. If people thought with the same thought
process as Sherlock Holmes, then people could possibly be more successful, could be less
distracted and more focused, and they could retain more information that they have analyzed or
observed.
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born May 22nd, 1859 to a Catholic family in
London. He was a very contradictable man who was very scientifically educated but believed in
sances and fairies. He was a son to Mary Foley Doyle and Charles Altamont Doyle who had six
other children. They then soon moved to Scotland so his father, Charles, could advance his career
in architecture. He failed to do so and soon became an alcoholic and died in an asylum. His then
widowed mother had a huge impact on his life by making him memorize his whole familys
genealogy. On Arthur's free time he loved to read wild west adventure stories, like those of Bret
Harte and Thomas Mayne Reid who was the author of Arthur's favorite book, The Scalp
Hunters. He realized he would be a writer and was sent to an austere Jesuit school for his early

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education. He impressed students by guessing their major just by observing them and using all
his senses to help him indicate the exact major of the student. He learned this method while in
school and it involved a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning. He then started to
write his first novel in 1886 and used the many techniques that he learned while in school to
create a greatly known character in the mystery genre, Sherlock Holmes. Although the Sherlock
Holmes series made Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a great sum of money throughout the years, he grew
very sick of writing about Sherlock Holmes and ended up killing him in one of his final novels
"The Final Problem.". After 9 years, and many pleading and threatening letters later, Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle finally brought Sherlock Holmes back to the people (Stanford). This shows how
much the people were intrigued by the wittiness and smarts of Sherlock Holmes and the impact
that the character and his novels had on the reader during this time period.
In almost every Sherlock Holmes novel that was written, Sherlock seems to amazing
always find the solution to any problem or mystery. The way Sherlock does this isnt by magic,
but by the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, making Sherlock incredibly observative, analytic and
he made him an extremely cognitive thinker. Sherlock makes the most out of every piece of
evidence that he finds by observing the piece of evidence and noticing almost everything about
it. He then analyzes the piece of evidence and thinks about where the evidence could have came
from, but not only does he wonder where it came from but he wonders about how it got there and
who would be most likely to have used that piece of evidence. Sherlock goes way deeper through
his thought process than most people do today and that has to do with Sherlocks incredible
cognitive ability.
For anybody that doesnt know what cognitive ability is, it is the ability to remember,
learn, problem solve, and pay attention or focus. Sherlock Holmes is a character with incredible

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cognitive ability and the thing that is wrong with the people today is that they dont have a very
high ability to think cognitively like Sherlock himself. An instance of Sherlock being compared
to a person who doesnt have a high cognitive ability would be when he is with or solving a
crime with his friend Dr. Watson. In the novel, readers could obviously see the difference in the
way the two characters think and how they process information. The way Watson thinks is more
simple like the way an average person would think. In Andre Didierjean and Fernand Gobets
article Can Sherlock Holmes Help Cognitive Psychology they help show explicitly one of the
techniques of reasoning that Sherlock Holmes uses in the novel A Study In Scarlet. The piece that
they used explains the technique of reasoning backwards, Most people, if you describe a train of
events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their
minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however,
who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what
the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning
backward, or analytically (Didierjean and Gobet 858-859). This quote shows one of the many
ways that Sherlock can decipher a mystery and it also shows how differently he thinks opposed
from Watson or any other normal thinking human in this day in age.
A reason that Sherlock is very good cognitively would be that he is always practicing and
improving his abilities with every case that is presented to him. He often practices these abilities
with Watson by telling him where he has been and what he was doing just by looking at him and
observing all the small indications of actions that he might have done. He takes that information
and processes it in his head and uses the technique of reasoning backwards to find out where he
has done these actions. All this practicing has made Sherlock Holmes and expert in his field and
also an expert at using his cognitive ability (Didierjean and Gobet 109-125). The problem for

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most people is that, to get good at thinking cognitively they must practice that way of thinking all
the time and the truth is, it is very hard to switch their way of thinking to a whole new style of
thinking in a short period of time (Mizraji 135). Another way that Sherlock helps solve the many
mysteries within the many novels would be him making logical assumptions after observing and
analyzing evidence of after talking to many people or suspects and victims (Mizraji 135). This is
something that many detectives and officers do today to help with their investigation and this
doesnt just pertain to detectives or anybody in the police workforce. This small form of
cognitive thinking is also what helps everyday people problem solve in their everyday lives.
Sherlock Holmes also uses analytic philosophy to help solve mysteries and when he
mixes the analytic theory with his incredible cognitive ability it almost makes it impossible for
Sherlock to mess up in an investigation. Add his extremely quick thinking to the mix along with
his very impressive execution of his actions and he is the epitome of all detectives and officers,
fictional or in real life (Liebesman 306-318). With this being said, Sherlock was made or
perceived to be that way by the author, and was completely made up. Which means nobody
could think the exact same way as Sherlock in real life, no matter how much practice or
experience that the person may or may not have. Although many people could try and get close
to thinking like Sherlock, no one could ever get to the same level of thinking and understanding
as the man Sherlock Holmes himself.
A review written by Nina Bai helps inform people that although Sherlock is extremely
smart and quick witted, he also gets stumped sometimes from trying to figure out some cases. A
way that Sherlock would help fix his train of thought would be secluding himself and stimulate
the creative process through mental and physical distance to help himself clear his mind and
have more visions or epiphanies to help himself with the mystery or the task at hand. She also

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wrote that it would pretty much be impossible or inhuman to live life thinking like Sherlock
because of all the inhuman features that the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, has given him. It's
impossible for people to live life thinking like Sherlock Holmes because no one can teach
themselves like Sherlock to improve their cognitive ability to a high enough level and then use
all these weird techniques to help them throughout their day. The author made Sherlock this way
in order to be the best detective that there has ever been.
Most human brains are made to think logically, so when people observe things they make
a logical analysis as to why it's there. Sherlock, on the other hand thinks cognitively, and this
helps him figure out more things like how something got to that place and he also makes up
situations in his head that would help make more logical sense as to why it is there. The
differences of the way that people think today and the way that Sherlock Holmes thinks within
the novels that he is apart of are pretty different. To show that the way Sherlock thinks is more
advanced and complex than the regular human mind Erkki Patokorpi, a well know journalist
wrote about how the process of abduction that sherlock uses in Doyle's novels is being
implemented into technology to help make things like computers other electronics smarter. The
abduction method is a method of reasoning that chooses the hypothesis that best explain the
relevant evidence and Sherlock uses this method in every novel or story that he is in. If
everybody uses this form of reasoning then the people could narrow down the answers to most of
their problems more easier than just guessing without any logical reason at all. This goes to show
that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has made Sherlock Holmes smart enough that his thinking process
is being implemented into newer technology to make it smarter. So if the process of which
Sherlock thinks is good enough to be implemented into technology, then it should definitely be

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good enough for people to implement it into their own lives to make themselves better and
improve the world.
While Doyle was writing these stories, he was also completing mysteries of his own by
using the same methods and techniques that he learned in school and they also happened to be
the same ones that he gave Sherlock Holmes. By using the same methods that Sherlock uses
within his stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped free two unjustly imprisoned men (Stanford).
This goes to show that even though it is exceptionally hard to learn how to think like Sherlock
Holmes, it is possible to think like him. Its just a matter of how strong a persons cognitive
ability is it also just a matter of the persons interest in learning the newer techniques of
reasoning like abduction and reverse reasoning to help better their problem solving for the future.
But in order to do this they must practice the techniques and learn how to entertain their mind
and help clear their mind to help better the thinking process. If people do end up learning how to
think like Sherlock Holmes and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, then people could
possibly be more successful, could be less distracted and more focused, and they could also
possibly retain more information that they have analyzed or observed in the past. Along with
that, another author, James Webb Young, has wrote a book all about how a person could help
themselves think like Sherlock Holmes (Popova), to better their minds and also to help better
their lives for their futures.

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Works Cited
Bai, Nina. "Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes." Scientific American
Mind 1st ser. 24.1 (2013): n. pag. Print.
Didierjean, Andre, and Fernand Gobet. "Can Sherlock Holmes Help Cognitive
Psychology." Psychologist 21.10 (2008): 858-59. Print.
Didierjean, Andre, and Fernand Gobet. "Sherlock Holmes -- an Expert's View of
Expertise." British Journal of Psychology 99.1 (2008): 109-25. Print.

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"Discovering Sherlock Holmes - A Community Reading Project From Stanford
University." Discovering Sherlock Holmes - A Community Reading Project From
Stanford University. Stanford University, 2006. Web. 8 May 2016.
Liebesman, David. "Necessarily, Sherlock Holmes Is Not a Person." Analytic
Philosophy 55.3 (2014): 306-18. Print.
Mizraji, Eduardo. "Illustrating a Neural Model of Logic Computations: The Case
of Sherlock Holmes' Old Maxim." Theoria 31.1 (2016): 135. Print.
Patokorpi, Erkki. "Logic of Sherlock Holmes in Technology Enhanced Learning."
Journal of Educational Technology & Society 10.1 (2007): 171-85. Print.
Popova, Maria. "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity
from the Great Detective." Brain Pickings. N.p., 07 Jan. 2013. Web. 8 May 2016.