Sherlock Holmes, already the
best-known character in modern fiction, has enjoyed an even better run since
the Arthur Conan Doyle copyright ran out.
Holmes and magnifying glass are the inseparable duo that seemingly
forever mark the detecting profession and its mindful observation skills,
combining imagination with knowledge and applying analytical tools to solve
complex, wicked problems. The Holmes
legacy focuses on intelligently viewing the world, pattern recognition, and
making sense of what’s out there – talents inherent in cultural analysis.
Maria Konnikova’s excellent
treatment of this process, Mastermind:
How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (2013), takes apart the three stages of
detection—observation, imagination, and deduction—to show the brilliance of the
Holmes method through leading cases in the canon. Her casebook is a master class in learning
about the processes implicit in thinking, decision-making, planning, and action-taking. This is the difference between vision, the
human talent for insight into the past, present, and future based on visual
memory, and just registering what’s on view around us avoiding attentional
blindness, and related practices basic to mental well-being of the “present
mind.”
Seventy percent of our sense
receptors are around the eyes. But vision
as processed looking doesn’t happen in the eye only – it only occurs after
processing by the brain. Our limbic
system is constantly building our emotional world as the structure that filters
the input of the senses through experience and cultural values. Our emotional sorting device, the limbic
brain, is always leading our thinking and responding. Everything in sight carries an emotional
charge. Our entire emotional array—geared to social and emotional goals—is set
up to see risk or reward, opportunity or danger, play, love, joy, fear,
uncertainty, or doubt—depending on just how our brain codes whatever we see as
positive, negative, neutral, or more rarely, to put on hold for future
reference.
Why do we see, but don’t observe,
as Holmes is constantly reminding Watson?
It’s not that difficult: because
seeing is a physiological act of the senses, whereas perception is the
brain-based outcome that follows the inner processing of light and image. What
we perceive doesn’t reflect what’s in front of us—nor what others
perceive. Looking and observing is a
complex process that involves many factors:
what we expect to see, matching that with our entire seeing history, and
the cultural (social) world in our heads—important in setting the ideals of
what we prefer to see, what we most fear seeing, and what we think others are
seeing. All these trigger our immediate
reactions.
Looking differs from mindful seeing,
as Jim Gilmore shows recently in Look: A
Practical Guide for Improving Your Observational Skills (2016), his metacognitive
treatment of the sight experience under various modes of aided perception. In opposition to routine autopilot approaches
to looking, Gilmore’s six-looking-glass toolbar is a tactical lever to extend
this seeing, breaking out ways of observing and their concomitant benefits for raising
awareness, macro to micro: from the broad-range binoculars (wide-shot) to
magnifiers and microscopes that home in on details (close-up) that open up yet
more landscapes to explore. This is a working
philosophy of observation to upgrade any effort, from pedestrian examination to
innovative seeking, using these powers of discovery when ordinary seeing isn’t
nearly keen or deep enough. This guide
to enhancing observation also grows a most valuable resource: attention and focus, the wellspring of
analytical ability. William James, father of psychology, called engaged
attention the root of judgment, character, and will. Seeing better has powerful outcomes: a means
to think better, discover potentials, inquire deeper, and make better decisions.
Gilmore’s section on rose-colored-glasses
looking is ingenious in its view of perceiving potential—what isn’t visible
except as “gems and gaps,” the baseline of creative perceiving to envision what
isn’t yet but could be. That’s the
imagination function prompted by “power vision.” He cites the rare ability of top
sports-talent scouts like Tony Lucadello for his legendary spotting of ball
players before anyone else could—an exercise in observation with a positive
bias. The evolution of tableware showcases the same ability to envision value
beyond present limits—in developing the fork out of the hunter’s blade. Reading between the lines of what is already
evident, but far from perfect, to see innovation, combines observation with
imagination—to create and discover entirely new stars and tools.
Back in Mastermind, Konnikova details the power outcomes from better
seeing, showing ways we can learn to attune our efforts and attention to
rediscover the world out there beyond habit, routine, and mindlessness—to take
us from passive absorption to active awareness.
But that transition demands a more attentive, curious, and engaged
mindset to make our subconscious processing far more conscious.
