The Mentality Goal

Youtube has been flooding my recommended videos with House M.D clips, a show that I very much enjoy since I enjoy basically any iteration of Sherlock Holmes (and Doctor House is very much based on him). I was watching a couple of them which showed a perfect example of the mentality we should strive to have as deductionists. I thought I’d talk about that for a bit

https://www.tumblr.com/detective-from-221b/164349657268

So in the clips (linked further on), we see House come back to consciousness after being shot (in this clip 0:00-0:43) and after being in a bus crash (in this clip 0:00-2:28). Now, the show is great at many things when it comes to portraying House’s deduction abilities, but these clips have stood out to me because of the way they show how ingrained into House’s natural reasoning these skills are

After regaining consciousness there are a ton of ways someone might react, they might look for comfort, someone to talk to, or they even might panic, but House immediately starts gathering information, purposefully and with a goal in mind: to fill in as many gaps as possible about what happened in the time he’s lost. He immediately thinks of using the growth of his beard as a measurement of how much time has passed, or checking his breath to see if he’s been drunk, he essentially starts deducing himself

This is a perfect example of what we should aim to do, we should aim to develop our deduction mentality to such a point that we consciously gather information and process it to fill gaps in what we know. We should aim to have our first instinct be to think “what do I not know? And how do I get to that information?”

Now of course the question is how do we achieve this? How do we train ourselves to have our brains always be in Deduction Mode?

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(Obligatory Dr. House GIF)

Well, the short answer is we have to rely on and exploit our motivation to learn deduction. Maria Konnikova talks about this extensively in her book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. When learning deduction (or when learning how to think like Sherlock, as she says in her book) we must make sure to cultivate a sense of intense motivation to do so, this motivation is the easiest way to push ourselves to stick to the training your brain needs to “rewire” itself so it can think in the necessary ways to learn deduction.

There are many ways to exploit motivation, but essentially what we’re looking for is to always filter the way we see the world through the lens of deduction, everything should have a deduction “hue” to it, and everything should be seen in deduction terms, basically, the mentality House exhibits in those clips are what should drive the way you interact with the world. It’s hard to tell someone else how to achieve this but some of the ways I have done it are:

• Change your phone background to something you associate with deduction
• Use widgets to have slideshows of deduction-related or deduction-associated images on your home screens
• Find books and props you associate with deduction and decorate your desk with them
• Have reminders on your phone telling you to observe at a different point during the day (follow the Reminders to Observe exercise listed here)
• Watch clips of shows and movies that inspire you to work on deduction (clips of House M.D, Sherlock, or The mentalist for example)
• Hang posters in your bedroom of things you associate with deduction (deduction quotes from the Sherlock Holmes books, or a periodic table, or a guide to different plants and what they look like)
• Have a deduction daily carry (even feeling a small magnifying glass in your pocket is enough to keep you always in the mindset of thinking about the world in deduction terms)

Essentially, anything that keeps your mind actively in a deduction headspace trains you to develop a mentality that allows for more instinctive, constant gathering and processing of information about the world around you. The ultimate goal is always to see everything instinctively through that deduction lens, treat everything the way House does when trying to figure out what mess he’s gotten into now

Happy Observing!

-DV