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How To Solve Problems Like Sherlock Holmes
Mindfulness means focusing on only one problem or activity at a time.
Our brain cannot do two things at once. “What we believe is multi-tasking is really the brain switching quickly from one task to the next.”
A study points out that those who are multi-taskers are less efficient.
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“What Sherlock Holmes offers isn’t just a way of solving a crime. It is an entire way of thinking."
"Holmes provides... an education in improving our faculty of mindful thought...
As it does so, we become less and less able to know or notice our own thought habits and more and more allow our minds to dictate our judgments and decisions, instead of the other way around.
Daniel Kahneman believes there are two systems for organizing and filtering knowledge:
To move from a System Watson- to a System Holmes-governed thinking takes mindfulness plus motivation.
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Learn how to notice small details.
It's not a superhuman ability. It's important to note when talking about Holmes that he has spent a lifetime cultivating the habits of mindfulness. So it's not like he was just born with this ability to be in touch with the world. What we choose to notice or not notice is a way of framing it in our own mind. We have a lot of bad habits in our mind, and we have to retrain ourselves to really notice the world. Everything we do rewires the brain, but we can rewire it in a way that mindfulness eventually becomes less of an effort. -- Konnikova
Give yourself monthly or daily challenges to form a new habit of observation.
Ideas could include trying new foods weekly and writing about them, noticing the color of a co-worker's shirt every day, or even just looking at a new piece of art closely once a day.
The idea is to gradually teach yourself to notice small details in your environment and daily life.
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Having a systematic approach to how you deal with problems, as opposed to just going by gut and feelings, ca...
Detectives and investigators use the process. They ask both obvious and unthinkable questions.
Get close and collect information about how the problem is manifesting. Understand where the problem does and doesn’t happen, when the problem started, and how often the problem occurs to generate critical insight for the problem-solving effort.