SECRET 6

“A Little Empty Attic”

“You see,” [Holmes] explained. “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

—A STUDY IN SCARLET

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, while reading a Sherlock Holmes story, I find that the main character says something so profound that it causes me to momentarily lose track of the plot. I actually have to stop, go back, and reread the passage to make sure I don’t forget it. Conan Doyle was a genius at smuggling in bits of his own personal philosophy into his mystery tales. One of my favorite such moments occurs in the very first Holmes–Watson novel, A Study in Scarlet (you’ll notice that I refer to the novel quite frequently—it has more quotable lines than any other Holmes story in the canon):

“You see,” [Holmes] explained. “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

In a nutshell, Holmes is telling Watson that he must be extremely careful about what he chooses to focus on. His point is simple: If you want to be the best at what you do, then you have to be very choosy about how you spend your time. It’s actually a rather elegant restatement of the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) concept that I wrote about in an earlier chapter. Holmes takes it a step further, though, arguing that there is a finite amount of space in our conscious brain. Because there is only so much room in which to place information, we should be extremely careful about what we read, who we spend time with, and even what we listen to on the radio or watch on TV or read on the Internet. I’ll leave it to brain surgeons and neuroscientists to argue over whether it’s actually possible to fill your brain to capacity; regardless, it’s an excellent way to start thinking about . . . well, what you think about all day long. Are you filling your brain with the mental equivalent of junk food or are you stocking it up with healthy organic vegetables from your local farmers’ market?

The concept of guarding your mind goes back centuries; it’s central to both Buddhist and Christian philosophies. Indeed, the Buddha himself said, “A guarded mind brings happiness.” It was also a fundamental part of the success philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the same time as the Sherlock Holmes stories were written. In his collection of essays The Power of Mental Demand and Other Essays (1916), Herbert Edward Law said the following:

Make your mind your partner in business. Love your business. Live with it. Feel with it, and make it a beautiful ideal in your mind, and be as careful in shaping everything for its advancement and perfection as you would if you were an artist in making every stroke of the brush add to the element of beauty in the picture. Guard your mind from any invasion of forces which are opposed to success, which are detrimental to it, which hold it down.

In 1910, Wallace Wattles—who, along with writers like Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich) and James Allen (As a Man Thinketh), became a self-help superstar—published a book titled The Science of Getting Rich, in which he urged readers to consciously decide on the images they allowed into their minds:

And you cannot hold the mental image which is to make you rich if you fill your mind with pictures of poverty. Do not read books or papers which give circumstantial accounts of the wretchedness of the tenement dwellers, of the horrors of child labor, and so on. Do not read anything which fills your mind with gloomy images of want and suffering.

As you can see, Wattles’s advice is very similar to the approach Holmes took to his own work. But before you can guard your mind, you have to first figure out what you’re guarding against and what’s okay to let in. You need to create a kind of mental bouncer, a muscle-bound gatekeeper who has the ultimate authority over which pieces of information enter your cranial cavity and which ones get turned away. It all ties back into your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? What dream do you hope to bring to fruition? The information aligned with your goals should fill your mind the way metal filings flock to a charged magnet.

The notion of paying close attention to what you allow yourself to think about has gained currency in psychological circles as well. In 1921, Henry Foster Adams, then an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, quoted the “little empty attic” passage in a paper on the power of memory. “While we are in no danger of running out of brain room,” he assured us, “this theory, nevertheless, emphasizes the fact that we should limit our memories to those things which are important professionally, socially, politically, and religiously; to those things, namely, which we have occasion and time frequently to review.”

More recently, the power to control your thoughts has been recognized as a crucial step in becoming a high achiever. Performance psychologists have realized that one of the reasons elite athletes are so successful in professional sports is because they have trained themselves not to dwell on their past mistakes or shortcomings. In fact, they don’t focus a lot of their energy on analysis or evaluation of any kind; they just go out on the field and perform.

Sound like any London detectives you know?