The Mind
Now you are mindful, paying attention, and in the moment. You feel centered, know yourself, and trust that you can continue to learn how to be a better detective. Detection is not an art. It is a learned behavior, a compilation of training your awareness not to take anything at face value (be skeptical), drawing from memory (now where in my memory did I place that?), assimilating facts remembered into a logical wholeness (wholeness, like putting it all together?) … oh, and let’s not forget … imagination, creativity, and motivation. Whew!
John Madina, in The Brain Rules (Pear Press, 2008) discusses “attention” at length. He says that you have about fifteen minutes to make an impact, whether as a teacher, lecturer, or book reader. Keep the most important facts short. The way to keep the attention going and focused? Link it to memory, interest, and awareness. Interest increases motivation. Interest influences memory. Interest is undeniably linked to attention and awareness. We have to be aware of something before it grabs our attention.
As you know, the brain is divided into two hemispheres. Keeping them in balance is a feat. They share what we attend to–how we attend to it–and what we do with what we attended to. We hear something close by, our mind and ears tune into it, we turn toward it or away from it, we decide what to do about it. All the time our two hemispheres are working their neurons asking all systems on both sides to help. Attention multitaskes.
Back to Sherlock Holmes before I lose you. My time is almost up. In Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova (Viking, 2013), She address the attention of a poor policeman in A Study in Scarlet: “And the criminal was right in front of his eyes. Only he didn’t know how to look. Instead of a suspect, he saw a drunk man–and failed to notice anything that would have told him otherwise, so busy was he trying to focus (pay attention) on his “real” job of looking at the crime scene.” His interest, awareness, and attention was on the crime scene. In detection, we can take no observation at face value. Here, the facts about the drunk were not assimilated or logged for further use. The policeman had “attentional blindness” where a focus on one element of the scene causes the other elements to disappear.
I have that with my wine. I see it, take it, sip it, and everything else in the room disappears. Maybe that’s not the same thing … hmm.
Next … we discuss the impact of logic vrs emotions … oh, and memory.
Hmm…