A Study in Scarlet, I: Sherlock Holmes, the Specialist

     A Study in Scarlet was the original Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in England in 1887. Within the first five chapters of Part I, the audience is introduced to Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, Sherlock’s new roommate and associate. Doyle uses Sherlock’s character to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of a highly specialized approach to knowledge, while also revealing how years of specialization have shaped Holmes’s psychological way of thinking.

     Holmes explains his “brain attic” theory to Watson by comparing the mind to an attic with limited space. The idea is similar to the philosophy of a memory palace, where a person deliberately decides what information is important enough to remember and organizes it in a way that makes it easier to retrieve later. Sherlock takes this idea a step further by arguing that useless information should not be allowed to take up space in his mind. Instead, he focuses on knowledge that is useful to his work as a detective. This specialization is one of Holmes’s greatest strengths because it allows him to become exceptionally skilled at what he does.  

     However, Sherlock seems to draw the line between useful and useless knowledge too narrowly. He does not care whether the earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around the earth because he does not consider astronomy relevant to his work. His lack of social skills creates another weakness. Holmes may not consider social knowledge important enough to keep in his “attic,” but knowing how to work with people, make allies, understand social situations, and persuade others could be extremely useful to a detective. In trying to keep unnecessary knowledge out of his mind, Sherlock sometimes rejects things that could actually become useful tools.

     Yet, Holmes’s specialization has changed more than just what he knows. It has also changed how he thinks. When Watson is puzzled by how Holmes reached a particular conclusion, Sherlock sometimes has more difficulty explaining how he figured it out than he had figuring it out in the first place. He has spent so many years practicing observation and deduction that the process has become almost automatic to him. This is similar to learning to read. When someone first learns to read, they have to consciously sound out each individual letter before they can recognize a word. After years of practice, however, someone can glance at the word “cat” and immediately know what it says without thinking about each letter. Sherlock seems to have developed the same kind of automatic skill with observation and deduction.   

     Holmes is right about one important thing: specialization can make someone exceptionally useful when their particular skills are needed. If you try to become a jack of all trades, you become a master of none. However, Sherlock takes this idea too far, causing him to reject knowledge and skills that could actually make him a better detective. His “brain attic” reveals not only what Holmes chooses to know, but also how years of focusing on one area have trained his mind to think in a way that has become almost automatic. Ultimately, Sherlock’s greatest strength and greatest weakness come from the same source: his extreme specialization.