Developing an Agile Mind

‘I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.’
‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAZARIN STONE’
While Holmes’s personality and motivations are endlessly interesting enigmas, were it not for his remarkable intellectual capacity, you would not be
here reading about him. There are plenty of interesting characters in life and literature, but very few able to solve an apparently unsolvable riddle like
the Great Detective.



Alas, few of us can ever hope to match Holmes in the bulging brains department. That need not be a source of shame, though, for has there ever
been a more penetrating intellect in literature than Holmes? ‘You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this
world,’ Watson told him in A Study in Scarlet (a piece of flattery that had even Holmes ‘flushed up with pleasure’). ‘Detection is, or ought to be, an
exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner,’ Holmes himself would declare in The Sign of Four.
However, do not be fooled into thinking that Holmes is only concerned with cold analysis and the weighing up of empirical evidence. Holmes
talked about his work as much in terms of art as science. It was a sentiment he returned to in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’, when he spoke of ‘that
mixture of imagination and reality which is the basis of my art.’ In The Valley of Fear, he reiterated the necessity for creative thinking: ‘How often is
imagination the mother of truth?’
The great news is that if you don’t feel like you are using your grey matter to Holmesian levels, you can train it to work better for you. This is not
some self-help claptrap but scientifically proven fact. The brain is incredibly durable and can grow and change to cope with any number of new
demands made upon it. You just have to make sure you get it into shape to meet new challenges.
Do you want proof? How about London’s registered taxi cab drivers. To join the profession, applicants must undertake years of study known as
‘the Knowledge’, learning some 320 key routes encompassing thousands of streets within a six mile radius of Charing Cross in central London.
Research students of ‘the Knowledge’ have typically shown an increase in the volume of the hippocampus (a part of the brain integral to memory).
The most famous winner of the television quiz was the 1980 champion Fred Housego, a cabbie who kept up his licence even after becoming a
media celebrity. No wonder Holmes was accustomed to seeking out hansom cab drivers as fonts of information in so many of his cases!
Warming-Up
Regularly exercising your brain by playing mental games and doing quizzes has been shown to offer a defence against dementia in older people.
But you are never too young to get into the habit. Here is a mixture of word and number games.