Transcription
One of the book recommendations I'll give everybody is just read the whole Sherlock Holmes short stories, 'cause they're bloody masterpieces, and you get two things from them.
Fantastic prose writing ability. He's not acknowledged as a great, but Kingsley Amis rightly said, in terms of clarity of English prose writing, um, yeah, an awful lot of things from that era are pretty unreadable now to us. But you can sit down and read Conan Doyle, and you, you never have to turn back a page to work out who somebody is. The absolute clarity in in which he does it.
But also, it's what he calls the practice of thinking backwards. A lot of people are very good at saying, "This happened, so what's going to happen next?" But there's a different mental process, which is sometimes called abductive inference, which is, "This has happened, what could the prior conditions have been that led to this consequence?" Okay. And that's fundamentally a more speculative and imaginative mental process than, say, deduction. It's an underexercised part, I would argue.
Now, of the human mental toolkit. [Music]