“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.”
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September 5, 2015 at 11:02 pm
thethotsofficial
First of all, I want to thank you tremendously for this blog. I actually found this blog on Quora when someone recommended it as one of the best econ blogs out there. (I read the last post about the Greece Crisis and I LOVED it).
Couldn’t being narrow-minded about what tools/facts to stock pass over potentially useful knowledge? The secret of course is being skilled enough that you know the purpose of something when you see it. But what if your perception/guess is wrong? This technique seems very close minded.
September 10, 2015 at 4:17 pm
Sandeep Baliga
I agree with you. You have to know what issues might come up in your life before you can decide what facts to ignore day by day. This quote is preceded by Watson being surprised by the fact that Holmes does not know Earth goes around the Sun. But surely a detective might need to know that to calculate something about the time a murder was committed or something of that sort.
Still, I was impressed that Conan Doyle could write something this cool so long ago. (I am re-reading all the books and short stories.)
September 20, 2015 at 10:54 pm
STM (@ShitTownMan)
I have to disagree with the quote (thus agreeing with you two) Sherlock Holmes is amazing and fun to read but, in reality it is based more on myth than fact. The brain, msy seem to have only so much capacity, but today we know it is constantly rewiring and seemingly ever expanding in knowledge. The Holmes quote reminds me of the popular phrase “you only use x percent of your brain”. We now know the brain is heavily automated and while it may be fun to fantasize over total (conscious) brain usage, it’s in reality quite more difficult and useless to dedicate the whole brain to one task.
My tangent aside, the Holmes quote is more applicable to understanding what knowledge you have is relevant to the task at hand. Yet I don’t believe Doyle meant it that way. He probably did fear that the brain was of a limited size like an attic and not the sizeof, say, a solar system.
There are some truly memorable yet, “practical” quotes from the series. My favorite being an early one by Holmes talking to Watson,
“I should be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket. An Eley’s No. 2 is an excellent argument with gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots.”
April 16, 2016 at 6:13 pm
GMcK
Holmes (and Doyle) didn’t know about data compression. If your mind is nothing but a grab bag of unrelated factoids, his statement is roughly true. But if you learn or discover some relating principles, such as indexing information that you can look up when you need it, or better yet rules that will allow you to reconstruct the information without looking it up, then learning that rule will free up all kinds of room for additional knowledge. The only incident where Holmes actually applied this principle seems to have been his inference of the existence of Professor Moriarty from a series of seemingly unrelated crimes.