When a mentalist or Sherlock Holmes “read” someone is that real or is it pure fiction ? In other words, can you look at a persons clothes, dialogue and body language and determine that they are a recently unemployed accountant who loves the Dallas cowboys? Or a off duty chef who is nervous about proposing to his girlfriend? That’s completely bogus, right?
Conan Doyle modeled Holmes after one of his university professors.
At the time, society was far more stratified and it was more likely you could identify a man’s position/profession by his clothes, scars, etc.
interesting, thanks for the info
The Sherlock Holmes stories are great entertainment, but pure fiction. You don’t need to be a great detective to conclude that the guy covered in soot carrying a long stick with a brush on the end is a chimney sweep. You do need to be an idiot like Watson to be amazed by that conclusion.
Even then, it was bogus. Consider Holmes’ reading of Watson at their first meeting:
Medical type? But all Holmes knew was that he introduced himself as Dr. Watson. He may have been a doctor of philosophy, or a dentist or simply a snake oil salesman.
With the air of a military man. What does that even mean? Presumably it means posture, but most public schools in England at the time required drill from the boys. So anybody would have a military bearing.
So therefore an army doctor. Why? Even if we accept the first two assumptions, he could have been a navy doctor or a military dentist. He could have been a GP forced by scandal to join the army as an officer or even an enlisted man. He certainly wouldn’t be the first in Victorian England who used the army as a way to escape his creditors or accusations of breach of promise. This isn’t a deduction, it’s a wild leap of logic, concluding that the only reason a doctor would be in the military is if he was serving as a doctor.
Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Why in the world would they even be connected? It was common treatment for “consumption” for the patient to be sent to a sanitorium in a warm clime. That would be the obvious reason why someone haggard has a tan. There is no reason at all for Holmes to conclude that the wound must be linked to the other features. This is an age where people being crippled by badly set bones, polio and a million other causes was commonplace. It is an age where diseases such as typhoid, TB and syphilis were rampant amongst all social classes. Any process that relies on a deformity and having been recently ill being linked to each other and to another observation is clearly bunkum.
Clearly in Afghanistan. Why Afghanistan? Even if we accept that the clues indicate overseas service, isn’t it far more likely that he was serving in the Caribbean or Africa where he contracted malaria and was shipped home for medical reasons? I am guessing there were orders of magnitude more military doctors who contracted serious diseases in other parts of the empire than ever got wounded in Afghanistan. Even just playing the odds, Holmes’ deduction is bunkum.
Aside from the actual flaws in assigning traits such as “military bearing” and “medical type”, the whole thing hinges on the totally unwarranted assumption that the tan, haggard features and deformity are all linked. In an age where deformity and disease were ubiquitous, such a process would lead to more incorrect answers than simply guessing. It is far more likely that Watson was deformed in a sporting accident as a young man, became sick 20 years later and then went abroad for his health than it is that he happened to become ill and get wounded *because *he went abroad. But even if they is linked, why not assume he was a civilian doctor who became ill, joined the army and asked for a post in a warm climate for his health, got posted to Australia where he fell off a horse? Isn’t that at least as likely as one man being wounded and becoming ill because he was serving overseas?
Human lives are complicated and most of our adventures are utterly unrelated to one another. Every statement that Holmes pulls out of his arse requires that every feature of a person, from their choice of clothes to their preferred diet is linked. That’s bunkum.
yes, exactly,if an author sets a certain set of traits and then reverse engineers the story to arrive at that conclusion, it look “intelligent” but, as you say, for ever single detail there are multiple other conclusions that could of been drawn,
SOP for a whole genre of detective novels. Agatha Christie was well known to write her mysteries from the back.
Mentalist cold readings are a different question. They rely upon a mixture of simple trickery (as simple as plants in the audience that relay overheard conversations) to fortune teller like Barnam statements. That and a well developed patter that allows the performer to slide over miss-calls quickly, or deflect them, allowing the patter to reach an apparently astonishing result. Cold reading requires active involvement in the process, and part of the art is in getting the subject involved in a manner they don’t really realise is occurring - to the point they inadvertently provide enough clues for the performer to weave the result.
Actually, when her notes and first drafts became public, it was clear that in many of Christie’s novel she had no idea as to who would be the murderer (obviously The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was planned from the start). It was one reason she’s so good; she made a strong case for several characters being the killer, and since she had no idea whether they would be or not, the reader gets no clues.
It is possible to draw conclusions like Holmes in real life. As pointed out, Conan Doyle based Holmes and someone who could draw that sort of conclusion by close observation. But whereas Joseph Bell might come to one conclusion this way, Holmes would come to several at once. Also, Conan Doyle used the trick of having Holmes announce his conclusion and then explain; in real life, people would go through the steps.
When I heard that Joy Adamson was killed by a lion, I knew that lions always first break the necks of their human victims. There was no mention of a broken neck, so I stated she was probably murdered – which turned out to be the case.
Blake: Your analysis fails due to your lack of knowledge. Holmes listed Afghanistan because England has just fought a war there. Since Watson had an injury, the most likely place he got it was in Afghanistan. Further, Watson couldn’t be been a naval doctor because the navy didn’t fight in Afghanistan. If you saw someone today with a buzzcut and a missing limb, you would come to the same conclusion. Holmes is making a perfectly reasonable inference; Conan Doyle only makes it more dramatic.
Probably true for many. However there is a good way to guess the murderer that I have found works remarkably well - about half way into the book, ask yourself, who is the absolutely least likely person to have done it? You will have no idea why, or how. But it works too well to be coincidence. So much so that the “Agatha Christie” clue was something my colleagues and I used to refer to when discussing matters. These were the plots she seemed to construct backwards. I would assume she didn’t always do this, but there are many stories that are so contrived to lead one astray.
One of the first subjects I read about when I joined SDMB was about Derren Brown and some of this tricks. This quickly turned to a discussion of cold reading. SDMB member Ian Zinn can claim to have helped Derren learn much of his skills. For one of the most brilliant exposés of cold reading - watch this. Ian’s book on cold reading has a chapter that exactly covers this.
I have another opinion: it can be done and it’s because people tend not to realize just how much they reveal about themselves. If you have a really good attention to detail, you can pick up on stuff that people normally miss.
Here’s a stalkerish example from when I was a teen. I was working in fast food and had a crush on a guy. I don’t know why but instead of normal crush-girl behavior, with this guy I felt compelled to try to freak him out in a cat and mouse game kind of way. He would come into the store because his sister worked there with me, and I used to flirt with him. Once he came in and I noticed while I was working that he filled out a comment card and threw it away in the dining room trash bin. After the store closed when I was cleaning the dining room, I pulled the card out of the trash (it was on the top). He wrote a fake name and comment on it but his real address. The next time he came in and I started flirting, I told him that I could read minds. Of course he challenged me, so I told him I could read from his mind where he lived. He was shocked when I told him his address.
(That was the extent of my stalking, I never went to his house or anything. It was just to play that little game on him.)
And of course, some of Holmes’ deductions were perfectly pedestrian. In one story, for instance, a man is amazed when Holmes knows that he’s a Freemason… which Holmes had deduced from the fact that he was wearing a pin with the calipers-and-square logo. In real life, people have many such obvious tells, which they don’t go to any great effort to hide, but which most people they interact with just never notice. Heck, in casual contexts I wear a hat completely covered with buttons and pins, and it’s perhaps one person in fifty who ever reads any of them. Holmes could deduce a great deal about me from that hat, and it wouldn’t be amazing at all.
It’s a shot in the dark. There’s no definite indication that Watson’s injury was due to a bullet wound at all. And even if one accepts the proposition that Watson was in the military, Afghanistan was far from the only place a British soldier might have recently been injured and received a sun tan. The Second Afghan War took place between 1878 and 1880 (Holmes and Watson’s meeting took place in 1881), but the Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa had also just taken place in 1879. Watson could just as easily have been a survivor or Isandhlwana or Rourke’s Drift as Maiwand. And the British Empire was a very big place. There were any number of ways to get injured in the West Indies, Africa, India, Malaya, or Australia.
Both the buzz cut and the missing limb are far more definite indications of possible service in Afghanistan than anything that was evident about Watson. No one would be astonished if such a guess turned out to be correct today (even though there would be a considerable probability that it would be wrong). The evidence for Watson is vague and open to any number of other conclusions.
Doyle himself even worked that into one of the stories–I want to say “The Naval Treaty.” After Holmes explains the (rather obvious) way he identified someone, the guy says, “Oh, of course. For a moment I thought you had done something clever.”
I recommend Robert Steiner’s Don’t Get Taken as a primer on the subject of cold reading.
Episode #28 of the Futility Closet podcast might be interesting to the OP. It’s titled The Real-Life Sherlock Holmes and tells a bit about Doyle’s inspiration for the detective.
I have no affiliation with the podcast or podcaster - I just happened to listen to that particular episode yesterday.
.
I worked as a department store clerk when I was in college. I would occasionally have to fill out forms with customer’s name and addresses. (refunds, or big ticket items) On a few occasions they would be amazed when I would write down their name and address without asking.
Then I would remind them that I had been their paper-boy a few years earlier.
The general sales manager at the first car dealership I have worked at was great at Holmes type reading of people. He didn’t do it with customers because it would freak people out, but the first time we met he accurately inferred quite a lot about me that wasn’t on my resume–my time in ROTC, for instance. “Military bearing” indeed.
I have a copy of “The Full Facts of Cold Reading” and it explains all of the different techniques used to produce a reading, one of which is deduction - but it’s based on a knowledge of demographics and things of that nature, and you’re always gambling a bit.
However, in social situations, it works amazing well, if you know what you’re doing.
It vaguely bugs me that Watson would still be tanned from Afghanistan. Wouldn’t it have taken him weeks to return to England, given the travel options of the day?