Sherlock: Ahead of His Time

Piqued by the many references to the Great Detective, I read the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, in eighth grade. I liked the story so much that I went on to complete the entire Holmes oeuvre.

(Image from boingboing.net)

One memorable (notice what I do here) passage that stuck was Sherlock's theory of memory: [bold added]

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.
             ------Arthur Conan Doyle, Study in Scarlet

From the vantage of the 1960's Sherlock's mind-as-an-attic metaphor was not correct. The prevailing theory was that the mind was like a tape recorder. Memories, particularly traumatic ones, were repressed; they could be retrieved by skilled psychotherapists and hypnotists.

Mind-as-tape-recorder fell into disrepute when "recovered" memories were shown to be false or at least questionable in infamous child-abuse cases.

The latest model of the mind is that [bold added]

Memory is more reconstructive than it is reproductive. That is, new details may be included into a memory each time it is recalled. Long-term memories become susceptible to change when remembered. This is because when you call to mind an event from the past, you bring the memory into your short-term memory. And in the process of recalling, new details may be attached to the old memory and reconsolidated with the memory.

Furthermore, the mind has limited storage capacity, and it is possible to have memories "jumbled up", if not lost altogether:

When a person tries to access a memory, their brain quickly sifts through everything stored in it to find the relevant information. But as we age, many of us have difficulty retrieving memories. In a review publishing in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences on February 11, researchers propose an explanation for why this might be happening: the brains of older adults allocate more space to accumulated knowledge and have more material to navigate when attempting to access memories.

Be thoughtful about how you arrange your attic. Sherlock Holmes, though fictional, was ahead of his time.