I Trained Like Sherlock for a Year Here’s What Happened

Photo by huan yu on Unsplash

Last year my friend and mentor Ben Cardall, known as the ‘real-life Sherlock Holmes”, launched a yearlong training course in a modern, updated methodology to emulate the abilities of Sherlock Holmes, as well as what we mortals can achieve anyway. In my opinion, much of what Ben teaches goes beyond the methods of the Great Detective, if we had failed to innovate on the methods of a late 19^th-century fictional detective something would be very wrong with the world. That being said, he keeps the spirit of Holmes alive and updates the tradition with modern scientific innovations in mental training and reasoning as well as including aspects of traditional thought that were stripped away from Victorian England at the time, chiefly the use of the imagination and the traditional art of memory, again given a modern spin.

Adventures and misadventures with autodidactic learning

To give you guys some much-needed context I will need to briefly explain a little about my background and previous efforts. In my early teenage years, I became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and his methods, charging ahead to learn everything I could about how to think like the great detective without much concern for questions such as whether his methods were possible or realistic. This was much to my advantage as many people talk themselves out of ever trying to achieve something remarkable because it isn’t ‘realistic’ when they would have become better for the effort even if they never reached their great ambitions. I spent much of my teen years then learning about body language, psychology, tracking, forensic science, and the history of crime. Practicing the art of deduction on friends, family, and strangers with limited success and learning through trial and error as well as books such as Maria Konnikova’s How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Much of what I tried didn’t work out and I needed to reinvent the wheel in many regards. That being said, some of what I tried did work. For instance, in my experiments with memory, I discovered that schemes to develop eidetic memory were fruitless, but that the method of loci provided immediate and astounding benefits that continue to build to this day. Progress was slow and I made plenty of mistakes along the way but was skilled enough to be accused of witchcraft at one of my grandparent’s churches by a disgruntled farmer. (true story).

Early Training with Ben Cardall and the Deductionists

I started training with Ben first with a month-long group course in memory training and made more progress with my memory and reasoning in one month than I had in almost a decade of training on my own. Then an anonymous donor paid for a year’s worth of courses beyond that, covering topics ranging from state control, situational awareness, deduction, and more. I learned a lot about what I was doing that was working, a lot of painful truths about the rubbish I had picked up along the way, and was finally given the scaffolding and direction to accelerate the progress I made. By the end my memory techniques became something I could use not just for memorizing scripts, studying for tests, and my poultry attempts at language learning as they had been in high school, and had blossomed into an efficient, well-oiled set of tools that allowed me to achieve high marks in an accelerated course in Forensic psychology at SNHU while going through some of my most stressful years so far. (a story for a different day.) all while making a huge amount of progress in studying French, memorizing the Art of War, and training with the Deductionists along the way. This is a complete 180 from my performance in high school which had always been rather poor all while I had far fewer responsibilities and troubles to contend with. I had also finally polished my deduction abilities and developed the ability to rapidly memorize information in important conversations to recall critical information, observe as much as possible, and leverage the information I had to a much higher level than before. There is another story for another day of how these skills helped me through a challenging encounter with the CFYD that I will need to be careful if I am to tell it.

The Year-Long Program How Have I Improved

The first round of training with Ben built a solid foundation of observation, situational awareness, reasoning, and memory that have served me well. The yearly Sherlock program I just finished strengthened that foundation and built off of it. The training is intense and you get out of it what you put in, I was able to heavily strengthen my critical thinking skills and improve my ability to memorize environmental information at speed. I can now walk through a grocery store and recall which items are in which isles, and how much various items cost, as well as read the people in the store, and accurately recall them afterward while going through the routine of purchasing goods. This may sound mundane, but building localized knowledge improves my ability to gather intel and make deductions about people.

We also delved into Criminal Profiling with actual case studies from some crimes Ben has personally investigated. The methodology gave me an edge in the classes on profiling and forensic psychology I took this year allowing me to push even further ahead of my peers in terms of the accuracy and complexity of the profiles I was able to produce.

I can also memorize the facts of a lecture, even on complex and difficult subjects, on a first viewing with reasonably high accuracy and detail. My ability to quickly learn about new subjects and retain what I have learned has come in handy for college where I continue to excel despite taking rather difficult classes such as in statistics where I was able to memorize and understand the concepts being discussed which ordinarily require a master’s to fully understand. This is not the result of some genius or extraordinary talent on my end, but the result of diligent training, careful coaching from Ben, and a willingness to put in the work to make the system work.

Training beyond one year

We will be returning to work with Ben in the subsequent yearly programs. Developing our capacity and accuracy further. I am looking forward to further solidifying my practice, developing a higher tolerance for the complexity of deduction problems, and continuing to workshop my particular blend of modern critical thinking, Deductive reasoning, probabilistic inference, and ancient ninja espionage and strategy moving forward into the coming years. The previous year’s program will be available for rewatch so you can still catch up if you start with us in December. I highly recommend that you all strongly consider joining us on this journey and getting the cognitive edge that will help you master higher education, career, and life to advance beyond the mediocrity of most modern minds.