How does Holmes come upon his solution? He not only opens his mind to the possibility of the nonlinear and improbable, the very hallmarks of creativity, but he makes certain that he has that mind stocked with the most esoteric of knowledge. It's easy to remember Holmes's famous rant to Dr. Watson on the necessity of keeping a pristine mind attic (Holmes's metaphor for the human mind). Far harder is recalling the major asterisk that is attached to that warning: A mind attic is only as useful as its contents and how you use them. If you store only the essentials, and follow only the most obvious path, you can be a t-crossing, i-dotting Scotland Yard detective bar none, but aren't likely to advance much beyond that. Your mind will never be able to make those elusive connections that could lead you to identifying a fish as a killer if you don't have the requisite knowledge base to begin with—and if you aren't willing to risk the possibility of letting a killer go free while you take the time to figure things out.

We remember Holmes's organized logic. We forget that in his mind space, there dwell not only jellyfish with stings that kill, but polyphonic motets and obscure paintings, tomes on bee keeping and discussions of philosophy. Holmes knows that the earth goes round the sun, and then some. And he isn't afraid to employ that knowledge in a non-traditional way. How can he discover the real killer unless he is willing to consider a possibility so seemingly outlandish that it makes him look like a doddering old man? Over and over, his is not the approach of a ruthless logician, but rather one of someone who knows all too well the power of the creative mind.

Why, then, do we tend to forget this essential element of Holmes's approach? As it turns out, it's not at all uncommon to sweep aside the uncertainty of imaginative meandering in favor of the certainty of hard science. Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman often expressed surprise at just how often people did that very thing: forget how central creativity is to the scientific method. "It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science," he once told an audience, echoing the lament of fellow physicist Albert Einstein who, too, bemoaned our propensity to embrace logic at the expense of imagination and intuition—and did so as early as 1929. Now, there is evidence that this tendency to dismiss the imagination of the scientific approach goes much deeper than mere observation. In their frustration, Feynman and Einstein captured what appears to be a basic tendency of the human mind.

In 2011, a team of psychologists led by Jennifer Mueller decided to test a common paradox: Even though we say we value creativity, we often tend to reject creative ideas. The problem, they hypothesized, might lie in our inherent distrust of uncertainty. To test their assumption, they asked a group of participants to take part in a task known as the IAT, the implicit association test. Originally designed to test racial biases, the IAT has since been used to look at bias in any number of areas—age, sex, weight, and the like—by measuring the time it takes for someone to react to a given characteristic that's been paired with a label of either "good" or "bad" by pressing a previously designated key. If we're slower to respond when the trait of interest is paired with negative labels than when it's paired with positive ones, that discrepancy is taken as evidence of bias. In this particular instance, the target concept was creativity.