If we could choose between a Watsonian and Holmesian mind, I’m sure most of us would prefer Holmes. He’s brilliant and perceptive: the consummate problem-solver. He’s an intellectual badass, capable of reading a complete stranger’s biography based on the guy’s cuff links. Sadly, most of us are like Dr. Watson: perfectly observant and well-intentioned but unknowingly judgmental and blind to the small, critical detail.

An example: At a recent party, I spotted someone across the room to whom I applied a less than charitable label. I knew he deserved this label, because he had chiseled cheek bones, a blow-dried sweep of blonde hair, khaki pants, and Oxfords. He was drinking a Forty, which he waved around like some kind of medal. I had this guy pinned in a second: He was a model-and-bottle type, lived in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, and worked at a hedge fund. Only later did I learn that he was a newspaper journalist, lived in Brooklyn, and studied fine art. He was also a perfectly decent human being.

Sherlock Holmes would never have made a snap judgment like mine, nor would he have overlooked important clues that might have saved me from my prejudice. “Where Watson sees, Holmes observes,” says Maria Konnikova, author of the new book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. If Holmes had been my companion that evening, he would have considered the fact that the hosts–a lovely journalist and an educational software sales rep–probably didn’t run in hedge fund, model-and-bottle circles. For starters.

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“Holmes employs mindfulness in all his thinking. He lives in the present moment,” says Konnikova, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia and a columnist for Scientific American. “We say that we do this, but it’s really hard.” Still, Konnikova has set out to try. In exploring the thinking of Sherlock Holmes, and plumbing A Study in Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and many other works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she has provided a guide for greater self-awareness, stronger memory, better focus, and enhanced creativity.

Holmes practices mindfulness, which sounds new-agey, but is actually quite practical. Mindfulness means focusing on only one problem or activity at a time. But mindfulness isn’t the opposite of multi-tasking, because there’s actually no such thing. “Our brain cannot do two things at once,” says Konnikova. “What we believe is multi-tasking is really the brain switching quickly from one task to the next.” And when our brains move so quickly between pursuits, it’s impossible to be truly focused on any single one. “Your attention is a finite resource,” says Konnikova. “Even when we’re walking down the street–not on the phone, not listening to music but simply thinking about what we’re having for dinner–we’re not really noticing the world around us.”

She points to a study from the National Academy of Sciences, which showed that people who described themselves as heavy media multi-taskers had much more trouble tuning out distractions than light media multi-taskers. They were also worse at switching between tasks. “So even though they were multi-tasking all the time, they were less efficient,” says Konnikova. She explains that our minds are programmed to wander, which multi-tasking exacerbates. But concentration is self-reinforcing. The more you do it, the better you get. “The more you learn to filter out irrelevant distractions, the better your brain can monitor [your] environment–both externally and internally.” This means that focusing on one activity or thought at a time will help you notice or remember details in your work, the things your read, and the people you talk to. This kind of focus will also make you better attuned to how you’re feeling, physically and emotionally.