Maigret

I was struck this morning by a passage of explanation of the Maigret method, in the midst of his visit to New York.

First, you get a firm grip on the two or three hard facts which are available to you.

Second, you wander about, wander to and fro, soaking up the people and the atmosphere. Maybe do a bit of data collection. Maybe travel records, maybe births, deaths and marriages. Important at this stage not to think too much and not to hurry.

Third, if you are lucky, the whole business suddenly clicks into focus, the people in it suddenly come to life. And, lo and behold, you have the solution to the problem, usually in Simenon a murder.

Which seems plausible as a method, but I was reminded of stuff I have been recently about how the brain works. One chunk of brain is busy, say, looking at something out in the street. Another chunk of brain is busy on something else altogether. While a third chunk of brain is puzzling about what there might be there, out in the street, given all the circumstances. Then suddenly, the whole business clicks into focus and the vague chap with a beard in the middle of the street turns out to be Jeremy 'The Crow' Corbyn. A process which requires a mixture of bottom-up and top-down processing. And a process which is sometimes disturbed, in a more or less random way, by what is going on in the second chunk of brain. See, for example, reference 2 (an open access paper which google will turn up for you).

My point being that sometimes the top-down processing gets it wrong and you are actually seeing Rolf Harris, a quite different chap with a beard. But having got it wrong, the brain goes onto to correct and tidy up what is being delivered from the eyes by the bottom-up processing.

Rather in the same way that detectival hunches are often wrong. Maybe better to work away at collecting facts than relying on hunches?

From where I associate, one again, to reference 1. Clearly something of a favourite.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/abstract-expressionism.html.

Reference 2: perceptual restoration of masked speech in human cortex - Matthew K. Leonard and others - 2016.