Mind Palace
In "The Hounds of Baskerville", Sherlock asks his companions to leave the laboratory so he can retreat into his mind palace. John Watson explains that this is a "memory technique, a sort of mental map... part of a map with a location. It doesn't have to be a real place. You deposit memories there that you theoretically cannot forget anything. All you have to do is find your way back to it." For some people, it can be a mind house or street, but with Sherlock being Sherlock it's a mind palace. Except that when you see it executed, it doesn't look anything at all like a mind palace.
("The Hounds of Baskerville")
And nothing royal or regal about his gestures. Instead, he looks awkward trying to do a Chief John Anderton.
(Minority Report)
My point is: Tom Cruise in 2002 in Minority Report does it more elegantly than Benedict Cumberbatch in 2012. If you've seen the Steven Spielberg film, you can understand why Tom Cruise did what he had to do. It imagines a future where government will have holoscreens with interactve user interface courtesy of special gloves. Meanwhile, in Spielberg and Cruise's future: Paul McGuigan and Mark Gatiss require Cumberbatch these same hand gestures so that Sherlock can navigate his mind palace. And he isn't even wearing any fancy memory gloves.
Why would a genius who has astute powers of observation (wonderfully executed visually in the series) need these awkward hand gestures when he can just think it up or write things down like Tony Buzan's mind mapping techniques? Even Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, with its techniques of positive thinking and submitting to the law of attraction, used better visual aids: vision boards.
("Circus of Epidurals")
Sally Harper of Coupling had a better technique of accessing her safety zone, which is like a mind palace but for sanctuary (and with a string quartet).
("The Hounds of Baskerville")
And nothing royal or regal about his gestures. Instead, he looks awkward trying to do a Chief John Anderton.
(Minority Report)
My point is: Tom Cruise in 2002 in Minority Report does it more elegantly than Benedict Cumberbatch in 2012. If you've seen the Steven Spielberg film, you can understand why Tom Cruise did what he had to do. It imagines a future where government will have holoscreens with interactve user interface courtesy of special gloves. Meanwhile, in Spielberg and Cruise's future: Paul McGuigan and Mark Gatiss require Cumberbatch these same hand gestures so that Sherlock can navigate his mind palace. And he isn't even wearing any fancy memory gloves.
Why would a genius who has astute powers of observation (wonderfully executed visually in the series) need these awkward hand gestures when he can just think it up or write things down like Tony Buzan's mind mapping techniques? Even Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, with its techniques of positive thinking and submitting to the law of attraction, used better visual aids: vision boards.
("Circus of Epidurals")
Sally Harper of Coupling had a better technique of accessing her safety zone, which is like a mind palace but for sanctuary (and with a string quartet).