I analyze Batman's detective skills to figure out what exactly makes him the world's greatest detective, so we can hopefully understand how to spot the things others can't. Over two years ago, when I started making these videos on one of my childhood heroes, trying to solve how hard the big guy punches, I never imagined these would take off. So, I thought to return the favor. I could make one that might just turn all of us into Sherlock Holmes spying machines. Batman's story is one of one man trying to make sure that no one else ever has to suffer losing a loved one to crime. And to do that, he has armed himself with an array of not only top-notch gadgets but also high-level detective skills, ranging from the highly useful inductive reasoning skill that we see people like Sherlock Holmes use to solve crimes, a skeptical mind, and one that the rest just doesn't work without being probabilistic thinking. And it's these skills specifically that I've seen Batman rise to fame over the last 75 years. Inductive reasoning, opposed to deductive, being a

thought pattern that most people do, where you start with a hypothesis of what you think is true, often based on your own prejudices and beliefs, and then look for facts to support it instead, in a sense, works backwards. Where someone simply observes what's there, coming up with different generalizations and theories, sometimes without ever forming a final opinion, allowing the user to keep asking why. From Batman's first-ever appearance in 1939, this skill easily made him stand out in a room at times, making everyone else around him look a bit slow, probably because a man dressed in an armored Halloween costume showing up in a room full of detectives destroys Amigos' discomfort and humiliation. Like every time when Batman has been the only person in the room to deduce any of the Riddler's riddles, observing the no more lies written on the mayor's duct-taped face, corruption in the mayor, and riddle asking, What does a liar do when he's dead? He lies still, meaning they continue to lie. Or how he deduces that Ra's al Ghul kidnapped Robin as an

excuse to take him on a world tour to test his abilities, screaming about how much of a dump this racial Ghul is, thinking he wouldn't see the coincidence of Robin and his own daughter Talia disappearing at the same time, only for him to show up in the bat cave with an obviously disrespectful servant the same freaking day. Or when he figured out that the god Orion was killed by a god-seeking bullet that literally traveled back in time by looking at the pattern of the internal trauma in Orion's skull and the fact that the same bullet was found buried in the concrete of the murder scene where it had been for an estimated 50 years. Inductive reasoning has seen Batman, a supposedly regular dude, routinely come out on top of criminals, his fellow heroes, and thus the minds of regular people around the world, allowing him to take both the comic book world and eventually the big screen by storm. Specifically, Batman is a keen observer of his environment, taking in and storing every small detail he can well before he jumps to any conclusions.

of what it all might mean and how he thinks it might tie together. This allows him to see patterns among the data and allow theories, no matter how ridiculous, to present themselves. A skill that is useful not just in detective work but almost any field. If you want to make the super-powered skill of inductive reasoning yours, first become an active participant in whatever is happening in your life, being as present-minded as possible. So, whenever you walk into a situation, in a room, or talking to someone else, or are simply sitting there, you want to simply actively listen and observe as much as possible without thinking too much about what it could mean or trying to come up with something to say back right away, as it could force you to miss seeing and hearing some important detail. Only after gathering various data do you look for patterns and formulate general conclusions. So, don't be staring at your phone or doing anything that may split up your attention. While studies published in Science magazine have shown that being able to have the skill of

divided attention, where your brain literally assigns one of its hemispheres or half of its gray matter between two different tasks that each only get half of your brain's toll processing speed and power behind them, does work, albeit it all happens much slower. And also, if your brain decides to take on a third task, the whole thing essentially crumbles because you only have two hemispheres for task management. As anyone given a triple test has to juggle consistently, forgets one of their tasks, and makes three times the errors on the tasks they do happen to perform while missing all the data science. Like many cognitive skills, observation is a skill that can and should be strengthened over time. As the professor Wib Beber Ridge says in his book The Art of Scientific Investigation, training and observation follows the same principles as training in any activity. At first, one must do things consciously and laboriously, but with practice, the activities gradually become automatic and unconscious, and a habit is established. However, all of this is quite hard if you don't have any

background knowledge in the thing you're observing, as you won't know what to specifically look at and take into consideration, causing you to miss and glance over details that an expert in that field would much more easily take note of. But none of this matters if you don't also develop this one other thing that has aided Batman in solving some of the worst crimes and bizarre circumstances that others often glance over, that has developed into becoming a trademark of a character's well-known personality. If you've seen any of the Batman movies or cartoons, you know that Bruce has a brooding, skeptical personality, that he trusts no one and leaves very little up to chance. This can be due to the fact that he is always having to question everything and everyone around him, living in a city where most police and people in power are corrupt and the Mob Rules the city. Bruce is constantly faced with situations where people lie to his face or just downright ignore or even cover up the facts, as he is faced with unsolved murders, robberies, and plots to

freeze the entire damn city, and this is where Batman's skeptical mind is duly needed. As famous French playwright Denis Diderot said, skepticism is the first step towards the truth. It must be applied generally because it is the touchstone. Batman always brings a hefty dose of skepticism to every situation and everyone he faces, observing the details of what is happening, what people say, details of the crime scene, and allowing questions of what happened or could happen to arise, not caring if it's an opposition to what others may think or believe in. Like Sherlock Holmes, who is partially based upon Batman, he doesn't believe; he searches for the truth. Probably one of the biggest scientific studies ever done on skepticism is in 1975. Stanford conducted some experiments with continually shocking results. Students were given two suicide notes and asked to decipher which one was real and which one was fake. Researchers told half of the participants that they did very well, getting nearly all of their guesses correct, while telling the other half they got nearly all of them wrong. But

this turned out to be a deception, as every participant scored pretty much the same. In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge the responses to thinking they were right or wrong. This, it turned out, was also a deception. Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened, and the true point of the experiment was revealed. The students in the high score group said they thought they had done quite well, significantly better than the average student, even though they had just been told they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who had been assigned to the low score group said they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student. The researchers noted that once formed, impressions are remarkably perseverant, even in the face of evidence that tells you that you're wrong. I'm sure we all know people like this, but to make

matters worse years later. Another similar study happened with the same results. As the researchers dryly said, even after the evidence, further beliefs have been totally refuted. People fail to make the appropriate revisions in those beliefs. In this case, the failure was noted as particularly impressive since the two measly data points participants were given would never have been enough information to generalize from, but they still did. Facts do not change people's minds. It's easy for us to believe and rely heavily on the first piece of information we're given, no matter if it's false, especially when put in a stressful situation or under time pressure, known as anchoring bias. Something that Batman impressively has gotten around is our brains rely on a series of mental shortcuts to lessen their mental load by using cognitive biases and heuristics, but they can also lead to horrible decision-making that detectives like Batman cannot afford to have. We generally tend to believe things if other people believe them. The bandwagon effect heavily weighs the information that is most easily available to us.

called the availability heuristic, or most of us tend to weigh our emotions far more heavily for decisions rather than concrete information known as the effect heuristic. Batman, on the other hand, has learned the skill and value of being skeptical and actively works to not believe the first thing he hears or is told, as seen in Detective Comics number 31. Batman refuses to believe the GCPD's initial belief that a woman is simply a missing drug addict and a crime scene that shows multiple sets of footprints and chemical residue on a tree. Instead, seeing the possibility exists that the woman was actually murdered and possibly showing that he works with a bunch of idiots. Also, as famously seen in the Tower of Babylon, where Ra's al Ghul discovers Batman's contingency plans to take down the entire Justice League because rather than being a pessimist, Batman sees that one of these crazily super-powered individuals could easily abuse their power. Skepticism for the win. While skepticism is incredibly useful, you want to make sure that as a detective or

someone who actively figures out whatever it is that you're doing in life that you do not miss this last thing cause if you do picking any direction to go especially for Batman is going to be incredibly hard and that is the massively useful skill of probabilistic thinking also known as making data-driven decisions. Probabilistic thinking is one where you actively look at the full range of possibilities and select the most probable ones and Batman based upon what he's observed his past experiences and his current model the world then selects what the most likely option to have happened no matter how ridiculous is and continually analyzes and adjusts not his opinion but his conclusion based upon new evidence. Perhaps one of Batman's greatest skills is when working on a case he thinks like a scientist and using the scientific method he forms many different hypotheses as he goes along that he can test and narrow down as new evidence is discovered figuring out which hypothesis is the most likely candidate. If you want to see Batman's probabilistic thinking in action look no further than the

Animated Series episode Per Chance to Dream where Bruce is trapped in a dreamlike illusion that contains everything he wants in life. Bruce's parents are alive, and he's set to marry Selena Kyle. But for Batman, everything conflicts with his childhood trauma, which gets him searching for more data. As the episode goes on, he discovers that Selena Kyle is no longer Catwoman. He has the relationship with his parents he always wanted, the amazing career with his father he always wanted, and it's due to his skeptical nature and constant search for the truth, no matter how grim. Batman sees the clear mismatch between his feelings and reality, coming to the conclusion that nothing is real. Or there's that one time he deduced that he was trapped in an illusion just by sensing that his bodily functions didn't correspond to the age he was supposed to have in that imaginary world. And because he's been trapped in illusions before, inductive reasoning. But if none of this was very interesting, then I saved possibly my most intriguing piece of information for last. Most of us

are subject to so many cognitive biases and natural flaws in our thinking that someone like Batman can't afford to have. But luckily, there's a simple way around them in Neuroscience studies that Batman most likely would have read the results of, which are discussed in the book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. The author, Maria Konnikova, notes the Neuroscience studies where people remain aware of the things actually priming their thoughts and controlling their decisions, saying, a prime stops being a prime once we're aware of its existence. The effect disappeared if subjects were first made explicitly or were bringing any attention at all to the priming mechanism, and you'll likely find the effect go down to zero when we are aware of the reason for our action. It stops influencing us. And Batman being able to train himself into the world's greatest detective is a massive reason for the character's success. But if you're left wondering, Okay, but how smart or strong is he then? you're gonna want to watch this video.

The SCIENCE Of: Batman's Absurd Detective Skills

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