Adam Deng, MIT PhD student and "data alchemist," joins us for this special episode of #SolutionsWatch where he interviews James about language. How can the non-literary and non-linguistically inclined learn to deal with language? How can they improve fluency and facility with language? How can they read faster, retain more, understand allegory and metaphor, and adequately interpret and summarize works of fiction? And what does all of this have to do with Ludwig Wittgenstein? Find out in this not-to-be-missed edition of #SolutionsWatch!

Adam has been kind enough to create a Watch Guide for this edition of #SolutionsWatch with a summary/commentary of the discussion. You can download the Watch Guide from his web site BY CLICKING HERE.

Highlights of the guide include:

ADAM'S QUESTIONS (w/ TIMESTAMPS):

QUESTION 1 (07m36s): Why and how do words resonate with and speak to you? I can remember shapes and numbers because I can visualize them, but I forget words all the time.

QUESTION 2 (26m12s): What is your strategy for extracting knowledge and meaning when you read? Do you pay attention to every word? just a few key words? the beginning and end?

QUESTION 3 (28m20s): How do you "read between the lines" to detect implicit intent, subtle emotions, and hidden meanings? I'm the worst in the world at this.

QUESTION 4 (33m16s): How can I read books and articles faster? Actually I'm not slow, but knowing I will have to sit down for hours to read the average 300-page book demoralizes me so hard. Maybe I'm just being immature.

QUESTION 5 (43m59s): How can I improve verbal recall? When I read a book, no matter how hard I try, I can remember no more than 5% of ideas/concepts. It's as if I never read it at all.

QUESTION 6 (XXmXXs): How do I increase my overall engagement with and affinity for words/verbal IQ? Should I just read a lot of stuff?

10 IDEAS EXPLORED IN THE CONVERSATION:

IDEA 1: Language divided into "Fundamental Verbal" and "Extroverted Verbal."

IDEA 2: Literature and Linguistics as sibling fields.

IDEA 3: Language as a sparse filler/describer of reality.

IDEA 4: Language as expression, a statistical/logical structure, or emotional affair are all different facets of the same mechanism.

IDEA 5: Words are more than the sum of their parts due to their inter-relations.

IDEA 6: Language is a graph!

IDEA 7: Words contain a fundamentally emotional, 'human' component that cannot be replicated with pure mathematics or science.

IDEA 8: Humans are not just mathematical, biological robots that can be programmed.

IDEA 9: Meaning is created, not discovered.

IDEA 10: The fields of human experience are more similar than expected. Diverse fields share techniques, and the building blocks of different fields are not that different, even if their associations are very different.

8 SOLUTIONS PRESENTED DURING THE CONVERSATION:

SOLUTION 1: Learn a foreign language!

SOLUTION 2: Connect a book to other, more familiar fields. Visualize what the author is saying, imagine the author is in front of you and speaking to you, draw diagrams of how characters and ideas connect.

SOLUTION 3: Don't just read a book once and toss it out. Revisit it, go over certain parts, etc.

SOLUTION 4: For nonfiction, a highlighter helps hone in on specific facts and boosts recall. Second-order highlighting, i.e. transferring and then annotating highlighted parts, helps create a higher-level analysis or reading.

SOLUTION 5: Predict the author's intent and filter words' definitions through that lens, and you'll reveal hidden meanings.

SOLUTION 6: To read between the lines in fiction, harvest lots of examples thereof and train your brain like a muscle to recognize hidden meaning.

SOLUTION 7: Remember words through their context, not the syntactical order.

SOLUTION 8: Read Wittgenstein to understand language contexts!

…And 3 miscellaneous observations that are worth reading, too!