A little background on myself first – I am currently studying to become involved with aging rejuvenation therapies like SENS.
This requires learning quite a lot about molecular biology. Which is fine, because I find cell biology quite interesting. The problem is naturally that textbooks and technical literature on the subject often make very little effort to be interesting.
Many of the books I’ve been reading lately are largely lacking in energy. And I was finding my mind was often drifting away from what I was reading and generally just not enjoying the process. Which was bad, because I need to spend a lot of time doing it.
I asked myself, do I hate learning about molecular biology and engineering? Should I shift my goals to something I’m more interested in? But, I didn’t seem to actually be disinterested in the subject. I loved talking about what I’d learned. And I frequently thought about it with interest. I was passionate about the goal of defeating aging. So the problem then was probably the books themselves.
So then the question was: how do I make boringly written biology books fun to read? Find better books? Well unfortunately, based on my research, the only biology books written to be interesting tend to be focusing on on other sects of the science; most good molecular biology books are boring. If anyone knows of any books on the subject that are unusually well written, please let me know. But I couldn't find any.
So I looked for the bright spots: where reading was fun. What makes reading a novel fun? I asked. Interesting story, character interactions, suspense, humor, dramatic scenes.
None of these are incorporated in molecular biology books and publications that I can find. But the answer was still there: visualize what I read. But not just visualize like the little diagrams of cellular interactions books usually give you – like stupid, over-the-top, Hollywood-status visualization. I had to make it dramatic. I had to mentally reconstruct the biology of a cell in massive, fast, and explosive terms.
Suddenly, I was reading about genetic engineering with a grin on my face; because I was visualizing a cackling mad scientist taking a jackhammer to a gene sequence.
Which, yes, is totally not what is happening in any way, but I remember what I read better because the unusual things are what stick in human memories; just reading a passage normally makes it easy to forget what I’ve read. And the weirdness seems to make the parts around it more memorable, so I’m remembering what I read a lot better, I find.
Most of the time I try not to make it that absurd. But if I imagine spliceosomes blasting introns out of RNA molecules or cell lysis as an overstated explosion of a cell I simply remember the concepts better. It isn’t the most accurate view of reality, but I'm aware of that when I think back on it, and it’s better than not remembering it.
But this strategy eventually gets a little tiring to maintain alone, I find, so I had to add in a second technique. Every time my mind wants to start wandering I stop, close my eyes, and refocus on what I'm reading, I recite ‘Tsuyoku Naritai’, and why I want to become stronger, what I have to protect. And then I continue. I find this little technique to make a massive difference. It reorients me, so that I continue to concentrate and it briefly reminds of what I'm pursuing and why. And if that doesn't give you the motivation to continue you should probably find a different project.
A third useful strategy has been planning how long I will read instead of how much and then break up the time spent reading over the course of a day. First, it encourages reading to understand fully rather than reading to finish fifty pages. Also, I find it tends to get me to read more pages, despite defeating the motivation to go fast. Time goals just take the pressure of failing to complete work off a bit, I find. As an example, I read about a 160 pages of a molecular biology textbook today using an input-based time goal. I used to plan for fifty pages of a similar type of material on a regular day and sometimes not finish even that. To be fair, I'm spending more time reading now, but I think using input based goals instead of output goals had a part in that that.
The other results I've gotten from these strategies have been pretty good as well. I’ve been trying to quantify my happiness lately, on a scale where every full number corresponds to doubled enjoyment, and now that I’m doing these three things my average happiness while reading technical passages has gone up by nearly a full point. My enjoyment of technical literature has gone from somewhere around 'yeah, it’s ok, I guess' to 'happy' while reading. And because it’s just more fun to do, it helps me to spend more time reading about molecular biology, more time working towards an unaging future.
Anyway, I thought I’d post the ideas in case they helped anyone else out (although the first might not work as well for things that are harder to visualize). I’m also interested if anyone does anything similar (or different) to increase their enjoyment of similar texts.
You've come to an example of perhaps one of the main aspects of the future of communication. Metaphors of useful for a lot of reasons, but one of these reasons is to decrease burden on cognitive resources by drawing an isomorphism with something already understood (to cut out the time and energy necessary to explain the structure from scratch), or by introducing an isomorphism with something that's easier to remember because of how the human mind works (such as your example, where you point out that things involving human meaning and intention are easier to remember).
People have been using metaphors for these and other reasons for a very long time, but in most cases people have been stuck with picking out of the already-existing landscape of things to draw isomorphisms from. This is difficult because these other things were not introduced into the thought landscape among the population for the purpose of being made into metaphors--they just happen to be there. But what you're talking about is removing this limitation, and essentially creating a new structure, for the purpose of then drawing a metaphor with it. This means creating a metaphor by design, rather than having to pick one from the wild.
Take it a step further, and move outside the paradigm of being constrained to just words for explaining things--make a bit more technological--and you realize one of the most promising avenues in the future will be to create enjoyable video games with worlds of their own, and rules of their own, for the purpose of later drawing metaphors from this man-made landscape. The problem of having to draw only from already-existing things for metaphors is gone. You can design worlds for the purpose of making metaphors out of pieces of them later on.
Few things I've stumbled onto seem to have the same potential as this. I wouldn't be surprised if this is literally at the center of the future of communication. Once video games are easier to make, and the average ambitious individual can work on their own video game, just as any ambitious person can write a novel, this may end up one of the most effective forms of communication--building an enjoyable virtual world for people to play through, with the ending being a re-labeling of all the components, revealing their theory on something in an extremely clear, effective, efficient manner.