>How do I scientifically unbrainlet myself?
A lot of times people read things with the goal of having read all of it. This is not very useful for learning, IMO. The way I read, I make sure to understand each sentence before I go on to the next one. I am a very slow reader but my comprehension is very high. It has occurred many times in my studies that I need to side-google a string of four other things to even understand the first paragraph of something. Overall, if you're not sure you're understanding what you're reading, stop reading it. Figure out what you don't understand, and then understand it, and then continue.
All of these threads, "Which textbooks should I buy to understand X?," are completely fucking retarded because it would takes months of full time study to independently work through any decent textbook, maybe a year. Maybe two years for big tomes. When I see these threads, it's like people think just reading the book will be enough. That's totally wrong. To ensure you understand a textbook, for example, you'd have to do the exercises. If you don't have an instructor assigning HW, you won't which exercises are the important ones and which are the filler type busy work. Then when you're replicating the other examples aside from the exercises, you're going to get stumped and drive yourself crazy, and the reason you eventually find is that the author made an error. All textbooks have lots of errors in them, and pretty much everything written has an error or several errors in it. This is universal.. Even then, sometimes you'll rack your brain wondering why you can't replicate something, and you'll conclude it was another error, but actually it wasn't and it was your own error that you didn't notice because you were doing self-study instead of classroom- and lecture-based study.
TLDR: Read slower. Probably read as slow as you can.
