I love to learn, and when I was a kid, I would eat up math and science like crazy. Nowadays, I generally learn more experience-based, implicit knowledge, like “howtos”.
I’ve noticed that I still can learn explicit knowledge through reading, but its odd because its a very different feeling. Whereas before I would read a book on math and “get it” as I went along, nowadays, I read it and its just sort of there until I try to use it, but when I use it, it actually make sense, that’s when I “get it”. Even when I get it, it still doesn’t feel the same, feel as good, but it is still rewarding.
Maybe I can describe it this way: say you are supposed to learn a story about a boy who walks his dog in the park. That’s easy to understand, and I immediately conjure up the vision in my mind’s eye, which in turn finds some memories and makes the idea stick and have some substance. On the other hand, learning about the syntax of XPath, and how brackets enclose attributes doesn’t have much flavor when I first consume it. If I read a specification about that syntax, then try to use it, it is clear to me that I’d actually learned something when I first read the spec, even if it didn’t feel like it.
The brain is a complicated thing!