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cousin_it comments on Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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There's something weird about how my mind works. The latest example was with this article. The first time I tried reading it, my eyes sort of glided off the page and I couldn't understand anything. I waited a day, without thinking about the article at all, then tried reading it again. And suddenly everything was completely obvious and I couldn't see any difficulty. The same thing happens with math problems (when I was a kid I would often wake up with a solution to some problem I heard the day before), complicated programming tasks, etc. Any ideas why this happens?
A couple years ago I deliberately used that strategy of reading an article again and again on successive days to grasp some hard sigfpe posts and decision theory posts here on LW. For some of them, it took several days, and some of them I never understood, but on the whole it worked very well. I always thought the reason it works is because of sleeping between sessions. (I still think this is a very useful technique but haven't used it much due to general akrasia.)
I'd guess it's a less systematic variant of the process described here, where the initial impression is sufficient to grasp enough of the problem statement to develop auxiliary ideas helpful for understanding the material on the second reading.
I had another guess: if some task is at the limit of my abilities, then success or failure is mostly governed by chance. Maybe I randomly fail the first time but succeed the second time.
I'm not sure why it happens, but my impression is that it's not unusual.