a dissertation on my own perceived problems
I found the Doidge book therapeutic.
Regarding "ability to learn": Ebbinghaus (famous for discovering forgetting curves which lead to Anki) showed that amount you learn is proportional to the amount of time you spend learning it; L(t) = at . Increasing "ability to learn" could be thought of like the constant of proportionality, a.
Learning = acquiring and retaining knowledge or skills. This definition comes from a book written by cognitive scientists coming off a decade of researching optimal learning recommended by Robin Hanson, which is also worth reading.
Obviously, there's values of time, t, for which this breaks down. I don't have the academic citations, but a professor I once had (who I trust) said that your brain's ability to learn can be saturated and marginal time spent learning won't help until you sleep.
However, I am aware of Walker et al. (2002) (pdf), which shows that you don't show improvements from practice until you sleep. In hierarchical situations, where every new thing you learn depends on something you've already learned, this implies you should sleep in between every new thing you learn. This effect is separate from distributed practice, which you should do anyway.
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.
Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.
So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?