>What are your tricks and methods to maximize the mental output of technical literature? Use the "socratic method" of asking questions. You don't actually nee

>What are your tricks and methods to maximize the mental output of technical literature? Use the "socratic method" of asking questions. You don't actually neede Socrates around, you can just ask questions yourself. Before you start reading, ask yourself questions about the subject, and try to answer them yourself. Although you might not have any answers, trying to come up with some will make you far more receptive to whatever the contents of the technical book are. As an example, suppose you were reading a technical article describing the state of the art in searching for twin primes. Such as this: https://www.emis.de/journals/SMA/v12/p12_17.pdf https://www.emis.de/journals/SMA/v12/p12_17.pdf I am bored to tears by the very idea of reading that article and despite its abstract promising to make it more lively (the article starts: "The purpose of this paper is to gather as much results of advances, recent and previous works as possible concerning the oldest outstanding still unsolved problem in Number Theory (and the most elusive open problem in prime numbers) called ”Twin primes conjecture” (8th problem of David Hilbert, stated in 1900) which has eluded many gifted mathematicians. This conjecture has been circulating for decades, even with the progress of contemporary technology..." Rather than just read, think for a moment and try to solve the twin prime conjecture yourself in your mind right now! Obviously without even being a mathematician, you're not going to solve an open area of mathematics that tens of thousands of actual machematicians spent a combined hundreds of thousands of hours on. What you will do, however, is after you give up after a few seconds, be far more open to actually reading the article. You'll actually get way more out of it than if you had never asked yourself a question on a subject you didn't know anything about.