The Math Ceiling: Where’s your cognitive breaking point?

The second half of the article is the interesting one. Skip/skim past the "do you have a ceiling" bit. The meat is the idea that if you go too long with a missing bit of understanding, the workarounds and coping strategies you form to keep progressing can create a barrier which is not remedied by filling in the original missing bit.

The proper way of playing fast notes on a guitar (with a pick) is alternate picking, up/down/up/down. So a three note per string scale ascension would be dud udu dud udu ... I never learned that. Instead I took the shortcut called economy picking, just picking in the direction the pick moves. The same scale ascension would be dud dud dud dud... (since you move down to the next string). This is also a valid technique, but meant as a compliment and normally learned after mastering alternate picking.

Now, economy picking worked pretty well for me for a while, but I'm starting to feel the disadvantages now (very hard to keep a perfectly even pace, easy to get "stuck" in certain picking patterns, etc.) But now for the life of me I cannot unlearn and relearn.

Far fetched parallel, but it makes me think that he could be right about the math as well.