Then, the next step came into my head by itself from the bit of me that was processing it; with Solo, I wait for it and it doesn't come.

Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar. I actually found the same thing when I first started playing Net, and I had a completely different theory about why it was. I wrote a rather long LJ entry on the subject at the time.

Oh, I'm glad it's not just me. (There was no reason why it should be!)

Do you ever get, when you change what you're working on or what technique you use, little bits of oddness that feel like a ship creaking when it turns around something? Forgetting something of a kind you normally wouldn't forget, or not being able to do a certain task automatically for a while?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Certainly I find that if I try to do something I used to be able to do automatically but haven't done in a while, it feels unfamiliar until it comes back to me, but I'm not sure I'd describe that as "oddness": it seems obviously natural that things should work that way. I therefore suspect I'm not thinking of the same thing you are.

I mean when you learn something completely new. Do it and see if you get weird things happening with the rest of your brain. (If you have time!)

Hmm. When I learned to play Solo recently I suddenly found it really odd to look at a (say) seven-digit number which had a repeated digit; I'd got so used to ensuring that never happened that I felt a subtle wrongness if I caught sight of, say, a catalogue number on some packaging. Is that the sort of thing, or are you thinking of glitches that have no obvious relation to the new thing being learned?

Things that have no obvious relation to the new thing, sort of.