For a while now I've been trying to think a bit about the way I think. When I get something wrong, fail to solve a problem, misunderstand something, or whatever, I try to look back on what went wrong, and I try to notice if it's the same thing that went wrong on other occasions. I now think I'm in a position to write down some of my most noticeable intellectual weaknesses. (At least, most noticeable to me. I expect other people probably notice different weaknesses about me from the ones I notice about myself.)

Neophobia. I often find that I'm extremely reluctant to get into a new piece of thought: picking up a new problem, or starting to learn about a new thing. Typically once I finally do get over that activation-energy barrier, I find it's not at all as difficult as I'd imagined it would be, but for some reason I still don't remember that the next time I'm having the same problem.

Too uninterested in the actual compared to the possible. To some extent this almost isn't a weakness – my feeling is that there's plenty of room in the world for on the one hand people who look at things that are possible and go and do them, and on the other hand people who have a good working knowledge of all the stuff that's already been done and can get it to where it's needed. But even the former kind of person needs to have some awareness of what's already been done, to avoid repeatedly reinventing wheels and wasting effort, and I think I err just a little too far in the direction of lacking that awareness: I'm reluctant to spend brain-space on holding a mental catalogue of stuff that already exists when I could instead spend it on knowing how to make new stuff.

Difficulty keeping track of many things. I much prefer to have a small number of problems to work on, each of which is complicated and fiddly, than a large number of problems each of which is in itself simple. I can handle complicated problems fine (or rather, I have at least as much of a fighting chance with them as anyone else), but keeping track of lots and lots of things without forgetting about one of them is much harder for me. Of course I can and do compensate by constant list-making, but as soon as I have to manage without a list it all goes pear-shaped.

Compartmentalisation. When I learn a fact in one context, I often find I've failed to apply it in another context, or failed to relate it to a fact I learned in another context which in combination with the first one would have told me something really useful. I seem to have a few mental compartments for thinking about different kinds of thing, and sometimes those compartments don't link up and talk to each other when they really ought to.

Insufficiently bold imagination. Quite a few times in the past couple of years I've tried to solve a problem by considering a lot of candidate solutions and then judging which of them are sensible or workable or likely. Often I've failed to solve the problem, and found out afterwards that this was because the real answer was completely outside the space of possibilities I'd considered – either because it was totally different from any idea I'd had at all, or (perhaps more embarrassingly) because it was an idea I had had but hadn't taken far enough. It typically seemed to me afterwards that my judgment was not obviously at fault at any point – all the solutions I dismissed as wrong were indeed wrong for pretty much the same reasons I thought – but in each case my imagination let me down by not coming up with a wide enough range of possibilities to submit to my judgment.

I wonder what can be done about these. One feels that the neophobia ought to be dealable-with just by more forcibly reminding myself that it's never as bad as I expect, but it probably isn't that easy in practice, and with the rest of them it's not even clear what I might be able to do to stop it…