Can you get brain amoeba like this?

While expanding your knowledge - how can you assure you don't mix up stuff and are able to get the correct knowledge back from your brain when you need it (remembering)?

• I'm always sabotaging myself when learning new nouns - like country names or people's names as to not be biased by the connotation they carry. E.g., I stop myself from having a lasting impression when the word "USA" is pronounced just for the sake of not being any way biased afterwards but at the same time of course I get the essence of "USA", like a concentrated knowledge about it and have at the end of the day very very little noun related knowledge. I grew bilingual and e.g. when I read HARP its sound first reminds me of "war" since harp means "war" but in the US HARP means something different so I always take more steps in processing new things. I thing that is great but when it comes down to speed and being smart and quick and knowing lots of things, I'm slow. I not only process stuff more, also I'm obsessed with possibilities and perspectives. Most of the time I can't take a standpoint and I never know what would be best to answer or say when somebody is expecting information from me. I need a bulletproof strategy and the missing manual to my brain. I know it is capable and vast and a piece of organ which is simply wonderful and fantastic, brains in general. But I feel like I miss the insider knowledge on how to use it effective and efficient. Another example are fantasy literature - I never wanted to read Tolkien because it is all made up characters and I didn't want to stuff my head with names that didn't really exist in real life without having anything bad to say about stories. I hold myself back from learning about Stark Trek also. Not because I would not like such stuff - as a child I would have soaked it up because I would have taken it for real and serious. I take thinks I learn serious, but because of this I learn so few things! So my brain probably is completely fine with following a story and remembering characters and stories if I just would let it do so! I'm so anxious about learning stories which will then interfere with stuff I learn somewhere else so I stopped the scaling my brain would offer me from the start. What kind of sickness is this? I can't trust my brain so much as to let it soak up stories just so I can be sure not to know something wrong and be awfully biased in a serious important situation afterwards where I will need to combine knowledge. I don't know what kind of combination my brain will produce for me! Which leaves me like a no-brainier in word sense :( I want to make the best decision in any given moment with the knowledge there is. Since computers can't iterate fast enough through all possibilities but humans have the ability to make _good_ decisions we opted to the theory that every brain in any given time will somehow combine important knowledge it possesses and make a decision and from its outcome we then say "this person is smart" or "this person is kind of dumb". But it is really the lack of possibility to check every combination and take the best out of them all. How can I ever train my brain or assure to 99.9% my brain to be a "smart" one? Decision making or thinking rational is for me some kind of poker. You bluff to yourself all the time that you are "smart" and "will be able to make the right decision because xyz (well nutrition, good genes, perfect background etc.) and so you lie to yourself and the higher the stakes get the more confident you say yourself to be and the more you are convinced you are smart the higher the possibility gets that you will make a smart decision. But there is no 100% guarantee. What is the recipe? So we all play a silly game all the time! We blame pokerers and people who are brokers they wouldn't do enough work but mere speculation. All we scientists do - especially mathematicians - is, gathering together as much information as we can over years and hoping by some chance we will see a new knowledge emerge just because we happened to have the right puzzle pieces at that time and someone else was on a wrong track. Please help me get this. I don't get this and it drives me mad because I block myself from learning anything without knowing how to organize and use that knowledge for sure. So I stand like a silly because I don't learn country names and country topography because the earth might change, names might change, I don't learn politician names because they might change, I don't learn history, I have trouble loving acronyms because I might leave out people, smart people, who don't know the acronyms and their not only meaning but connotation, I'm afraid to learn from somebody because someone else might have another perspective, I don't learn things because I fear I might mix up fantasy with reality etc. Help!

• Answer:

  You have built up a great analytical machine out of your mind, but unfortunately, the data structures it uses is slightly messed up. I faced this problem very early in my life and managed to bypass it. Here's the solution. Use source tagging of your information. When assimilating any new info, make it a habit to ALWAYS tag it with their source, so whenever you remember that piece of data, it comes tagged with its source, which itself comes tagged with its source, and so on, (like when remembering this method, you will remember this answer, then this question, then quora, then the internet) you will always have a clear handle on the ever-changing reality, truth, presence and trustworthiness of that data - while the data remains intactly stored without needing edits unless a more accurate version is found. That, if made a habit, will clear up most of your problem.