this question rises into my head this day. First I read the comment by @mikeazo he says
Do you learn best by reading or doing? That will make a difference.
Also, today I had a class in cryptanalysis so we were doing a lot of computation in class during two hours (solving equations in order to find key of a cipher given ciphertext and plaintext). In the class I noticed that there are two types of students: faster and slower. I noticed that slower-people related to theory-people and faster-people to "non-theory people".
to define difference between theory and non-theory. Usually in science we have two types of people: theoretical people and experimental people. For example: in physics you can work in theory without doing experimental things or you can work in experimental without doing theory. Usually theory related to mathematics; since the language of science is mathematics. Now, in mathematics we have people who do "computation faster" like they solve puzzles quickly or they are very smart at games or multiply tens of digits without calculator, etc. While the other part, the theory-people, they analyze physical things to have a mathematical model and expect future results based on these models so if models doesn't work (such as no solution for the model under some conditions) then we say this result cannot happen in future under some conditions, etc.
From this point-of-view, I'm really interested to see whether is there any survey or research paper about "what is the consequences to be a theory-people or non-theory-people?" For example: I remember Michael Sipser says in his book of "Introduction to Theory of Computation", "theory is good because it expands your minds". Now, if someone is doing theory, then he expands his imagination and the way of thinking to things, but how about consequences? it seems to me for the example I had today in class that "theory people are slower to do normal jobs, even though they understand it". Is there any research papers about this issue! I would be happy to hear from this site anything related to this topic.