You are definitely smart enough. The problem is that most neuroscience is extremely incremental and often boring/useless. People like the idea of "working with the brain", but since we have no idea what we're doing, they just end up doing the 237th paper on the regions whose activity is "modulated" by the hippocampus, etc., etc.
There's a lot wrong with the structure of science, and this does lead to some incrementalism, but at the end of the day, we are making huge breakthroughs and our progress in understanding the brain is accelerating.
