Nice work going from Q23 to Q40.
From what you said, it sounds as if you did a great job of learning the concepts and driving your score up. Now you need to get more adept at handing the questions, and likely part of what that development will take is doing a fair number of additional practice problems. As you are doing each question, you can be considering what might be a cool, quick, efficient way to get to the answer. Over time you will develop the vision and adeptness that you want.
There are all kinds of processes going on in someone's mind when he is solving a problem and partly you just have to work on questions and develop those processes.
One of those processes is what Brian at Veritas Prep has likened to driving in the fog with headlights. When one is driving in the fog, one's headlights show only a little distance ahead. So the thing to do is drive slowly that little distance. Then, once again, one can see a little distance ahead, and one can keep driving. Similarly, when you see a question, you may not see all the way to the answer, but you can start doing something, moving some numbers around, considering different angles, plugging in answers, or doing something to get things going.
When a person who scores high on quant approaches a question the person may be bouncing from the question to the answer choices, seeking to see a pattern, and considering multiple ways to handle the question. It might look as if the person has it all under control and just knew how to get to the answer, but internally the person is hacking at the problem, looking for an opening. It's not as if the person necessarily saw the way right away. Rather the person was just determined and kept looking for a path to the answer.
If you are freezing up a little when you see questions, you are not so different from many others. Just seek to get something going. Don't worry about being "taken aback." Just have at it. Seriously, that "taken aback" thing is probably much of what you need to change. Anyone can be a little freaked by a question. Some of them look practically unanswerable. The thing is that those who score high just power on through that feeling and look look look for a way to the answer.
Also, as you do more questions, you will find that there are basic things and tricks that you can use over and over. The more tricks you pick up the more you will find that you are doing the questions quickly.
One thing that seems to help is becoming good at factoring. If you become good at finding factors, and prime factors, of numbers, often you will see your way to answers more quickly than you would have.
To get some ideas for answering questions, you could post them here. Alternatively, you can do searches for certain types of questions and see how the experts get to answers.
A good source of tricky practice questions that you can use to develop your skills is the quant part of the BellCurves question bank. To access it, go to the GMAT section of
https://bellcurves.com and set up a practice account. Then seek to achieve a high hit rate in each category. You don't have to be quick at first. Initially you more want to be coming up with cool ways to handle the questions. Then as you get more adept at getting to answers, seek to also speed up the process.
You can be sure that you will.
