Then you’re very unlikely to come up with a novel approach. It’s very difficult to not let reading “state of the art” research put up big guardrails in your mind about what’s possible.

All of the impressive breakthroughs I saw in academia in the CS side were from people who bothered very little with reading everything related in literature. At most it would be some gut checks of abstracts or a poll of other researchers to make sure an approach wasn’t well explored but that’s about it.

The people who did mostly irrelevant incremental work were the ones who were literature experts in their field. Dedicating all of that time to reading others’ work puts blinders on both your possible approaches as well as how the problems are even defined.

Maybe some people tried to develop out-of-the-box sessions to force investigating absurd axioms and see how it goes.

Worst case: you don't have a fresh perspective, but you have learned something and you can try plenty of other problems.

There's also a fair chance of finding possibilities that are "obviously" implicit in the prior work but haven't yet been pursued, or even noticed, by anyone.

In all seriousness, if you're cool with it, LSD. Or anything else that can take you out of the ordinary course of though.