“Aha” Moments Indicate Missing Prerequisites

In an efficient curriculum, learning feels obvious -- not surprising. The "aha" is what relief from unnecessary confusion feels like.

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When you’re learning efficiently in a well-structured curriculum, you won’t really have so many “aha” moments.

I know that sounds counterintuitive but hear me out.

The “aha” moment – the relief of “omg it finally makes sense now” when something finally clicks into place – indicates that you were missing prerequisite information.

You built up a ton of knowledge around this missing prerequisite, so much that it created extreme tension, and you felt all that cognitive pressure get released when you filled in the missing prerequisite.

The “aha” moment is a great feeling and it does represent important learning.

But it also indicates you spent a lot of time being confused.

If you had that missing prerequisite in place beforehand, you wouldn’t have spent hours or days ruminating, bothered by it, searching for it.

Everything would have felt somewhat obvious. Like, “we just put the prerequisites together, what’s the big deal.”

And the time you saved not being confused, you would put towards learning more advanced material.

A few final notes:

– Here, I’m talking about “aha” moments internal to the curriculum. If you start out with an inefficient curriculum, build a swiss-cheese knowledge base, and then switch to a more efficient curriculum that fills in your pre-existing gaps, then of course you’ll experience “aha” moments from that. But once the gaps are filled in, the “aha” moments will come much less frequently.

– Additionally, I’m talking about foundational knowledge. Knowledge that humanity as a whole knows, but that you don’t. Once you get to the true edge of a field, you don’t have an efficient knowledge structure to learn from, and you’re roughing it on your own with discovery learning. So of course you’re going to develop some swiss-cheese knowledge and experience “aha” moments from filling in your gaps. That’s how it goes with discovery learning. But the difference is that when you fill in one of these gaps, it will be a significant contribution to the field. That’s why actual experts/researchers will often talk so romantically about their own “aha” moments.

Discussed ~2:06:44 in this podcast.

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