The way we’re educated from childhood tends to leave an impression that knowledge is a collection of discrete “dots” — a formula here, a definition there, a conclusion somewhere else. Memorize them, and you’ve got it.
This understanding is flawed.
The brain is not a warehouse where you simply dump things in. It’s more like a multidimensional structure where pieces of knowledge are interconnected. Any new piece of information must form connections with what you already know in order to truly stick. Knowledge without connections just floats in the void — even if you force-memorize it, it’ll slip away within days.
This process of “forming connections” is essentially what understanding is.
When people talk about “understanding a problem from different angles,” what they really mean is that a single knowledge node has established more pathways to other nodes. The more connections, the deeper the understanding, and the harder it is to forget. Conversely, a concept that’s been crammed in through rote memorization, without hooking onto anything you already know, is just an isolated dot — destined to be lost.
This explains something very common: why learning something completely unfamiliar feels so exhausting.
It’s not necessarily that the subject is inherently difficult. Rather, it shares almost no overlap with your existing knowledge structure — there are no hooks to grab onto. Without hooks, you can’t draw analogies from prior experience or build intuition. You have to start from scratch, growing outward one tiny step at a time.
This is why learning must be incremental. You can’t skip the intermediate path and reach straight for something far removed from your existing structure. You have to find the nearest entry point, get a foothold, then move to the next.
The good news is that as you accumulate more knowledge, the structure grows denser, and new information finds more and more hooks to latch onto.
If I had to use a metaphor, it would be a banyan tree. A banyan’s aerial roots hang down from its canopy, and once they reach the ground, they become new supports, gradually growing into additional trunks. Over time, you can’t tell the main trunk from the branches — the entire tree becomes one interwoven mass.
The way knowledge grows in the mind works much the same way. But there’s one thing worth noting: this tree doesn’t sprout from bare ground out of nothing. Everyone is born with certain trunks already in place, provided by DNA and early upbringing. And DNA itself is a kind of compressed archive of knowledge accumulated through millions of years of evolution. Which patterns to watch out for, which signals to pay attention to, which directions are easier for building intuition — evolution has pre-installed a foundational structure for us. What we call talent is largely these pre-installed trunks. Some people are born with thicker branches in certain directions, and new knowledge in those areas hooks on effortlessly.
But regardless of whether your initial trunks are thick or thin, the growth logic is the same. When the tree is still young, there are few aerial roots, and it’s hard for new ones to reach the ground — the canopy is too far up, with nothing nearby to cling to. But once the tree grows to a certain scale, branches extend everywhere, and new aerial roots can easily find a landing spot, take hold, and become new support.
This is why the further you get in learning, the faster it becomes. It’s not that you’ve gotten smarter. It’s that the tree has grown large enough that when something new arrives, there are branches in every direction ready to catch it.
So that feeling of “getting it instantly” is partly talent — evolution does give people different starting points. But the larger part is accumulated stock. When you’ve already built a dense enough structure in a certain direction, a new concept arrives and hooks on immediately. It looks like natural aptitude, but it’s really the groundwork you’ve already laid.
The reverse is equally true. Someone with no foundation in a field will feel at a loss when facing a new concept. It’s not a matter of ability — it’s that they haven’t yet grown enough branches in that direction to catch it.
Once you see this clearly, your approach to learning shifts. Rote memorization is ineffective not because your memory is poor, but because it only shoves an isolated dot into your mind without building any connections. Examining a problem from multiple angles works not because it’s “thorough,” but because each additional angle is another connection, anchoring that knowledge more deeply into the structure.
Knowledge is a network, and also a tree. It isn’t stored — it grows.