Mmm... I am a click-hunter. I keep pestering a topic and returning over and over until I feel it click. I can understand something well enough to start accurately predicting results but still refuse to be satisfied until I feel it click. Once it clicks I move on.

You and I may be describing different types of clicks, however. Here is a short list of things I have observed about the clicks in my life.

• The minor step from not having a subject click and having a subject click is enormous. It is the single greatest leap in knowledge I will likely experience in a subject matter. I may learn more in one click than with a whole semester of absorbing knowledge from a book.

• Clicks don't translate well. It is hard to describe the actual path up to and through a click.

• What causes a subject to click for me will not cause it to click for another. Clicks seem to be very personal experiences, which is probably why it is so hard to translate.

• Clicks tend to be most noticeable with large amounts of critical study. I assume that day-in-day-out clicks are not terribly noticeable but I suspect that they exist. A simple example I can think of is suddenly discovering a quicker route through town.

• Clicks do not require large amounts of critical study, however, as I have had clicks drop on me from nowhere with all of the answers to a particular problem laying around in plain sight.

• Once a click happens, the extra perspective appears obviously true. Clicks are often accompanied with phrases like, "Oh!" or "Why didn't I see this before?!"

• Even for complicated subjects, it takes trivial amounts of conversation to learn if the subject has clicked in another person. Once you "get it," other people who get it know you got it.

• Some people are much better at producing clicks in others.

• Some people have no idea what a click is and have never felt one. Some of these people are very smart, but I seem to notice that they have a weakness for abstract thought or are more likely to be satisfied with stopping once they have accurate predictors. Perhaps learning why the model ended up being that particular model is extraneous and not needed to predict and so is an unwanted extra step.

• Mind-dumping helps things click. I find that if I just blah on a page, start over and blah again, and repeat the process a click will probably happen at some point in the cycle.

• There are topics that have not clicked for me yet but I suspect they would if I kept pushing them.

• Perspectives from other people help clicks happen. Listening to someone else struggle to understand the concept helps clicks happen.