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Sly comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
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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.
I found this:
To be very true.
Many times in my classes I have barely grasped what the professor was saying throughout the year only to click the subject at a later time when a fellow student explained it to me in a way that grokked. Whenever this happens, I feel like I have learned more in that brief period then in the entire class before then.
This is actually how I approach difficult textbooks. I read through as much as I can before I just totally collapse in confusion, look up related information on the internet, take a few days off, and then go back through from the beginning. The textbook usually makes vastly more sense then, as all the disjointed pieces come together in a way that's obvious in retrospect.
This is how I was able to read through and understand an algorithms textbook in junior high, even though it terrifies and befuddles people in their third year of college. It's just not that hard if you attack it in multiple passes, because multipass studying is much more likely to get you to the click of understanding.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who does this!
I found that this approach sorta-works, but results in much more shallow reading of the material than if you studied the prerequisites first (at least in math, an algorithms textbook might be an exception).
I already had the prerequisites for learning about algorithms. It's just that the topic itself was hard to fully grasp. I mean, on the first reading I'm sure I could have written a hash table or a mergesort, but it wasn't until I read it again that I got the depth of understanding that lets me optimize hash tables for special applications, or quickly understand timsort. The multipass approach was how I got past a shallow reading of the material.