Why does something suddenly ‘click’ when learning something?

Question

Why when learning how to play something, such as an instrument, does something suddenly click and you suddenly become much better at that skill?

And does this apply for learning anything? Such as programming or are some things just learnt at a constant rate by certain people.

In: 475

Answer 1

The click is what happens when we go from knowing something to understanding it. When we understand something, it becomes a lot easier for us to apply that knowledge to new hypothetical scenarios that we’ve never encountered before.

Math is a great example. I can tell you that 2 + 2 = 4 and you can memorize that fact. When you go to write the test, you’ll be able to answer “2 + 2 = ?”. But if you don’t understand how addition works, then you probably aren’t going to be able to figure out “3 + 3 = ?” or any other question because you’ve never seen that before and don’t know how it works. As a result, you’re going to score very poorly on your test.

But once you know how addition works, you can add any two numbers together, even if you’ve never seen those two numbers added together before. Now, you can correctly answer every question on the test. The click is the moment you realize you now understand how addition works and are now capable of solving all these problems that you couldn’t solve before. And that newfound ability to solve these problems is the sudden leap in skill.

I’m not going to answer your second question because if you understand my explanation, then you should have that click moment and suddenly now be able to answer it yourself.