Game Design
There’s a bunch of learnings that is important to understand of our brain function spread out across this chapter, but to sum them up:
The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant. The brain notices a lot more than we think it does. The brain is actively hiding the real world from us. All these things fall into a concept we call “chunking”, and we do it all the time, which is basically absorb things into our brain in a level that is so deep, that we have trouble to think about how to do it when we’re not doing it, because you don’t have to think to do it. For some people, it’s driving a car or riding a bike. I always like to think of chunking as the way I can easily assemble a Rubik’s cube when it’s in my hands, but I would never be able to tell someone how to do it.
And chunking is present in our daily lives to frequently that most of our percepction of the world is our brain recognizing patterns we’ve previously experienced instead of actually trying to assemble that new experience from 0.
In games, we like to call this moment when you understand something so thoroughly that you have become one with it — this term is Grok.