INTRODUCTION

Stop for just a moment, and think of a subject you might be interested in.

Maybe you're interested in a layman's understanding of quantum physics. Or perhaps you've always wanted to learn to play the piano and you're finally ready to hunker down and get started. Maybe the game of chess was something you've always been afraid to learn - thinking it was "smarter people" - but you'd love to secretly learn how to play well.

We all have these inklings from time to time, but let's be honest. Most of us never even start. Or we start, but give up pretty soon after that. Unlike those new year's resolutions to hit the gym on January 1st that may start out strong but fade before April Fool's day, our inertia in learning something brand new isn't usually a failure of motivation or some lack of will. It's simply because most things in the world are complicated. You can't sit down for an afternoon and expect to learn all you've ever wanted to know about quarks, understand every nook and cranny about western music, or how to checkmate a grandmaster in 40 moves or less.

Nor would we want it to be! Nothing that's worth doing, nothing that's going to be truly meaningful, nothing that's really worth learning about is going to be easy to learn.

And yet, people learn about these subjects all the time, every day, around the world. How do they do it? They have a plan. This chapter is all about how to formulate a plan for learning that new thing that's on your radar.

I've boiled the entire plan down to one simple phrase: "Context is Everything."

And when I say "Context is Everything," I'm not trying to be poetic. I'm being literal.

When we're exposed to something new to learn – a chef reading a new recipe for oatmeal cookies, a pilot being trained in a new cockpit – we can't receive that new experience completely objectively. We have baked-in opinions, prior knowledge, and other forms of conditioning that provide a landing spot for that new information to land. Every new experience of something we see, hear, or taste, generally has no intrinsic meaning all on its own. Every time we're exposed to something new, our brain goes into its very own, personalized "meaning-making" mode.

Long-standing research has shown that the our brains have evolved to be quite lazy and to conserve energy whenever possible. From a survival perspective, preferring a default state of "lazy" makes sense. If my brain prefers to expend as little energy as possible, it will have plenty in reserve when my retinas detect a lion and I need to figure out the best way to run back to safety!

But there are notable exceptions where it becomes quite agitated and active. Instead of a lion sighting, let's considerable a much happier, yet almost as brain-activating an experience: being confronted with something new that we don't understand. When faced with something new, the brain will leave its naturally lazy state and begin to work quite hard in order to "make sense" out of the new experience. After all, we might be encountering something critical to our survival, so we'd better figure it out.

Given what I've laid out so ar, it seems reasonable to conclude that it's best to scrutinize every new experience in great detail, and attempt to understand as much as we possibly can, right? Wrong. While some examination of the new experience will certainly be performed, the brain's strong preference for low-energy states will cause the brain to throttle down quickly as soon as it can afford to do so. It will examine just enough of any new experience until it can "reverse engineer" it, by finding a connection to something that it already understands. If it can find a connection to something already understood, then it can declare this new experience as "understood" as well, allowing a move back to a lower state of energy once again.

We aren't often consciously aware of it, but It actually takes a certain interval of time for the brain to go from that first exposure to making the contextual connection it needs that provides understanding. That small - or large - snippet of time is spent on finding a place for the new experience to "fit" amongst similar examples in our prior experience. We're trying to locate the strongest association possible, so that our mind can now "make sense" of the new experience. We say we understand something new when we believe we have made a successful connection to a prior experience and yet also understand the distinction between that prior experience and the newly-encountered concept.

But let's slow down, rewind, and zoom in on what we just said. When presented with something new, and while our brain tries to seek out a connection to just the right prior experience, we experience a sensation - however brief - of cognitive dissonance.

Aside: Have you ever "jumped to the wrong conclusion?" Your brain sometimes forces new information into a context that doesn't really fit, like a toddler using a toy hammer to hit a plastic square into a round hole. Yeah, it can work with enough force, but it's not ideal. Imagine if the toddler could have somehow had the patience to look for a slightly better hole to hammer upon…

COGNITIVE RESOLUTION

Musicians are first trained to hear "consonance" – notes that most people would agree sounds good together – and then "dissonance," which are notes that don't sound good together. You would think that famous musicians have figured out how to only play "the good notes" - sounds that our brains like. Surprise! It turns out that that "dissonance" isn't always a bad thing! In fact, almost all music that people enjoy deliberately include of moments of dissonance, followed by a "resolution" into notes of consonance.

The brief dissonance troubles us on some kind of subconscious level (or, if the dissonance is more extreme, on a conscious level!) and secretly makes us yearn for something to "fix it". But when the music soon "resolves" to a pleasing sound, we feel a strange sense of relief and happiness. It's all set up by that dissonance, and without it, the music wouldn't provide the magical feelings that we all enjoy.

A very similar of discomfort happens when we're learning something new, something that's going to take a little bit of work to really understand. Think back to a time when you had a hard time learning something new. Perhaps it was Newton's famous equation F=ma in your high school physics class. Or maybe you're an actor faced with learning a part in a new production that you've never heard of before. Or maybe you're an excellent driver in the US, but now renting a car for the first time in England and trying to survive all of the roundabouts.

In these situations, the task of learning something new can feel confusing, frustrating, or even a bit overwhelming. In these moments - as fleeting as they may sometimes be - we're actually experiencing feelings of cognitive dissonance. Like those musical note combinations that just sound "wrong", our brains don't always like being confronted with something that's not understandable.

Most of us have a natural abhorrence of this sort of feeling. Sometimes it's mild, sometimes rather strong, but always just a bit unpleasant. It makes some people anxious, because it's hard to experience this kind of dissonance.

But in the same way that musical dissonance opens the doorway to fantastic sounds of resolution, cognitive dissonance is a necessary and vital step toward cognitive resolution and getting that feeling of true understanding and true accomplishment. We need that dissonance, because it is a sign that our brain is working to find just the right way to make sense of what we're learning. We might solve this problem quickly, finding the right context for this new information, and the momentary confusion suddenly pays off and we feel good again about our understanding.

Or, it might take a long time of rereading, practice, and pondering to truly understand or master to the new skill that we're trying to learn. Most people give up when that dissonance lasts too long. Some folks can't cope with cognitive dissonance that goes on for 30 or 40 seconds. Some can't cope with even three seconds of feeling lost. They give up.

People who have learned to become great learners in a particular specialty - a renowned violinist, or major league baseball player, a scientist, or an international chess master - have great capacity for cognitive dissonance. They have somehow managed to become friends with those uncomfortable feelings, and can live with it for minutes or even hours. They have grown accustomed to this part of the learning process, and recognize it as a good sign that they are on to something important. They just need to stick with it long enough until their brain can find a way to make it all make sense.

So if you're trying to learn something new and then at some point it seems to "click," it's usually because your brain has found a hook—some bit of previous knowledge, experience, or metaphor—that made the unfamiliar feel familiar. This is the power of context.

FOUNDATIONS OF CONTEXTUAL LEARNING

Neuroscience backs this up. One compelling finding involves schema theory, which shows that the brain builds and uses mental frameworks—schemas—to understand new experiences. When new information fits into an existing schema, learning becomes faster and retention deeper. If no relevant schema exists, the brain struggles to encode the information meaningfully, often relegating it to shallow memory or discarding it entirely. In this way, context isn’t just helpful—it’s essential.

This principle echoes what we discussed in the Big Rocks First chapter. There, we argued for learning the most important and foundational ideas first. Why? Because those “big rocks” often become the schemas into which everything else fits. Learning syntax in a new programming language, for example, is easier once you understand basic control flow. Trying to learn everything in a flat order—without context or prioritization—is like pouring sand before placing the rocks: the structure collapses.

Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in relation—relation to time, to experience, to what you already know. Context is how the new becomes part of you.

We often imagine learning as a process of stacking up new facts, one after another, like bricks in a wall. But that metaphor fails us. A better one might be a spiderweb—new threads only have strength if they attach to existing ones. Context provides those attachment points.

Another idea from neuroscience is the concept of encoding specificity: the idea that memory is most effective when information is retrieved in the same context in which it was learned. This is why taking a test in the same room where you studied can sometimes improve performance. But more profoundly, it suggests that your brain binds facts not just to each other, but to the conditions surrounding them—place, mood, time of day, even background sounds. These cues act as retrieval aids later. In practical terms, this means that weaving rich, multi-sensory context into your study time—using visual metaphors, real-world examples, or varied practice scenarios—can dramatically improve retention.

This foundation also intersects with our chapter on The Spiral Staircase, where we emphasized the need to revisit ideas in varied settings and levels of complexity. Each return trip reinforces different contextual associations, making the knowledge more flexible and durable. It’s not repetition alone that builds expertise; it’s repetition across varied contexts.

As learners, we should stop asking “What do I need to know?” and start asking, “What does this connect to?” That question helps activate the very networks that make long-term memory possible.

And indeed, our minds already have a prewritten playbook for how to attach new information onto our current understanding. Let's explore that the next section.