The Problem of Linearity in Instruction

The real world is an interconnected mess, with large quantities of parallel events interacting with each other. Humans can perceive only a very small portion of that mess. Books/courses need to be linear as that is how our attention works: We can only understand multiple concepts well when they’re communicated one at the time, linearly. Then, after we received all those concepts, our brains can create a non-linear representation of them, in a format more similar to how the real world works. However that takes time and practice with the learned material. Between the non-linear events in the real world and the non-linear knowledge representation in the brain, we have a linear “human perception bottleneck”.

🪐 real world → 👀 human perception through senses → ፨ knowledge representation in the brain

Those interested in teaching complex concepts need to represent the non-linear concept linearly so that people can (1) digest it easier and (2) eventually create non-linear models in their brains that better represent how the world works.