You only learn something relative to something you understand

a process where new ideas associate themselves with old ones that already constitute a mind

  • Learning Theories for Teachers by Morris Bigge

Based on the work from When one idea appears in our understanding, it often brings along another associated idea

Apperception implies that the mind is like a framework on which ideas can be hung.

“Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult”

Association Ideas combine and recombine in the mind like chemical elements


In teaching or communicating anything, we have no choice but to make connections between a new idea and that which is already known. The only alternative is to fool ourselves, which happens all the time.