A "Nucleation" Learning Metaphor

Nucleation is the first step in forming a new phase or structure. For example, microtubules are hollow cylinders built from individual tubulin proteins, which stack almost like bricks. Once the base of the microtubule has come together, it's easy to add more tubulin to the microtubule. But assembling the base - the process of nucleation - is slow without certain helper proteins. These catalyze the process of nucleation by binding and aligning the first few tubulin proteins.

What does learning have in common with nucleation? When we learn from written sources, like textbooks or a lecture, the main sensory input we experience is typically a continuous flow of words and images. All these words and phrases are like "information monomers." Achieving a synthetic understanding of the material is akin to the growth of larger structures, the "microtubules." Exposing ourselves to more and more of a teacher's words or textbook pages does increase the "information monomer concentration" in our minds, and makes a process of spontaneous nucleation more likely.

At some point, synthesis just happens if we keep at it long enough, the same way that nucleation and the growth of microtubules spontaneously happens if we keep adding more tubulin to the solution. But for most people, I think the bottleneck to increasing the rate of forming a synthetic understanding is bottlenecked not by exposure to "information monomers," the sheer amount of reading or listening we do, but by the process of "nucleation," our ability to form at least a rudimentary synthetic understanding out of even a small quantity of content.