Talking to a friend you hear about a new scientific paper or study. You quickly Google it and read what it is about. Then you move on to the next Chrome tab. This is how learning looks for most people.
However, things don’t exist in isolation in nature. Entities are interconnected via relationships and there are patterns between diverse things. Ability to find those connections, similarities and patterns is essential to our intelligence and learning analogy is the essence of intelligence.
A piece of information that is not connected to anything else gets forgotten first by our brain. Similarly, the information that is connected to the most other things gets revisited the most and learned the most.
However, most people spend their time focusing on the new piece of information and entirely skip how that information relates to everything else. This is partially because it requires extra effort and partially because most people don’t have a systematic way of learning things in relation to other things.