Schemas are chunks of multiple individual units of memory that are linked into a system ofunderstanding

My somewhat pious belief was that if people focused more on remembering the basics, and worried less about the “difficult” high-level issues, they'd find the high-level issues took care of themselves. But while I held this as a strong conviction about other people, I never realized it also applied to me. And I had no idea at all how strongly it applied to me. Using Anki to read papers in new fields disabused me of this illusion. I found it almost unsettling how much easier Anki made learning such subjects. I now believe memory of the basics is often the single largest barrier to understanding. If you have a system such as Anki for overcoming that barrier, then you will find it much, much easier to read into new fields.