Chunking

 

The chunking thing

This concept of "chunking" shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.

When you learned to read, you started by recognizing individual letters. Then you learned to chunk letters into words. Then words into phrases. Now you chunk entire sentences, maybe paragraphs, into single units of meaning.

A beginner reader sees individual letters. An expert reader sees ideas.

Same thing happens in every domain.

A beginner programmer sees individual lines of code. An expert sees patterns. That's a sorting algorithm. That's a recursive function. That's an off-by-one error waiting to happen.