This jives with something that’s occupied my brain a couple times in the last year, the separation of art and science.

Science is empirical knowledge and processes which can be transferred, art is gut feeling and subconscious knowledge applied automatically, which can’t be transferred.

Roughly I think this corresponds to how our minds perform cognitive offloading of repeated tasks. New tasks that require instruction following occupy our attention, but the more we do them, the more our minds wire the behavior into our “muscle memory”. Practitioners of the arts (or even the art of science, one might say) have a built a neural network that offloads tasks so that higher cognitive functions can focus on applying those tasks in expert ways.

It’s sort of like when we start out our brains have to bitbang all tasks (muscle movement, speech, etc.) but over time our brains develop their own TCP offloading, or UART peripherals. And you can’t just download a TCP offloading engine, it has to be built into the silicon. Hence why “expert knowledge” isn’t transmissible.

Which is why spaced repetition is an effective learning method. You’re hacking your brain to wire facts into the hardware.

You might enjoy a 70s classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance