[We] became involved with a somewhat therapeutic compulsion: to dispel what we feared to be the first shadows of a “holistic” or “Gestalt” misconcept… - Marvin Minsky

In today's computer science curricula … almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design" — the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates.

It would seem that making unusual connections is unusually difficult and, often, rather "indirect"—be it via words, images, or whatever. The bizarre structures used by mnemonist (and, presumably unknowingly, by each of us) suggests that arbitrary connections require devious pathways.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience… How would they know?