Brooks, David (2011-03-08). The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (pp. 86-87). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
The human brain is built to take conscious knowledge and turn it into unconscious knowledge. The first time you drive a car, you have to think about every move. But after a few months or years, driving is done almost automatically. Learning consists of taking things that are strange and unnatural, such as reading and algebra, and absorbing them so steadily that they become automatic. That frees up the conscious mind to work on new things. Alfred North Whitehead saw this learning process as a principle of progress: “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”