The Illusion of Clarity: How to Test Whether you Really Understand Something

Anne-Laure Le Cunff · 8 Apr 2026

Others here said this too

Seeing something many times does not put it into memory: familiarity with a thing and knowledge of it are different, and people confuse the two constantly.

Their wordsRepetition is one of the biggest culprits. Hearing or reading about a concept multiple times makes it feel increasingly familiar, and that familiarity gets reinterpreted as comprehension.

Also said by Alan Castel

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A feeling that information is easy to process gets mistaken for genuine understanding of it.

Their wordsWhen something feels easy to take in, your brain interprets that ease as a signal that you understand it.
Our reading
Seeing something many times does not put it into memory: familiarity with a thing and knowledge of it are different, and people confuse the two constantly.

Their wordsRepetition is one of the biggest culprits. Hearing or reading about a concept multiple times makes it feel increasingly familiar, and that familiarity gets reinterpreted as comprehension.
Our reading
Easy external access to information makes it harder for people to notice they lack real knowledge of it internally.

Their wordsThe easier it is to access information externally, the harder it becomes to notice that you don't actually have that knowledge internally.

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