Glossary

Feeling of knowing

Αίσθηση ότι ξέρεις

The sense that something is understood. It is produced mostly by how easy the material felt on the way past, which is a fact about the page rather than about you, and it can report that everything is fine while nothing underneath it can be produced from memory.

Also known asillusion of knowing, fluency illusion
Named byJoseph Hart (1965)
Belongs to the skillMetacognition
Level1

How to spot it

Before you look at it again, close the source and try to say the second part out loud. The sentence stops exactly where the knowing stops, and that is the only place worth going back to.

The research behind the term

The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoringdoi:10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906

Flavell is regarded as the founder of the concept of metacognition. The paper describes how people can monitor and control their own cognitive processes, which leads to more effective learning.

Practised in

The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.

  • The Post-Mortem

    Level 1
  • Forty Minutes You Asked For

    Level 5

Sources

Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.

  1. Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring — doi:10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906