What miming a steering wheel tells us about what we learn

Pro-tip - keep your eyes open while doing this

One of my favourite podcasts is '99% Invisible' by Roman Mars. It's about design, and about the consequences for good and ill design has on our day to day life. You should listen to it, because it is awesome. 

An older episode fell into my ball park a little bit, and I thought it was a nice idea worth repeating. It's about the steering wheel, and what we learn when we learn to use them. The moral of the story is this: when we learn, we don't acquire internal models of the features of a task which we can then access later on. Instead, we learn how to interact with a given task dynamic and how to use the information made available by that task dynamic.