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April 9th, 2026
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

✂️ The Illusion of Clarity

When people ask me why I started the Ness Labs newsletter, I always admit that it was initially for selfish reasons. As a neuroscience student at the time, I had discovered something called the generation effect: a psychological phenomenon showing that when you create your own version of something, you both understand it and remember it better.

So I decided to run an experiment: I would write 100 short articles in 100 weekdays based on my studies, trying to turn a concept from neuroscience into something practical people could apply in everyday life.

But something unexpected happened. Every time I sat down and needed to actually explain a concept – really explain it, step by step, in plain language – I’d hit a wall. What I thought was knowledge didn’t survive the simple test of having to put it into my own words.

This exercise forced me to confront what I’ve come to call the illusion of clarity: the confident feeling that you understand something, when in reality your grasp is full of gaps you’ve never noticed.

And I’m not the only on falling prey to the illusion of clarity. In a study, psychologists asked participants to rate how well they understood everyday devices like sewing machines, zippers, or cell phones and then asked them to write detailed explanations. After attempting the explanation, self-ratings dropped sharply. The act of actually trying to explain revealed how little people actually knew.

So why does this happen? There are three main reasons we experience the illusion of clarity.

1. We rely on shallow mental models

We tend to store only rough sketches of how things work. We know what a zipper does but not how. The problem is that this shallow model feels complete until we try to produce an actual explanation. This is why the simple instruction “explain it in detail” is such a powerful test of real understanding. The moment you try, the gaps in your knowledge reveal themselves.

2. We confuse familiarity with understanding

You’ve used a toilet every day of your life. You can picture one. You can identify its parts. That deep familiarity makes it feel like you understand how a toilet works. But try explaining the actual flushing mechanism step by step, and most people quickly discover that familiarity and understanding are not the same thing at all.

This is an example of a well-studied phenomenon in psychology called processing fluency: the subjective feeling of ease you experience when processing information. When something feels easy to take in, your brain interprets that ease as a signal that you understand it.

Repetition 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. When something feels familiar, we assume we’ve mastered it even when we’ve barely scratched the surface.

3. We outsource knowledge to the environment

Another issue is that we blur the line between what we know and what we can access. Research shows that when people expect to have future access to information, they remember where to find it rather than the information itself. This is known as the Google Effect (which maybe should be renamed the ChatGPT Effect).

And the boundaries between what we personally know and what we know by accessing those external memory systems are getting blurred, inflating our sense of understanding. The easier it is to access information externally, the harder it becomes to notice that you don’t actually have that knowledge internally.

The illusion of clarity is why we confidently give advice on topics we’ve only skimmed, why we commit to plans we can’t actually walk someone through, and why teams agree on strategies that nobody can articulate.

The good news is that this illusion is remarkably easy to break. You just need to try explaining things. Here’s how to do it:

• Step 1: Pick a concept you think you understand well. It could be something from your work, a topic you discuss often, a tool you use, or an idea you’ve been advocating for.
• Step 2: Explain it step by step without looking anything up. Write it out or say it out loud as if you were teaching someone who knows nothing about it. Don’t skip the “obvious” parts. Follow the chain of cause and effect from beginning to end.
• Step 3: Notice where you get stuck. Pay attention to the moments where your explanation gets vague, where you use filler phrases like “it basically works by…” or “somehow it just…” or where you realize you’re actually restating the what instead of explaining the how. Those gaps are the illusion breaking.

That discomfort in Step 3 is the most valuable signal you’ll get because it tells you exactly where your actual understanding ends and where the illusion of clarity begins.

Confronting the illusion of clarity is not always pleasant, especially when you realize that something you thought you knew – maybe something you’ve even taught others or built decisions on – is held together by vague assumptions rather than real understanding.

But I’ve come to see this discomfort as one of the most productive feelings available to us as knowledge workers. Every time I sit down to write and hit that gap between what I thought I knew and what I can actually explain, I know I’m actually learning.

🔬 Tiny Experiment of the Week

Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment to practice breaking free of the illusion of clarity:

It might feel a bit uncomfortable at first to notice all the gaps in your knowledge, but this is how you’ll know you’re learning and growing. Want to dig deeper? ​​Get your copy of Tiny Experiments​.

👀 Into the Mind of...

HELEN LEWIS

Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from Helen Lewis, BBC host, The Atlantic staff writer, and author of The Genius Myth.

1. One daily practice you can’t do without? I’m very attached to my morning routine, because my brain doesn’t start working for about an hour after I wake up. I like to start the day by clearing any outstanding emails and reading all the various newsletters that I’m subscribed to. Once I’ve done that, I’m ready to do what I think of as “proper work”.

2. One mindset shift that transformed your work? I struggle with procrastination when I’m not on a hard deadline, so I often take a sheet of lined A4 paper and write “100 words”, “200 words” and so on down the margin. Then I give myself rewards (like a tea break, or a walk) at certain word counts. Doing that makes me feel less apprehensive about starting.

3. One habit you wish you had? My husband is very diligent about taking his work email off his phone when we go on holiday. I wish I could do that, but I’ve never quite plucked up the courage. I’d be terrified someone would email with a one-time offer to win $100,000 on the condition I replied within two hours.

Read Helen’s book

🛠️ Brain Picks

• You have 80,000 hours in your career. Most advice on how to spend those hours is based on no evidence – or worse, misleading platitudes like “follow your passion.” 80,000 Hours is a tried-and-tested career guide covering what actually makes a dream job, which skills matter in the age of AI, and how to find work that makes a difference. Pre-order your copy now.​
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• Want to read more books or discover amazing books? Check out this newsletter by Alex & Books. You’ll get a new book summary every week, plus a list of his 100 favorite books when you sign up. Join 50,000+ readers for free here.

• Break free from inbox overwhelm. Start using a newsletter aggregator built for reading and wake up to a personalized news briefing using smart filters to always surface the most relevant content at the right time. Join Meco.

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🗓️ Community Events

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Make peace with unfinished work. In this Creative Hour session, Gosia Fricze will walk you through a self-reflection exercise to explore your relationship with unfinished projects, the pressure to complete everything you start, and how to see unfinished work as part of the creative process.
​• Design a life without burnout. Heidi Anderson for a workshop where she will walk you through a guided reflection and live exploration to identify which parts are loudest in your life right now, understand what they are protecting you from, and begin to harness them for good.
​• Take balanced approach in exploring career change. Join entrepreneurs Kat Wong and Helen McGuire in this interactive session to learn how to become a founder while juggling life’s responsibilities.​
• Improve your knowledge management system. Join our next PKM Collective meeting where we learn from one another through sharing how our systems work in the real world and give new PKM users a leg up.
​• Make progress on your project. This is a community favorite! Join Kathryn Ruge for our Monday ‘body doubling’ coworking session to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones.
​• Host your own workshop (anytime!). Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.

Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.