That Hamming quote reflects on something I've felt in my gut to be important for a long time: there is nothing more intuitive than a cohesive internal world model, where all conclusions are "trivial" because these hooks which you reference carry us through the logical deductions automatically. Everything makes sense because there's a basal (axiomatic) set of rules with which to interpret the things we encounter, and a helpful set of heuristic functions which help us quickly decide further actions. Learning is the process of turning a datum sans context into another node in the great graph database in our head, and learning rules over which to operate on this graph.