To unite our points, I might be thinking of something like: the immensity of sensory and cognitive data that pass through (sub)consciousness during the learning

To unite our points, I might be thinking of something like: the immensity of sensory and cognitive data that pass through (sub)consciousness during the learning task are sifted and sorted in the unconscious while not learning; one might call the sifting "forgetting" and the sorting "figuring out".