[rmah]

Your brain is neither BFS or DFS. Your brain is a biological neural network. It is associative, that is, your brain follows paths of relationships. The brain actually is "like calling a computer a hard drive" in that memory and processing is wrapped up in the same mechanism. "Thinking", "knowing" and "remembering" are not separate things for a brain, they are all flavors of the same thing.

You wrote "learning limits in isolation of the whole picture, optimizing for less percentage of forgetting, often leaves learners confused". The is true. The reason is because, if you do it in isolation, you're not forming connections to related knowledge.

The main split in brains is short-term memory vs long-term memory. And I suspect (speculating here) that forming more connections to items in long-term memory helps in moving a fact from short-term memory to long-term memory.