Expertise isn’t easy to pass down. Take riding a bike: A seasoned cyclist might talk a beginner through the basics of how to sit and when to push off. But other skills, like how hard to pedal to keep balanced, are more intuitive and harder to articulate. This implicit know-how is known as tacit knowledge, and very often, it can only be learned with experience and time.

But a team of MIT engineers wondered: Could an expert’s unconscious know-how be accessed, and even taught, to quickly bring a novice up to an expert’s level?

The answer appears to be “yes,” at least for a particular type of visual-learning task.