Congrats on taking the first class! I forced myself to do something similar after a nasty breakup, and the first 4-6 classes were brutal. Then I finally got the hang of it!
I’ve also been thinking about this a lot lately as I play piano more consistently. When I first learn a song it’s agony. I’m straining my brain so hard to figure out a reasonable fingering. The first week or two (assuming practice every day) is likewise quite tough or draining. And then muscle memory kicks in and I’m amazed that I’m able to play the song faster than expected. I feel like this process is way more applicable to learning in general than I used to give it credit. For some reason piano just makes the entire process crystal clear.
Learning is such an incredibly interesting topic for me. The concept behind something like machine learning is easy enough to understand- especially since you can implement everything by yourself and know exactly how it works. 'Human learning' is just so spectacularly abstracted from these models that it leaves me wondering how the heck we actually learn anything. Some examples like your piano playing and muscle memory are some of the more straightforward ones, where we figure something out like 'oh, this section is easier to play with this fingering'. But, like, you're not consciously drawing on all your previous conversations whenever you talk with someone and you don't think 'that conversation went well, time to add this to my corpus of conversations and retrain my "how to speak" module.'
I think it's beautiful that we'll never figure out exactly how learning works.
Glad you aspire to be more like Jake the Dog.