You are still totally capable of building knowledge without a path! It's just, you know, incredibly impaired the more existing knowledge you have. It is very difficult to stop the brain from forming connections and trying to understand things with existing concepts. So you will often find it snapping to incorrect ones or getting into confused panic or whatever when you truly don't know how to relate something. This can discourage people from pushing through and really memorizing a novel thing that they can't relate to yet. It's basically like rote learning where you have to just memorize the unfamiliar information even if you can't fully link it up yet. Not being able to link it up yet tends to really really bug people.