black-box-ing

"The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three:
1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made.
2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations.
3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made."
--
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Aha !

Once we have made a blackbox if a particular piece of reality, we are no longer equipped to deal with any event from _within_ the blackbox.
As we age,the ability to open a blackbox and reconcile its contents with other blackboxes ,decreases.
Examples will come as I can think of them