Outlining versus thinking

I'm not sure this is relevant to Toiler's psycho-epistemological comment about "the danger of ordered lists," but I've found that standard outlines are not as brain-friendly as we are led to believe in middle school. Structured data, such as a detailed outline with points and sub-points and sub-sub-points, actually has high impedance relative to humans and is very hard to cognize. It's just not the way we think. Such mechanical structure is useful for organizing data for reference, but not for working out or capturing a line of reasoning.

What does our thinking really "look like"? Like ordinary language. (What a coincidence!)

So if I were to write a book, I wouldn't expect to create any detailed outlines -- ultimately because I would expect my target audience to be people, not computers.