A handful of interactions with ideas might naturally happen in a year for most people; no more books can be read, or novel concepts explored, amongst the realities of life, without deliberate saturation in them. And most people don't go out of their way to get struck by cue balls.

For idealists, ideas run in a stream, like a creek down a hillside; for well-adjusted people, ideas are particles, discrete, noticeable. But who counts the drops of water in a river?

I think this is one of the things behind Dean RM's remarks on the great impact possible in seminary ministry: during this time, the student is, if not an intellectual dousing the mind with buckets of ideas, at least closer to Animal House mode.