What is mental schemas?

Mental schemas is a concept in personal epistemology: You already have schemas for everything — making them explicit is the work.

Example: You walk into a restaurant and immediately know to wait at the entrance, expect a menu, understand the sequence of ordering, eating, and paying. Nobody taught you this explicitly — you absorbed a 'restaurant script' through repeated experience. That script is a schema. You have one for job interviews, first dates, morning routines, how your boss reacts to bad news, and what 'success' means. You didn't design most of them. They were installed by repetition, culture, and emotional experience — and they're running right now.

This concept is part of Phase 11 (Schema Foundations) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema foundations.