I wonder how much the ability to understand the possible ramifications of complex events just has to do with the ability — or lack thereof — to hold a lot of information in memory at once?

I can hold a shit-ton of artifacts and ideas in my head simultaneously and bounce them all against one another. Note this is all non-visual, as I am not a visual thinker at all. But I can feel or experience or something these artifacts (there are no words for this in any language) and cause their mechanisms to bounce off of one another and interact, and I can modify the parameters in real time to see what happens. And I can hold dozens and sometimes hundreds of these in my head at the same time, if I think for a couple of hours about something intensely.*

It’s a great gift and I am lucky to have it but I think it’s also probably rare. I just take it for granted, though, because I’ve always been able to do it.

I’m guessing most people can’t do this?

*It’s one of the reasons I am good at infrastructure networking, I think. Can hold all sorts of information in my head at once about a complex network and sim it out without ever touching a network device.