It’s like diagnosing sick systems - I don’t think about it, at all - I just look, listen, observe, take in the landscape and the music of the machine, and then point at the problem. Software, mechanical systems, networks, any domain where I have enough knowledge to know what I’m looking at, the pattern recognition system can handle the rest. It makes people think that I have expertise in many domains, but really, I’m just a one-trick system-grokking pony.
The structure and function of the animal brain is remarkable. Only a few weeks ago, I was noting the habits of a hornet, which tended to pass by the same point at the same time each day, and marvelled that such a tiny handful of neurons could manage not only flight and navigation of 3d space, but a routine, habits, behaviour. What the many orders of magnitude more grey matter we have might be capable of beggars belief. There’s the old bullshit adage that you only use 1% of your brain, but there’s perhaps truth to the idea that most people horribly underutilise the power of their minds, because they have been trained to think, not to intuit.
I've had a similar realization. I think we vastly underestimate how good our subconscious/automatic parts of our brain are. Every healthy person can run up a flight of stairs without looking where the steps are and analyzing the position of each step. Many sports involve the forming of reflexes that let your brain analyze where an object is and respond to it without even thinking about it. There's A LOT going on in terms of calculation and response. We call that a skill and once mastered, it seems effortless.
So now, as a rational person, I value the conscious part of the brain not as much for its ability to be logical (though I still cherish that as a developer) but as a an agent of improvement, a programmer for the subconscious part of the brain. And the more I can offload and delegate to the subconscious, the more new and fun things I can take on with my slow but rational consciousness.
Of course, there needs to be a feedback loop, to prevent the subconscious from drifting into self-delusion or a general asshole but for that, empathy and the Golden Rule have served me quite well.
This is all very new to me and I'm probably not explaining things very well. But I had the epiphany on this watching squirrels in slow motion do insane calculations when tossed into the air, locking their heads on a target and twisting their bodies to land precisely on their target.