I was thinking about this the other day. When I was a kid I'd think 1-12 moves ahead, I'd obviously learned to prune bad moves and it worked pretty well for me.

But then thinking about it, this is exactly the wrong way to train your brain. It's job isn't to evaluate every single position, but rather to train it in the form of a "neural network" to institutionally recognize good vs. bad positions, and to expand on that.

Looking at some high ranked players online, this seems to be the way they recognize positions and possibilities.