[reverendsteveii]

>There's a certain situational awareness that you have to develop

The term you're looking for is executive function and in a nutshell it's the brain watching and controlling the brain. There are deliberate, methodical tasks in which executive function is a great predictor of safety and success. Wood shop is one of them. There are also flowy, improvisational tasks where a lack of executive function allows one to be in the moment and respond quickly to changing conditions. Off the top of my head I'm thinking of a jazz drummer or an freestyle rapper, someone who has to move quickly and guess a lot without much assurance of the results of their actions.

I also wanna throw some support behind the idea of "thinking like the machine". Us coders have a lot of weird little quirks but one that's stuck out for me ever since I read it in the jargon file back in the 90s was the tendency of people who are good with computers to also anthropomorphize them. Most people speak in terms of what computers are programmed to do and what they require, but all the best coders I know speak in terms of what the machine is trying to do and what it needs. The anthropomorphization seems to engage empathy, and that empathy leads to a deeper understanding.