Sudden cognition noodle

I just posted this to the thread on plurality on rasfc:

My problem-solving architecture is very remarkably slow. I do not handle new situations either well or quickly; I get the equivalent of a lot of badly hung-up processes and gears that do not engage well.

I compensate for this by anticipating and planning responses to a large number of situations, which I keep in a sort of archive. Once I have survived an encounter with a completely unanticipated situation, I devote some processing time to evaluating courses of action in case of a recurrence, and file them.

I can best-match situations to stuff in the archive very quickly, and implement them very efficiently; /creating/ them takes a significant amount of time, and time in where there is resolution pressure is useless for this purpose.

I am now wondering if this is related to my drive towards composing fiction: I have a very heavily developed "What If?" generator, and it doesn't necessarily stop at conceiving of possible solutions to possums in the kitchen.

I need to figure out if the dream I'm trying to convert into a short story has an actual plot though. It's got plenty of "What if?"