Wayne Gretzky could skate to where he knew the puck would go because not only did he know what the other players were going to do, he knew how the puck played off the boards differently in every NHL arena.

sportswriters used to talk about how Larry Bird could look at a newspaper photograph from any game he’d played as a Boston Celtic and recall where everyone else had been on the court at that moment, knowledge that informed his play every time he brought the ball forward.

Those inherent physical attributes were not what defines star athletes. The great ones, be it Jordan or Ohtani or Messi or Williams, possess superior knowledge, said the neuro. Tom Brady isn’t a great quarterback because he’s big or has a strong arm. Thousands of men are big with strong arms. Brady is great because he knows more about football, and what he has to do to play it better, than anyone else. His brain has an extraordinary store of football knowledge and the ability to process it at lightning speed.

“People always say of great athletes that they have a sixth sense,” Malcolm Gladwell says in Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. “But it’s not a sixth sense. It’s memory.” Gladwell then analogizes James’ exacting memory to Simon’s. In the way James has precise recall of basketball game situations, Simon has it of sounds and songs. “Simon’s memory is prodigious,” Gladwell says. “There were thousands of songs in his head. And thousands more bits of songs—components—which appeared to have been broken down and stacked like cordwood in his imagination.”

One high-level manager involved with the Federal Response Plan made the following reflection about two weeks after Hurricane Andrew occurred: My feeling is that recovery needs to start day one, or even prior to a disaster. It would be wise to set up a group or task force, or a committee. They get together to gather information as the disaster begins. The potential for fragmentation is enormous. It actually goes back to intelligence, damage information. It is difficult to plan for recovery when you do 001 have a sense for how long it could take. You know, recovery has already begun. FEMA has already issued over one million dollars worth of checks .... Anyway, why not have a recovery unit? That would be cool. They should deal the long term recovery within hazard mitigation. In any event that needs to be happening ftom day one.

Sonnenwald, D.H. and L.G. Pierce (2000): Information Behavior in Dynamic Group WorkContexts: Interwoven Situational Awareness, Dense Social Networks and ContestedCollaboration in Command and Control.Information Processing and Management, vol. 36,pp. 461–479.