Isn't that ability called abstract thought? I was under the impression that not only is it potentially a fairly valuable skill, it's one of the handful of extraordinarily useful traits that makes us human beings as opposed to just large, hairless, appallingly un-cute lemurs. Take, for example, the mental image of an absolutely enormous young man hurtling at maximum velocity, and yet often at least somewhat blindly, across a portion of the baseball field which to him is more or less the surface of alien world, toward either an immovable wall-like object, or a highly movable, crushable, and incredibly valuable other young man. Not only is it awfully easy to imagine an undesirable outcome, it's potentially extraordinarily beneficial to have done so and then avoided having it actually happen. And what's more, the entire mental exercise can take place without any knowledge of (let alone concern for) who Trevor Plouffe is.