Even if you aren't keeping track of the world around you, your
brain is. Everything that comes in contact with your senses is registered and stored away as
data in your mind, probably down some side
corridor between your
conscious and
subconscious. Your memories are in cardboard boxes back behind the furnace of your subconscious--but in this certain corridor I speak of, there are millions of neurological
accountants and
statisticians keeping the books, entering data, noticing
patterns that, if I came up to you on the street and asked you to memorize, you would quake with gales of laughter and maybe break my nose before staggering onward hooting and giggling.
Why does your brain store and analyze all these seemingly pointless, minute details of events in reality just so that once in a while you can have a "hunch" at the card table? Simple: because your brain is bored to tears! It has a capacity that has barely been touched upon, a power of cognition that would probably burn your hand like a red-hot frying pan if you could grasp it this very day.
One of two things might happen, should said mental capability be harnessed and wielded in its entirety: you will either go slobbering insane, or become god the omniscient. Or both. Or neither. I just theorized this to explain why my dad is so damned lucky at the Blue Chip Casino.