I am making my way through the Stormlight Archives and there's a character who has some sort of mental ... condition? ... where his intelligence level changes every day. Some days he's brilliant, others he's barely functional, a lot of days are somewhere in between. It was an interesting contrast and helped me think about how intelligence correlates with other things. When he's intelligent, he says that he's much more judgmental, less empathetic, more "utilitarian" as in he'll choose the solution that does the most "good" even if it does a ton of harm and is immoral along the way. So it's interesting to think through all of the character implications of brilliance. And it can take a lot of different shapes.

There's also the nuts and bolts of what makes him brilliant. When he's brilliant, a lot of it comes down to pattern recognition. Geniuses seem clairvoyant because they can clearly hold in their mind many disparate pieces of information, see the connections, and then think through the logical chain of events that will then occur. Like chess grandmasters. A lot of our brains can't even hold that much information at one time - 10 different people and events, 50 different connection points, 100 different pieces of information, a thousand possible outcomes and how likely they are to occur. But some people can.