You might be alluding to this by putting "default" in quotes, but I think things like are pretty much always learned skills.
The various memory competitions are probably the best example of this. It's not there are people who can just pick up a deck of cards and naturally remember the order they were in. Everybody learns, and uses, extensive tricks to do so. The most typical for memory competitions is to associate each card with some vivid image in your mind. And so when you memorize the cards, you're not really memorizing the cards but instead creating a story in your mind of how those images interacted, and then reciting that story back.
Language itself is another example of this. The above paragraph is 94 words, yet you could probably recite it pretty much verbatim in terms of what was said, even if using different words. Think about how absurdly remarkable that is. You just "memorized" 94 words without even trying. So I guess it begs the question of why some guy would spend a bunch of time teaching himself to reverse phonemes. The linked YouTube channel is called Alone Time Club, and features videos of him in the wilderness alone, and now he's cashing in his skill to some quirky 15 seconds and a few dollars. Probably a better expenditure of free time than what most of us do, all things considered!
> but I think things like are pretty much always learned skills.
What if it isnt? What if there is a zoo out there, with loads of different people with different skills just because the brain-maturation took a entirely different turn when they were a baby/child or the genetics did play out strange? Why is such a world of mental diversity so threatening to even just imagine? I find the thought of a alien mind just waiting for a coffe right next-to-me exhilarting and fascinating. Not to look at the sky, just to listen and find out that not everyone is a carbon copy of me (as my lazy flat copy mirror-neurons default implies) is a great adventure.
I don't find it threatening, just contradicted by life experience. My background includes chess at a reasonably high level, and it's always always the same: just an absolutely obscene amount of work that gradually yields emergent skills, that includes things that many people think are "natural" like visualization and memory.
For instance the 'trick' of casually memorizing games you play isn't a feat of some super-human memory. It's, inadvertently, the exact same 'trick' that memory competitors use. When a reasonably strong player looks at a chess board, it begins to tell an often vivid story of what's happened and what will happen. And stories are really easy to remember for everybody. So memorizing your games isn't really like memorizing a series of arcane moves, but instead more like recounting a familiar tale.
We can even cheat, because so long as you remember all the key points of a game, you can generally reconstruct the filler in between - again, just like telling a story. It's why it can be much harder to remember games against weaker players than your peers - their moves, and thus stories, often don't make as much sense, and so it gets pretty fuzzy pretty quickly. This is also why you might often notice things like strong players able to relatively easily replay 80 distinct moves of an arbitrary game, but have difficulty remembering the exact date the game was played.
'Talent'/genetics obviously plays a role, but mostly only in determining what your peak potential is. But the fact that the overwhelming majority of people (including e.g. grandmasters) will never get anywhere remotely near to their genetic potential in anything makes it largely inconsequential in practice. In any case, we certainly aren't carbon copies. These 'tricks' I'm mentioning here only really emerge after many years of concerted and dedicated study of something. The overwhelming majority of people will never do anything like this, so whether ones brain is an 'alien mind' or not becomes largely a matter of semantics.
Although you're correct that this occurs (and is likely the case of those with these abilities greater than 9/10 if I had to guess without any data), there are definitely savants out there like Kim Peek unusual brains that allow them to do all kinds of things. I think that's all the other commenter was talking about.
Agreed, and research agrees also, that the largest determining factor in skills is the time and effective work put into developing that skill. Unknown factors are a much smaller component and can give someone an edge at the highest performance levels.
But for some reason people don’t want think that the largest component is lots of work.
It is only contradicted by your perception of the life experience of others, which is guided by what you are already familiar with. You are also not psychic, but you draw conclusions about the minds of others that you cannot know.
The human mind is ambiguous, and you have created a comforting narrative to explain it. This is a very human response to the threat of ambiguity.
It is not clear which part 'this' refers to. We as humans know very little about our brains.
The original commenter assumes there is little variation in the human mind based on a narrow observation about memory feats in chess, then generalized that idea to the entirety of humanity.
I was mostly referring to the "you have created a comforting narrative to explain it" (but also, a little bit, as a joke, kind of referring to the "you are also not psychic" part, but only as a joke)
It may not be so much threatening as much as knowledge is also a lot like this innate capability:
> Language itself is another example of this. The above paragraph is 94 words, yet you could probably recite it pretty much verbatim in terms of what was said, even if using different words. Think about how absurdly remarkable that is. You just "memorized" 94 words without even trying.
I just recently watched a YouTube video about how someone known for her bad memory taught herself to memorize 3141 digits of pi. Took her about 2 hours just to recite it. It's really impressive what the mind can do if you train it. (Search YouTube for Answer in Progress pi)
The various memory competitions are probably the best example of this. It's not there are people who can just pick up a deck of cards and naturally remember the order they were in. Everybody learns, and uses, extensive tricks to do so. The most typical for memory competitions is to associate each card with some vivid image in your mind. And so when you memorize the cards, you're not really memorizing the cards but instead creating a story in your mind of how those images interacted, and then reciting that story back.
Language itself is another example of this. The above paragraph is 94 words, yet you could probably recite it pretty much verbatim in terms of what was said, even if using different words. Think about how absurdly remarkable that is. You just "memorized" 94 words without even trying. So I guess it begs the question of why some guy would spend a bunch of time teaching himself to reverse phonemes. The linked YouTube channel is called Alone Time Club, and features videos of him in the wilderness alone, and now he's cashing in his skill to some quirky 15 seconds and a few dollars. Probably a better expenditure of free time than what most of us do, all things considered!