A friend of mine, normal in most ways, has exceptionally good mental imagery, such that one time she visited my house and saw a somewhat complex 3-piece metalwork puzzle in my living room and thought about it later that evening after she had left, and was able to solve it within moments of picking it up when she visited a second time. At first I was amazed at this, but I soon became more amazed that she didn’t find this odd, and that no one had ever realized she had any particular affinity for this kind of thing in all the time she’d been in school. I’m curious as to how many cognitive skills like this there are to excel at and if many people are actually particularly good at one or many of them without realizing it due to a lack of good tests for various kinds of cognition.
A friend of mine, normal in most ways, has exceptionally good mental imagery, such that one time she visited my house and saw a somewhat complex 3-piece metalwork puzzle in my living room and thought about it later that evening after she had left, and was able to solve it within moments of picking it up when she visited a second time. At first I was amazed at this, but I soon became more amazed that she didn’t find this odd, and that no one had ever realized she had any particular affinity for this kind of thing in all the time she’d been in school. I’m curious as to how many cognitive skills like this there are to excel at and if many people are actually particularly good at one or many of them without realizing it due to a lack of good tests for various kinds of cognition.