[JoshCole]

This is true of other skills that seem magical. One that stands out to me as being learnable, but often seen as magical, is 'savant like' memory capabilities.

People assume that these people have different minds and that is how they have such incredible recall, but the truth is our memories are really strong when the recall is a spatial query and the object being recalled is encoded well. People mistake their short term memory for their actual memory and they often don't do the work of encoding and decoding their thinking to improve its compression properties. This leads to the impression that our memory capabilities are much worse then they are.

If you properly encode the memory into a spatial context you can have rather incredible feats of memory. It just takes work to do the proper encoding and decoding and the creation of spatial contexts in which to store the things you want to remember.

That happens often with things that seem magical. Edward Tufte had an amazing observation about magic that really sticks with me: magic is an art of misinformation wherein the objective is to hide the work that was done. Oftentimes magical things are things which take a lot of work, but that work is hidden.

[homarp]

for 'savant like memory', see the book ' Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything' HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528807

and on the memory palace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2395739

and on spaced repetitions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24857437 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790

[sethrin]

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio. The "memory palace" technique is pretty useless to a person with aphantasia. Some people do, in fact, have different minds.