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Pretty sure you can train and improve this. I don't think it's a skill that you either have or do not have, I don't think the mind is a fixed thing. Much like muscles they can be exercised, trained and rewired. With the right practice drills and routine I'm fairly sure that you could change this in a person, although I'm not sure exactly what drills or routine you'd do for it. Our minds are really moldable and none of this stuff should be viewed as fixed, much like playing an instrument isn't an inherent skill you either have or do not have, it's something you can learn and improve in.
IME, drugs that fiddle with your mind's control can make you aware of mental muscles that you didn't know existed.
Probably some life drawing and color/design classes
Yeah maybe. I once read Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, and as lib brained as it is at times it was also quite good about being anti-eugenics and anti-ontological factors for creating peak performance in sports/competition.
Its general thesis is that genetics play almost no role in our success in competition because we're still very very far away from perfection in any sports. It argues mainly that practice with the intent of improvement is the primary driver of improvement. Focused practice. It uses a lot of non-physical sports to demonstrate some of these things, in particular chess, where it discusses that most of the prodigies in chess have been people who were trained in chess from an extremely young age. But using the same training techniques they could demonstrate other people could achieve near identical results with the same methods.
Its main point discussion point is that the method of training is what produces results, and that different methods of training demonstrate better results than others. That sounds obvious on the surface but its about pointing out simply doing drills aimlessly isn't efficient and doesn't crack the barrier when you think you're peaking at something, very specific methods are needed to crack through the ceilings in performance people reach.
I think this is similar here. Now I'm tempted to re-read it because it's been a number of years and I kinda liked it originally, maybe my take would be different now. I think it was a significant influence on me though in that it really solidified my belief that I could reach top level in anything if I really worked at it.
There's a difference between what the body can do and what the mind can do. This isn't really genetic, it's just a feature where some people can't visualize things. You can't practice doing it, that's like asking someone to practice seeing new colors. Some people also don't have an internal monologue. They can't learn to have that, they just don't and never will.
Be more materialist, these things are created by neurons that are connected up in a specific way firing in a specific pattern in the brain. Connections of the brain are not fixed, the brain has a very large amount of plasticity. I strongly disagree with the idea that you can't acquire or develop these things. It's simply a matter of developing the right connections. We don't have a good idea of how to go about achieving that but I don't believe it's impossible, given the fact that we can somehow produce both different outcomes in people through natural development. We just don't understand the mechanism by which those two differences are developed, and if we did we would have a very good starting point from which to deliberately develop one or the other.
but it develops in infancy it seems, so it is not possible to intentionally control this process.
nope, artists, very good artists, can very often have aphantasia.