In today's "non-playbook world," dyslexia is a major advantage. The inability to follow a standard playbook forces dyslexics to invent new and generative solutions from first principles, allowing them to outperform those who rely on outdated, rigid strategies.

For invisible skills like meditation, traditional instruction is often ineffective. A better method is to observe an expert narrating their internal experience in real-time. This 'imitate an expert' approach primes your intuition and reveals new possible techniques you wouldn't discover otherwise.

To an expert mathematician, an equation can be beautiful because they can imagine its power to explain phenomena. This reveals that mastery isn't just knowledge; it's the ability to see abstract concepts aesthetically and connect them to a wider, meaningful context.

With 10x more neurons going to the eye than from it, the brain actively predicts reality and uses sensory input primarily to correct errors. This explains phantom sensations, like feeling a stair that isn't there, where the brain's simulation briefly overrides sensory fact.

Vision, a product of 540 million years of evolution, is a highly complex process. However, because it's an innate, effortless ability for humans, we undervalue its difficulty compared to language, which requires conscious effort to learn. This bias impacts how we approach building AI systems.

Achieving a 'flow state' is the goal for any performer, as it leads to an effortless and powerful show. However, this state is largely unconscious, meaning the artist often has few memories of their own peak performances, experiencing them only through photos and videos afterward.

Your brain processes a vividly imagined scenario and a real-life experience through similar neural pathways. This is why visualization is a powerful tool for skill acquisition and even physical change. For instance, repeatedly thinking about exercising a muscle can lead to a measurable increase in its mass, without physical movement.

Improving imagination is less like a painter adding to a blank canvas and more like a sculptor removing material. The primary task is to forget expected answers and consensus reality. This subtractive process uncovers the truly novel ideas that are otherwise obscured by convention.

Just as a blind person's visual cortex is repurposed for heightened hearing and touch, savantism might be an extreme case of this principle. An individual may develop superhuman skills by allocating a disproportionate amount of neural resources to one area, often at the cost of others like social skills.