I came to believe that this types of skills, especially visualization, are learnable. For some people it looks like this skills are somehow natural but this can be just an accident of upbringing and time allocation.
The thing that convinced me that they are not innate is my own journey with drawing and guitar playing. At first (around 15 years ago) I thought that I have some brain deficiency that makes it impossible to visualize things that I draw and remember simple melodies (I even thought that I was tone deaf). But when I invested a lot of time in it (thousands of hours probably) something clicked and suddenly those mysterious abilities materialized in ma head. There surly is some element of talent to it - there are people that would get there a lot quicker, but I believe that for most deliberate practice and a lot of time would do wonders.
The thing that convinced me that they are not innate is my own journey with drawing and guitar playing. At first (around 15 years ago) I thought that I have some brain deficiency that makes it impossible to visualize things that I draw and remember simple melodies (I even thought that I was tone deaf). But when I invested a lot of time in it (thousands of hours probably) something clicked and suddenly those mysterious abilities materialized in ma head. There surly is some element of talent to it - there are people that would get there a lot quicker, but I believe that for most deliberate practice and a lot of time would do wonders.