As someone who has had a severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) as a child, I, at times in my life, have spent time thinking about this. And I agree with your sentiment.
On one hand, I'm a competent software engineer. I think I'm fairly good at problem solving -- not great and really only learn by example as opposed to creating novel solutions on my own. I have learned, anecdotally, that I may have a better biographical memory (including world events happening at the time when recalling life experiences) than some of my peers. On the other hand, I feel like I lack certain skills that most adults have or are expected to have (whether it be due to impulse control, etc.).
And then there are more abstract things, like abstract visualization as you mention. I realized (thanks to a BBC article [1] on Hacker News a number of years ago) that people generally are able to visualize images in their head to various degrees. Some can represent images with picture- perfect quality, say of a loved one. Others at the very least can conjure up an image of, say, a crowded beach on a summer day. I on the other hand can't visualize anything at all, which I realized impacted my score on an IQ test after my TBI in which I was told a series of numbers and was expected to visualize them sequentially in my head. Whether it has anything to do with my TBI, I'm not sure. But I would love to find out more all these years later.
Lots of people think differently without having brain injuries.
There are people with no internal monolog, for example. They don't "talk" internally.
Another example is that while I "see" things easily, they are very abstract. It doesn't relate to world world things, but they can create intuitive connections. I can't really think that well without "day dreaming" and staring off into the distance.
However I can't really "hear" things internally. Sometimes, rarely, I can listen to music in my brain as if I am hearing it, but it's a fluke. It is extremely unusual.
Were as I have had musician friends that can record and playback every note internally. I remember back in the day when Little Caesars had "Simon Says" style musical game were you could win a free pizza... the owner of the store would get so angry at my friend for effortlessly beating it that he would just hand him a free pizza and tell him to leave every time we would show up with a handful of quarters. He would have to lose on purpose so we could win just a free soda to go along with the free pizzas.
My girlfriend, when she hears a catchy song, can have it playing so loudly in her head that it will keep her up at night. It is not something she has lot of control over. I am banned from playing certain songs around her because it will fuck up her sleep schedule. It is not even related to whether she likes the song or not.
According to her the most evil song that ever created is 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up".
I think the idea that "we need to be cautious" in regards to the article is missing the point. It's not trying to claim that "If you get head injury everything will be alright".
I think the main point is something more along the lines of:
We don't know how the brain works. When people talk about "language centers" and this part of the brain does that... They are factually wrong. They don't know that.
They know that MRIs can show different parts of the brain getting more or less blood flow when people see different things or carry out different tasks, and there is some correlation between different types of brain injury and different types of cognitive impairment, but the ultimate meaning behind all that is still largely a mystery.
>They know that MRIs can show different parts of the brain getting more or less blood flow
I always wondered about this as a casual person with a heavy consumption rate of neuroscience. I fallen in to thinking of the "active" brain areas similar to lakes. places where activity seems to collect. if you remove the lake bed (fill it in? analogy breaks down here) then the activity will just collect itself in a different location. It might look / act a bit different from how it was before, but would still fit the profile overall - hence 'retraining' being possible.
disclaimer: just personal thoughts, not backed by anything specific
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.
On one hand, I'm a competent software engineer. I think I'm fairly good at problem solving -- not great and really only learn by example as opposed to creating novel solutions on my own. I have learned, anecdotally, that I may have a better biographical memory (including world events happening at the time when recalling life experiences) than some of my peers. On the other hand, I feel like I lack certain skills that most adults have or are expected to have (whether it be due to impulse control, etc.).
And then there are more abstract things, like abstract visualization as you mention. I realized (thanks to a BBC article [1] on Hacker News a number of years ago) that people generally are able to visualize images in their head to various degrees. Some can represent images with picture- perfect quality, say of a loved one. Others at the very least can conjure up an image of, say, a crowded beach on a summer day. I on the other hand can't visualize anything at all, which I realized impacted my score on an IQ test after my TBI in which I was told a series of numbers and was expected to visualize them sequentially in my head. Whether it has anything to do with my TBI, I'm not sure. But I would love to find out more all these years later.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054