I think it's unclear. We have some ability to do math, but even our specialists learn it with great difficulty. (We see something a bit similar when we try to t

I think it's unclear. We have some ability to do math, but even our specialists learn it with great difficulty. (We see something a bit similar when we try to teach other primates language or math. They can learn enough to fake some of it, with lots of difficult training.) If we want to see more examples of human cognitive limits, I hear we can look to games like chess. We play them because we're bad at them. It's very possible that there's things we can't imagine how to begin answering (even things we really care about) that another species finds trivial. Or funnier, we could have roughly similar mental powers, but our thought processes are so different that each species' insights seem entirely mystical to the other. I hear that psychologists (and following them, AI researchers) keep finding that intelligence is buried in our visual and lingusitic systems. What if these aliens have very different organs? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXQtoAyCGA&feature=PlayList&p=9F536001A3C605FC&playnext_from=PL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXQtoAyCGA&feature=PlayL... And off-topic, might this explain "rubber-duck debugging," where we explain our problems to a rubber duck? (Because using language clarifies our thoughts.) And why we often write pictures on paper to better visualize abstract problems? (To leverage our powerful visual apparatus.)