This is fascinating to me and it never occurred to me before reading about it a long time ago. My sport growing up was ski racing, and later, sportscar racing.

This is fascinating to me and it never occurred to me before reading about it a long time ago. My sport growing up was ski racing, and later, sportscar racing. In those sports it is critical to have a deep visualization of the course. For ski racing, you will see racers waiting around the starting gate for their start time with eyes closed lightly swaying their head and moving their hand in visualizing their ideal path down the course (we even sometimes crash in those simulation runs and shake our head and restart...) In sportscar racing, an important drill is to drive the course in your head, making every shift, turn-in point, apex, and track out point, visualizing and feeling your attitude, balance, the forces, at every point on the track —— and do it under a stopwatch so you know you have a realistic timing of the track with your car. I could typically come within a second of the real times, and it was quite vivid, and for 'fuzzy' sections, I could go back and sharpen the visualization. These seemed to me and my coaches as essential skills for the sport, and I never heard of anyone in either sport without that ability. I want to know if people without that innate capability just get filtered out early, or if it is trainable. Does anyone have any data on that?