I don't find it threatening, just contradicted by life experience. My background includes chess at a reasonably high level, and it's always always the same: jus

I don't find it threatening, just contradicted by life experience. My background includes chess at a reasonably high level, and it's always always the same: just an absolutely obscene amount of work that gradually yields emergent skills, that includes things that many people think are "natural" like visualization and memory. For instance the 'trick' of casually memorizing games you play isn't a feat of some super-human memory. It's, inadvertently, the exact same 'trick' that memory competitors use. When a reasonably strong player looks at a chess board, it begins to tell an often vivid story of what's happened and what will happen. And stories are really easy to remember for everybody. So memorizing your games isn't really like memorizing a series of arcane moves, but instead more like recounting a familiar tale. We can even cheat, because so long as you remember all the key points of a game, you can generally reconstruct the filler in between - again, just like telling a story. It's why it can be much harder to remember games against weaker players than your peers - their moves, and thus stories, often don't make as much sense, and so it gets pretty fuzzy pretty quickly. This is also why you might often notice things like strong players able to relatively easily replay 80 distinct moves of an arbitrary game, but have difficulty remembering the exact date the game was played. 'Talent'/genetics obviously plays a role, but mostly only in determining what your peak potential is. But the fact that the overwhelming majority of people (including e.g. grandmasters) will never get anywhere remotely near to their genetic potential in anything makes it largely inconsequential in practice. In any case, we certainly aren't carbon copies. These 'tricks' I'm mentioning here only really emerge after many years of concerted and dedicated study of something. The overwhelming majority of people will never do anything like this, so whether ones brain is an 'alien mind' or not becomes largely a matter of semantics.