One of my favourite athletes is Steph Curry - he's redefined basketball, & has so much fun on court.

Late last year, ESPN invited him on show to play a memory game: they'd show him a clip of him playing, freeze frame it, then ask him what happened next.

At least that was the theory.

Instead, what happened was: they'd name the game, Steph would say "Oh, I bet you picked the [such-and-such] play, where I [etc etc etc]", before he'd seen a single frame.

At first, the commentators thought it was funny. Then they got spooked. Steph's talking about bench player reactions, where everyone on court was, etc

It's really fun to watch. He only partially does it on the first one, but then gets into the spirit

Very similar thing here: LeBron James gets asked by a journalist "what happened next?", and simply recounts _everything_:

[Insert thread about expertise, memory & chunking, w/ examples in domains from tennis to chess to music to math. Mostly, though, it's just fun!]

Here's a beautiful Steph mixtape the NBA made in 2016, the year he was unanimous MVP. Enjoy, it's wondrous!

Fun early papers on this were written about chess by the great Herb Simon (eg https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.601.2724&rep=rep1&type=pdf ) and by Adriaan de Groot (eg https://www.amazon.com/Thought-Choice-Chess-Adriaan-Groot/dp/4871877582/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=de+groot+chess&qid=1593315825&sr=8-2 ).

Those were for chess, but there's now a literature in many domains

A fave: Helga Noice & Tony Noice have extensively studied how actors memorize scripts. They wrote a book about it, but here's a lovely short paper with a quote from Michael Caine I love http://www.shafiknbahou.com/uploads/6/2/0/5/6205772/current_directions_in_psychological_science-2006-noice-14-8.pdf

The rough moral of all this work seems to be: intensively study (eg analysis and post-mortem) what you do; you will start to automatically see higher and higher level patterns ("chunks") if there are any to find; your memory gets better and better.

This all happens automatically, no magic required, just lots of thoughtful analysis & hard work

It's why if you cook thoughtfully for a while you start to get better and better at understanding the gist of new recipes - you can just be told a tiny bit, and will remember it.

So Steph and LeBron aren't magic: they're what happens when you do this incredibly thoughtfully and intensively for decades!

(Well, actually, maybe that is the magic! They're fun to watch!)

Funny thing: lots of people replying "Wow!" to the activities shown in this thread

But I look at people's bios, and I'll bet lots of people commenting do things in the same vein, routinely, and don't think about it.

Let's say they've been a VC for a long time. I'll bet they can remember the terms of deals from 10+ years ago, heard once, that would stagger any non-VC, but wouldn't surprise another VC at all

Same thing

Applies mutatis mutandis to any field with complex patterns, AFAICT...