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I also thought about this a lot. Some things about slow thinking are great. I truly believe that it helped me thrive as a software developer.
But social interactions are awkward. I can't really come up with things to say easily and lots of times I can't respond in ways to keep the conversation going. Only after the fact I get lots of ideas of what I could have said. I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.
I'm a tad older, so I stopped caring about it and just accepted my slow thinking. But I'm sure that I also missed out on a lot of opportunities regarding friendships or work. I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.
Funnily my wife is completely opposite to me and we have the greatest time.
> I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.
As Winston Churchill once said when asked “what are you doing” –> “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”
I’m one of those weirdos who does public speaking sometimes. Even 8 hour workshops. You cannot prepare for an 8 hour speaking engagement. Not really. But you can accumulate a plethora of anecdotes, metaphors, and remarks that you weave into the narrative or in response to questions.
You can build frameworks that are similar to code. Prepared functions/coroutines/objects that you run in appropriate situations. Works pretty well especially in mentoring/teaching/consulting situations. This is also how comedians prep their sets.
The key is that things you say are new to the audience, but not to you. It can be the same metaphor you’ve fine-tuned over dozens of interactions. And the person you’re talking to thinks “Wow that guy is so quick on his feet, how did he come up with that so fast!?”
You can also spot this if you watch talks by popular presenters (Simon Sinek is a good example). You’ll notice the same 2 or 3 core stories getting polished and fine-tuned over years of talks and interviews.
I also often don’t have timely responses.
There are sometimes long pauses before my response or even mid-speech, during which I’m thinking about what’s said. But the delay is often interpreted as a cue for someone else to respond or change the subject, which often leads to not being able to say anything that i’ve spent so much glutamate to process.
I used to say “one moment” every 5 seconds while I think, but that was distracting.
Sometimes, I do this thing with my eyes jumping them around as if I’m reading a book; that gives people something to look at while they wait, like a spinner indicator.
To an extent it’s a skill you can practice if not learn.
By nature I’m a slow thinker but I can mode switch if I need to but it’s exhausting after a while in a weird way I put it down to working in the trades before switching to programming full time, some of the fastest funniest people you’ll ever meet are tradesmen on job sites (introversion doesn’t mean poor social skills after all though they get conflated).
If you are generally happy as you are don’t sweat it, be a boring world if we where all the same.
I am also the slow-thinking dev married to a quick thinker, and it's a good pairing. I know couples where they're both quick thinkers and things are so mercurial it's hard to believe they're still together, but maybe the excitement keeps it going.
I enjoy watching Harry Mack videos on YouTube where he freestyles and can work in something that happens like someone walking into the frame into literally the next line of his raps. This capability is so absolutely outside of the realm of possibility for my brain I almost feel like he's a different species.
I‘m very similar. I noticed that people who are very easy to speak to share one trait: they have no shame to tell you the same story multiple times. It bores the hell out of me every times. If i try to do it, i get bored as well.
My boxing coach once described fighting as a conversation. I am inclined to agree.
In boxing you don't have the luxury of taking your time to think otherwise you get punched in the face.
Improving at conversation is like boxing - it can be reduced into structures and scenarios. Combinations and responses can be drilled in. Ultimately once the foundations are bedded in there is plenty of room for self expression and creativity.
The funny thing about social interaction is that we all talk to each other but there are people who live breathe and hone the art whether formally or informally while plenty of us just stumble along doing just good enough...
>> I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.
Most likely they don’t care as much as you think. They are probably thinking about what they should say next
Due to this, career success is going to be highly dependent on chosen profession. Some professions are inherently more social and require heavy networking. Software and engineering as a whole, is a good profession for slow thinkers to excel. It can also be meritocratic so any personality quirks or pedigrees get normalized when ranking by performance.
I could have written these exact words. Marriage needs a certain balance you know ;)
My wife and I are complete opposites. One of us processes data instantaneously, connecting it to dozens of other topics at the flip of a switch, and integrating broad knowledge. This makes for a great member of, say, a tiger team.
The other thinks slowly, often has no initial opinion, and rarely speaks up, but when they do, the input is flawless and monumental. R&D is their forté.
Neither one is better than the other. The quick thinker handles in-the-moment action well, but is so wrapped up in the “now” that it’s difficult for them to get too deep on a topic. The slow thinker meditates on ideas for a while, carefully chooses (almost always the correct) path, and steadies the course. Prick and pull at this one for a quick thought, and it comes out flatter than you could imagine.
Until we know what actual intelligence is, trying to act like one form is objectively better than another is just silly.
I think lots of the graybeard devs are deep thinkers, not fast thinkers. I think fast thinkers were pulled towards the “move fast and break things”-style companies.
>I guess if you take a long time to do something, people kind of forget that you're there.
This is so true sadly, group conversations are very exhausting to me. It is a constant back-and-forth and if you want to say something you need to do it "quick" or the topic shifts.
>Also, my ‘processing time’ in conversation is slow. So I’ve realised that I’m better off focusing on writing as a way to communicate. Writing to me feels more suited towards slow, patient thinkers.
I feel the same way, I try to avoid arguments (like something political with friends (harmless, don't worry)) because it takes me too long to say what I want to say, and my sentences jump around awkwardly trying to express the point I want to make. I was also made fun of in school due to that... Also I tend to mispronounce some words then which makes it even more awkward. People often think that if you don't respond to an argument in two seconds you "lose"...
This also got waaay worse when I first drifted into burnout two years ago (still have, not recovered).
It also takes me longer to understand things and it takes me longer to get to delivery than many of my peers.
However, I have consistently noticed that the quickness comes at the price of a shallow understanding, and the delivery is also often lacking in those who move fast.
For me, I have to really grok the thing I'm focussing on. I have to internalise it somehow and build a mental model. Once I've done that I am actually faster and more productive than the ones who leap on things quicker.
You may have ADHD. I’ve never described myself as dim-witted, because I’ve never viewed it so negatively, but your description fits me exactly. Even down to the spatial awareness thing and biographical details like switching from math to theoretical physics in college.
I eventually got diagnosed as an adult with ADHD, and got treatment. Stimulants help me be significantly more “quick-witted” to use your terms. I would rather describe “being slow” as being in a constant state of distraction, which prevents me from being efficient with the task at hand. Stimulants fix this.
However having grown up scatterbrained, some aspects of it are now architectural in my brain and aren’t changed by slightly modifying the brain chemistry. I now see that as a superpower through, as it gives me a different perspective for seeing problems, and is great for strategic thinking. Stimulants just give me focused control over it and the ability to turn it off and on as the need arises.
> I’ve had one interview where I had to do multiplications really quickly, whilst shouting my name, and doing such-and-such random thing every five minutes.
I think the whole “I would stand up and walk out of that interview” trope is a little overused but … I would stand up and walk out of that interview. Was that a real situation?
This absolutely resonates with me.
I have always felt that my verbal recall skills and the size of my lexicon do not correspond strongly to the quality of my ideas.
Which is unfortunate because I believe most people over-index on these attributes. folks with extremely high wit and low/average critical thinking, I.e Russel Brand types are extremely persuasive due to their ability to be so _accurate_. But accuracy doesn't matter if you're not shooting at the right target. We confuse accuracy with truthfulness. It is some sort of cognitive fallacy our brains short circuit to.
The best folks in our position can do is find work that allows our results to speak for us. And yes, write. Find the time to write. Strategically position yourself such that the battleground is async written text.
I have thought of myself as a slow thinker but have shifted to the view that it's more about myself putting a higher value on the thoughts that inherently take time to reach.
Other, "quicker" people are satisfied with superficial ideas and sometimes don't even care about factual correctness. But when I finally form my opinion, it is always very considered. When quick people are questioned it's often evident that depth is lacking.
So I am slow only because I do alot more processing, simply put.
I am a slow thinker but learnt a trick early on from an American girl I met in a bar: she said that a lot of Americans think and are perceived as quick thinkers but often it's not the case: they just don't stop talking. And if you keep talking, about whatever (no one listens anyway), indeed you get ahead. I met that girl when I was 19, now i'm 50 and still it works well in social settings. People like me at parties as just blabber on wherever you put me. But when you ask me a question about math or software, I am quiet for too long, which makes me better at those than many I think as I see many of my colleages just blabber on about those things too and, while seemingly quick, they are often very wrong and shouldve kept their mouth shut.
I write about doing high-risk, impactful and neglected science. Particularly in physics, biophysics and biosecurity. Ex-Cambridge Maths. Ex-Goldman. Currently at hedge fund but no finance content here.
Judging by this person's bio, I am sure he is not actually slow, at least not as defined by IQ. You don't land those jobs and credentials by being slow. Getting a quant job for example requires being able to think fast on one's feet to answer interview questions.
I think it's more like his working memory speed is not up to his satisfaction or subjectively he feels slow, but relative to everyone else or general population, he is not actually slow, much in the same way a runway model may feel fat due to body dysmorphia, but is not actually fat.
My first real struggle with slow processing time was when I started to play competitive volleyball in high school.
the vast majority of people who try a sport will suck at it, and many are still bad even with practice, hence why so few become pro. it has nothing to do with mental slowness.
It's like when Einstein felt he was bad at physics or math. No, he was brilliant at it, but he thought he was not good enough to solve the problem he wanted to solve, which had also vexed everyone else too.
I went through an autism assessment about a year ago. Part of that was getting an IQ test. I scored well in Verbal Comprehension and Perceptual Reasoning, but struggled more in Processing Speed. This was accounted for by giving two scores, the Full Scale IQ, and the General Ability Index (GAI). The GAI deemphasizes the processing speed, as raw speed to an answer usually isn't that important these days. I was told the having a larger gap between these numbers is one indication that autism might be in the picture.
I feel like I have a lot to say about this because I've actually been at both ends of the spectrum at different points of my life.
Going into college I was an extremely quick witted person, but I was also at the beginning of a depressive episode. Over the course of 10 years (and 8 years of therapy), I developed into the slow thinker that I am now. The reality is: I actually think my quick wittiness was only possible because I was overlooking a ton of mistakes. I was an incredibly certain person, but I didn't have the foundation necessary to be as sure of myself as I was. Going to therapy made me more cautious about thinking I knew how others thought and felt, and I realized that, by being so quick, I was dominating other people and failing to actually gain any real input or information from them.
The best way to describe it is biologically IMO. It's the difference between a precocial and altricial species: A precocial species matures quickly because it has strong instincts. It's born knowing what to do and how to do it, but because it's ruled by its instincts it can't be creative. It responds to each stimulus the same way each time. An altricial species is born with less knowledge. It has to spend time learning, but because it learns, it can pick and choose its response to different stimuli, and so it exhibits greater creativity.
Maybe I've gone too slow and I feel like I'm starting to pick up speed again these days, but I'll never think less of a slow person. Maturation is not necessarily a good thing. IMO the longer you can go without maturing, the better.
If you’re running a team, you owe it to yourself to start looking for these people. Some of the absolute best engineers I’ve ever worked with are of this sort - they get absolutely swamped in group discussions, but when you get them alone and lower the tempo so they can get done processing, they’re often two or three iterations past the group. Don’t let the showy people throw you off - the people who think before talking are worth their weight in gold.
I believe I'm a slow thinker too and it's always bothered me that in a work context there's an inherent advantage for fast thinkers due to the idea that the optimal way to solve problems is to "just jump on a call/huddle" or hash it out in a meeting. Coupled with the fact that many people never write anything down for asynchronous consumption it can be easy to become a bystander whilst decisions are made.
I can relate 100%. It affects how I perform in coding interviews, and I also need to work around it in my job.
I also have ADHD and a lot of this matches Dr Russell A Barkley's description of ADHD, particularly when he describes it as a performance and executive function disorder - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wW.... ADHD includes much more but this "slow thinking" seems to be a prominent feature.
Lots of undiagnosed autistic people in the comments describing autistic masking and burnout.
Autistic burnout is the name for the unexplainable energy drain when you have to interact with people, because while social interactions are usually as effortless and as easy as lifting a finger for neurotypical people, they can feel like lifting a 100lbs stone for you, because you have to constantly remember how to act and at the same time focus on the moment to not miss a social cue, etc. This is called masking and it drains your energy.
Now watch people under this comment claiming they are not autistic, because how they are able to perfectly socialize, because they have learned to keep eye contact by putting a reminder on a post-it note on their desk for a year in the middle school.
Before discovering I'm autistic I was totally dumbfounded: why I was tired as if I ran a marathon after a meetup with friends for just a few hours? Now I know.
I feel like a simpler explanation is that the author is roughly average in most traits, and comparing themselves to others who are above average in certain traits.
I doubt it's about thinking speed. At times I've thought I was fundamentally deficient in some way, only to realize later that I was catastrophising about a poor performance in something and generalizing that across my entire life.
There is also a lot of variation in our abilities, mostly due to practice. When I've holed myself up in my room working for weeks I lose the ability to socialize in general, let alone make witty comebacks. But once I'm in a social environment for a while I can banter with anybody.
I think of myself as a slow thinker and feel the same as many other comments on this post but I always but this down to being a visual mind and having to draw/picture everything to think it. So in my experience slow thinking is topic dependant; maths, conversations, even code are slow because I have to draw it in my head and it takes time. But give me a spatial/visual problem, like coming up with a plan for garden landscaping, organising room layouts or will this object fit in this space and it takes like 1 micro-second. it's weird.
JoelOnSoftware had a great piece back in the day where he mentioned that while he consciously knew what a short sale on an option was, in practice he had to stop and think about how to calculate it, while his financial friends just knew the answer immediately. He drew a comparison to pointers in C, where if you're going to be a C programmer, then pointers should just be intuitively obvious to you and not something you need to think about.
IAW, there are no pure fast or slow thinkers, a lot of this is just how well have you internalized the background material. Having quick repartee in conversation has absolutely no relationship to immediately seeing what the loop variable should be in a programming problem. FizzBuzz isn't quickly solved by decent devs because they think faster, it's quickly solved because it's a trivial problem that doesn't require serious thinking for experienced devs.
When I'm programming for finance or medical, I often have to tell the PM "let's stop here and let me think about this for a day". Because it's not my field, it takes me a while to get my head around it. OTOH, there's very often algorithm conversations where I have to wait for others to catch up.
I resonate highly with this. Especially when brainstorming ideas with my manager. He's very quick with suggestions, and I am always saying ehhh I don't know let me think about it. I have realized that him giving me ideas quickly to iterate on is beneficial because I am always able to refine it.
I still do think it is a deficiency in some sense as I would have loved to be one of those guys who could just grok stuff instantly and contribute quicker
The author uses the following examples to describe slow thinking:
> In a mathematics context, it would be doing mental math to figure out things like the split of a restaurant bill.
> In a social context, it would be coming up with witty responses in conversation.
> In a recall context, it would be quickly remembering facts.
> In a sports context, it would be like a badminton player�s quick ability to hit the shuttle in a gap.
> In a job interview context, it would be solving small scale coding problems and quickly designing algorithm
But they are all in fact completely different kinds of thinking, and an individual may be fast or slow depending on the kind. As an example, I have no trouble with 1), 3) and 4), but am abysmally slow with 2) and 5). Am I a fast thinker or a slow one? I also know why 2) and 5) are slow, because they are human interactions and I spend extra time thinking about whether what I wanted to say may offend the other person. That's not necessarily slow thinking persay, but more so overthinking, resulting in a delayed or absent response.
The thing that resonated the most with me was the idea that slow processors need to focus on strategic thinking. I am a 60 year old and now retired software developer. I keep myself busy by actively continuing to code every day. I definitely have experienced a slowing of thinking in the last ten years. I have read that this could be because I have more information to sift and sort but being honest with myself, the machinery is not as well tuned as it once was.
I am fine with all this. I love coding and I doubt I will ever stop doing it for pleasure. I have had to become more methodical and intentional with my time on the laptop but reflecting on this piece, being more strategic would be a wise thing for me to contemplate on.
If the thinking was truly "slower", i.e. have less throughput, it would result in fewer insights overall, i.e. lower intelligence. This doesn't seem to be the case since the author describes equal success of these "slow thinkers" to neurotypical ways of thinking.
The problem therefore seems to be more accurately described as having the same insights as others, but they arrive later, i.e. "delayed" insights.
Delayed processing could be an effect of delayed context switching, i.e. monotropism [0]. Monotropism can be an indicator of mild autism.
I'm going to propose an alternative explanation. This distinction doesn't exist, or at least not the way it seems.
The "fast thinkers" aren't thinking. They're just doing. Everyone is not only capable of this, but probably behave this way several times a day on certain tasks without realizing it or how it seems to others.
This is beyond mere practice towards a narrow goal. Certain topics just click better due to seemingly unrelated, yet deeply integrated life experiences.
It's not something to worry about since, as the article states, it doesn't affect outcomes much. If anything, "fast thinking" creates blind spots.
I find myself bimodal, when comparing my "speed" to others in social situations.
If there's something that's novel to me, I feel like I'm slower than the average bear. Not massively slower, but with a desire to take the material aside and spend some time alone with it.
But if it's my home ground, if I've been living inside it, I find few people can keep up with me.
At least part of it is that social interaction takes a bit more processing power. I know I get a bit autistic and info dumpy when I know the ground, and that relieves the social pressure (though I know it costs me points too).
Dr. Amen has identified at least seven types of ADHD. I have three of them. I’m a slow thinker, but despite being detail-oriented, am not well-organized, make mistakes, am erratic, fairly unpredictable (if anyone needs me as an entropy source for a TRNG?), procrastinate, am on the autism spectrum, have OCD tendencies, have paranoia (also had hallucinations as side-effect of stimulants), am uncoordinated, have treatment-resistant depression, etc.
So, these “you are X, therefore Y” don’t work for me. A lot of people don’t fall into buckets well.
I consider myself to be a slow-thinker too. I have several above-average people as friends. New stuff (usually some mathematical topic) that takes me a whole day to internalize the basics, I can tell to them in 15 minutes and they will be able to understand it and to immediately connect it with other topics they know.
I have not attended a special school for mathematically gifted like some of them. In school and during my first year at the university, I used to think that I am just intelligent enough to have an idea how true intellegent one could be...
I was always bad at solving equations with more than 3 unknowns, since this includes enough steps to have a significant probability that I forget a sign or mix something up - even though the algorithm itself was completely clear to me.
Today I acceppted myself much more: I think my real advantages are that I am a) interested in a lot of things and b) I am enduring in reading about a topic. Even if I need to read explanations of 5 different authors to grasp something, I do so. And I care much less today than ealier. However, I still like to be faster at times.
While I think I am a decent programmer/SWE, I do not like pair programming. My path of coding is not linear and most of the stuff I type will be erased until I am confident about my solution.
And getting enough sleep is also a big issue.
I think it can be an error labeling people as "fast" or "slow". I had similar self doubts to the OP during my PhD, where so many people around me would say they "got" a concept and I was just feeling behind. But a few years in, while desperately trying to "catch up" I realized a good portion of the time I was just misinterpreting. Even those tasks aren't as well defined as the OP suggests.
There's another dimension that often is not acknowledged: depth. People have different thresholds at where they're comfortable talking about a topic or saying they "understand". I also don't think there's a strong correlation with the person's intelligence, if anything, a slight bias towards "slower" people being smarter.
- Dumb people might have low thresholds as they are unaware of depth.
- Smart people will have low thresholds because they do better thinking out loud or are just saying they think they have enough to launch off of.
- Dumb people might be slow because they haven't thought about the thing very much.
- Smart people might be slow because they are considering different depths.
We all think fast and slow at times (intended), and we're all 4 people in the above list on different topics. I think we should just make sure we're judging people at the right race. The trouble is despite standing in front of you, talking face to face, you don't know if in that time they've run a few meters or a few kilometers. I think we'd all do better if we worried a little less about speed. If your destination is nowhere, you get there in the same time regardless of your speed.
The conversation here has been really interesting since it shows we all have subtly different abilities and issues around slow processing.
I am a senior/staff software engineer with 20 years of experience and who would be considered a top performer. Quick wittedness is something I rely on but technical thinking is always slow. White board interviews are nearly impossible. So finding work is ROUGH.
I wouldn't call my self the class clown, but I am often the first one to crack a joke and people look to me for lighthearted fun. I often hope this will save me in interviews as I rely on my past work and personality are my strong traits. All of the jobs I got through this, or from a personal referral. Never through a technical interview.
My way of coping with this has always been to work more hours then everyone else. It helps that I am also more passionate about what I am working on then those around me. I work on open source in my free time, while my co-workers have barely heard of Linux. If it were not for my love of the craft, I be miserable in this industry.
I first noticed this all when I was a kid and started taking more advanced classes. I’d have to take copious notes and deeply review them after class to make sure I knew what was going on. While my friends would listen once and ace the tests. I was also always behind on reading speed since I had to read things 2 or 3 times before the words really registered in my brain.
As a side note, I recently worked with a real version of the oh-so mythical 10x programmer. And he was a college intern! Running loops around the rest of us at our startup. He was doing the work of several of us older programmers. I think most of it was do to his 0-friction processing of information. Read, assimilate, code. Interesting to watch. They do exist.
I’ve been thinking about that in the context of hiring. Some companies require a cognitive test, which is often some kind of Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. Unfortunately, most companies giving these tests do it with a time limit, thus measuring a speed function, and neglecting other dimensions. Some people think fast, others think deep. We need both.
I like to think I’m pretty quick at generally getting things done in the context of work, and in my anecdotal experience I can see how it doesn’t actually benefit me all that much.
If I use that capability to work faster/harder/better I still can’t get around the fact that there’s nowhere to be promoted to in my company.
Or there’s the fact that I don’t actually want to be too high of a performer and set high expectations for myself and be saddled with more work.
I also haven’t lucked out with working at the right company at the right time to get promotions. Usually, companies growing fast with a lot of opportunities to make visible impacts allow people to climb the ladder.
I have a family member that did this and now that they’re above the indicator contributor level they report that their job is significantly easier than it used to be, it just has higher stakes and more meetings.
So thinking faster doesn’t magically turn me into a VP or something like that, and thinking fast isn’t even needed for that role.
I am a slow thinker if I need to do some calculations that require a precise answer. For me, it's a memory thing. To be fast you need to memorize patterns, algorithms and data, whether you do it consciously or not. You also need to have a good working memory.
I have a terrible long term memory and about an average working memory.
As a work around, when I don't have to come out with precise answers I got quite good at making aproximations.
As another work around, my brain tries to use data that it can recall with ease such as very fresh data, instead of trying to remember things that might take some time to remember or not remember at all.
While I enjoy debating and long talks about tech, science, culture, history, art etc, I tend to concentrate on stuff I can deduct or think on the moment such as ideas instead of trying to remember stuff.
As a consequence, I tend to suck at job interviews when I am asked to recite things from memory. So before interviews I kind of have to review most asked questions.
My first college girlfriend made me realize that I wasn't a fast thinker. In person our conversations didn't seem problematic to me, but on the phone she would respond too quickly to what I was saying. I wouldn't be able to get into listening mode in time to pick up on the beginning of her replies.
I suppose that different people just have different strengths and mine isn't quick repartee. Another unusual thing I've noticed is my inability to do my best thinking while music is playing. While working briefly at a company to help out some friends I was forced to hear music throughout my time working on location; it was terrible (for me). In school I always did my work in quiet settings.
I was a math major in college and music interfered with my math work more than other subjects. My theory is that math and music both rely on similar mental resources.
I'm a decently fast thinker but a relatively slow learner. I'm good at synthesizing information. It's because I tend to naturally doubt/resist new information and I need to see some proof or utility value before I can fully absorb it. Once I've absorbed information, I can recall it years in the future and can synthesize it with different related information.
I'm grateful for my slow learning because if I had just absorbed everything I was ever told on the first go, I would probably be crazy right now because of how many contradictions I've encountered in the information I've been presented with and how often I've had to re-evaluate my worldview...
You don't want to learn stuff based on what you learned first; what information you retain and decide to build upon should be about what best fits into your existing (hopefully gradually improving) world model.
Chess Master at Any Age talks about this on page 55: https://archive.org/details/Chess_Master_at_Any_Age/page/n65...
I think it's great to play to one's strengths, but it's also true that what people perceive as "quick thinking" is often the result of very large amounts of practice. More specifically, people I know who are good at the types of skills described at the beginning of the article (mental math, witty responses, remembering facts, playing badminton to a high level) probably have a knack for them, but there are also types of underlying skills that aren't obvious to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time practicing the activity in question. I'll take two skills that I'm familiar with as cases in point: mental math and tennis (adjacent to badminton).
For mental math, there are all sorts of tricks that allow one to transform the problem into one with fewer values to hold in memory (for instance [1]). There are also lots of different patterns that allow shortcuts in calculation. The more of these one knows (kind of like facts in a trivia contest), the simpler many sorts of mental math problems become. And the more one has practiced, the faster one is at applying them. This is not to say that there aren't people who are exceptionally gifted, but it's also possible to be perceived as "quick-witted" by actually doing a lot of slow thinking ahead of time.
With tennis, sometimes it seems like players have exceptional reaction times (At the highest level, they certainly do!), but one learns over time to move to different areas of the court preemptively based on what the opponent is likely to do. This often shortens the distance one has to run by a step or two, which makes a pretty big difference in reaching difficult balls. Also, time spent practicing with better players who hit harder gradually changes one's perception of ball speed and one's ability to follow the ball all the way to the racket. It's like one's eyes get better, somehow. None of these perceptual changes or positioning habits happen overnight, but with enough stacked skills practiced over time, a person's reaction time appears to get faster even if their absolute reaction time hasn't improved.
Of course there are people with a higher skill ceiling than others, but I also think people write themselves off as being hopeless at something, choose not to practice, and then conclude that they are unsuited to the skill without having better understood what the road to "good" actually looks like.
I find myself in both the spaced-out "slow thinker" and witty "fast thinker" camps depending on the situation I'm in and the people I'm with. I think it's less about mental predisposition like the article says and more about how comfortable I am.
When I'm with old friends, processing time feels snappy because I'm less burdened by anxiety and general mental defense mechanisms. When I'm underprepared for a job interview or with a new group of people, the latent anxiety and subconscious doubt uncontrollably slows down the quick processing part of my brain.
I've often associated quick thinking with lack of thinking. It's intuitive and prehaps emotional. In some cases folks I've seen who were 'quick witted' completely lacked a filter and it didn't help them at all.
I fit into this category so much and have noticed that it has certain properties. For example, in areas of expertise it took me longer to master, but now that I'm an expert I'm comparatively faster than other experts in the same field.
My only explanation for this is that being 'slow' left me something of an social outsider, and this gave me more time to immerse myself in the things I cared about, and so I went deeper. This applies to a lot of different things.
That said, this slowness has caused me so much agony over the years! But now, like the author, I lean into it and have found many advantages through it.