He has been an insei for 3 months and spent 5½ months in China and 1 month in Korea, so he knows how people practice there. On the other hand, advice that works for young inseis may not work for people who started as middle-aged adults.
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people seem to have varying base-level abilities when it comes to memory, but for most situations this can be worked around via mnemonics or creating more associations. It also depends how fast you work through those problems as you get benefits from short-term memory for doing so quickly, but not all of that carries over to long-term
I’m still trying to figure out how to mind-palace my way around things like professional go games and tsumego, as mnemonics for them are a bit hard without brute-force coordinates
But generally, the more experiences, ideas, or anything you can mentally attach to something, the easier it becomes to remember
I’ll dare say many talented people are lost because they are taught the way an expert says and not the way that can unlock their potential.
I don’t know Go, but I’ve trained different colleagues in different professions in different ages in different sectors.
I have to adapt to make the other person understand, if I insist like a mule to push my way, like most do, I’d get 100% the obedience but half the potential.
Basic skills and expertise aside, it’s really dense of any expert to expect their own way is the only way, we are literally billions.
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I agree that we are all different and shouldn’t struggle to become somebody else. However if I want to improve in one domain, it’s probably safer to follow a path that at least one expert has already taken, otherwise bad habits are difficult to get rid of.
Sure, but better pick the expert whose path doesn’t clash with everything that works for you. 
It’s admittedly much more difficult when information is scarce.
We agree on that!
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Oh yeah, one last technique that was relevant for me recently
Rubber ducking:
Sometimes when you have to describe a problem to another person (or a literal rubber duck), your brain finds new ways to think about it in the process of doing so that you find the solution (or at least a step of progress) after hearing yourself speak
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I’ve noticed that I tend to do significantly worse the second time I go through a tsumego collection (assuming it’s hard enough). On some level I remember that I’ve already done the problem, and so my brain insists on “shortcutting” to a possible solution (like a tesuji or vital point) without actually reading that it’s correct. This makes it much harder to force myself to read variations correctly.
After the third or fourth time though, I tend to remember everything and can redo the problems from memory.
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So you have better memory than me. Or perhaps I should try harder to analyze why I got the problem wrong and improve my way of thinking, I don’t know.
one thing that I’ve noticed in my tsumego collections recently is that I sometimes shortcut the tactic based on similar problems and run into trouble, but as I start paying attention to what those differences that allow certain tactics and deny others, it’s definitely helped
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