My skepticism probably comes in part from an anti-religion, anti-mystic reflex. There’s a lot of woo around this stuff so it often puts me on guard.

Obviously nobody is claiming psychic powers here, but I wouldn’t expect brains to operate that differently - so it’s surprising to me.

You might enjoy "37 ways words can be wrong".

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-th...

Maybe it's similar to how an artificial neural network can converge to different local optimums for a particular problem, depending on its initial parameters and training method. Our brains might just find different ways of representing thoughts, be it through words, images, sounds or even just abstract concepts. If none of them are strictly better than all the others, then there's no selective pressure for the brain to prioritize development in one specific direction over others.

>but I wouldn’t expect brains to operate that differently

Everyone's neurotransmitter balance is different. Of course that will cause brains to sometimes operate wildly differently.

Sure, but there are 4 billion years of selective pressure behind us that make us a lot more alike than different. Maybe this runs at a higher level in the 'brain software stack' that has more variation, but it seems like it'd be a more common lower level type of thing.

Ultimately this is just a hunch though about what I suspect is more likely, I can obviously be wrong.