I think the problem is that it is unlearned too easily. Being forced to modify your thinking to succeed in school or the workforce is what stifles this kind of creativity. I feel like I used to have gifts like that, but somehow lost it along the way

Great point. We constantly challenge him to find solutions from things that aren't obvious, pushing him to be resourceful.

You're right about the environment. Creativity often isn't well-aligned with traditional learning patterns.

I think it's more along the lines of imagining what it is you want, and then finding things around you that are close enough to work.

At least that is how it works for me most of the time. Although I guess I do take direct inspiration from the things themselves sometimes.

I would say that some of the spacial reasoning ability is innate to a person, and will determine how easy it is for the person to learn to solve physical problems. Past this, a lot of the ability comes from having seen similar concepts before and being able to create an elegant solution from them.

When I solve problems like this I typically get a vague sort of vision of what the final solution is going to look like in my head (possibly the innate part). Then I take all the little things I know about and slowly build up something that will perform the action I want. After which it becomes a task of optimization by combining and changing things until the final solution falls out (the experience part). When you have 2 or 3 people working on the same problem using this process some really special things often come out of it.

I'm not sure -- OP mentions the guy is a musician and specifically a pianist, so perhaps he just intrinsically has developed great spatial reasoning from learning and practicing with his piano for so long -- that along with him being from another country makes this make a lot more sense for me, although it's all still impressive.

Another country?