Basketball requires the combination of many "talents", some of which can be natural talents that are there but will be enhanced by experience, others will need training.

It's more of less the same with OP talents. Nynaeve's talent for Healing is natural, but it only developed through experience.



Not necessarily, especially not with women (also with men, but women rely more on pure dexterity). When they have a Talent, they can make exceptionally efficient weaves with much less saidar than other women. That's what happens with the talent for shielding. It's not necessarily a strong shield, but the weaver is so dextrous at putting it in place and handling it it's exceptionally hard to break (she's exceptionally good/fast at countering attacks on the shield - she's hard to overwhelm with just strength, the captive needs to be very also very dextrous to counter her). If she ties it, a strong enough channeller will break her shield in no time.

We actually don't know if the woman has had much training with shielding. She's not a wilder.



Of course, but it's exactly how it's shown in the series...

You need to have an inquisitive mind and experiment to discover your Talents, all the more when these talents are not part of your training. Nynaeve has the "true" talent for Healing, and many other women can use her weaves. Without Nynaeve's example, none of the others may have ever discovered they had this talent. Nynaeve took risks experimenting in an area where the Yellow Ajah traditionally discourages experimentation. With experience she's better and better at reasoning out intuitively other modes of Healing.

If people don't experiment and aren't taught they can indeed spend all their life without knowing about some talents they have (especially true for weaving/OP talents - others just show up naturally)



Quite possibly as the shielding talent seems to rely a lot on dexterity and speed at handling Spirit (but probably an inner sense of anticipation and a natural understanding of how shielding work), but again maybe not. Some of the other weaves the same woman could theorically do well may require strength in Spirit the woman doesn't have (ie: her talent would thus depend entirely on using an angreal or leading a circle), or a combination with another flow the woman doesn't master. There is more than just dexterity with a flow or weave involved too, for example the talent to make extremely efficient gateways (ie: using little power) seems to involve a cosmic/intuitive affinity for the Pattern apart from pure efficiency with Spirit.



All these cases exist in the series. Channellers can have a special strength/dexterity in some flows that make them very good at some categories of weaves, and they can have other characteristics added to that that make them exceptional (Talented) with some specific weaves or categories of weaves.



It seems to be the soul that develops "talents", based on Rand/LTT. (other characteristics could be genetic, we don't really have enough data to judge of this). We don't know if this evolves over time, is due to some cosmic affinities, on the number of rebirths. It's doubtful the Wheel determines it, it seems to only determine the parameters, eg: if the True Source is reachable or not, if the communications between man and wolf is possible etc. The talents are latent or active depending on those parameters.



The talents in a circle are strictly those of the circle leader, the person who weaves. That's where passing control between specific members of the circle along the way is useful, and where balancing the requirements for raw strength and specific weaving talents to accomplish a task come massively into play when planning a circle. The optimal balance between saidar and saidin also comes into play often, we're told (the BOW circle is an example: it worked, but it worked by overworking the ter'angreal and the circle lacked male players who could guide saidin the same way the saidar flows were guided. The ter'angreal was left to draw saidin on some "auto mode".

There would be absolutely no point in Nynaeve and Flinn linking, for instance, if the Healing doesn't require both of them to take the lead at some point. Weaving talents or strength in flows aren't cumulative. "Strength" in flows means dexterity with that flow (including controlling large amounts of some flows). That counts for nothing in a circle unless you're called to take the lead at some point. What you contribute to a circle is raw strength (and some psychological dimension, it appears)