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I would be surprised if there is anyway to improve these skills, g(aka IQ) is notoriously hard to improve.
But I imagine you want better abstract thinking skills for a specific reason, and it'll probably be much more effective to skip directly to the reason you want to improve these skills.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You memorize the order of an entire deck of cards every day?
Although I'm not as intentional about it as the parent commenter, I try to play with my memory palaces when I get the chance. I'll get a list of 12 random words and memorize them with the technique. This helps me get better and quicker at the process, and it feels good to impress myself every so often.
Or any other art, such as woodworking or pottery.
This is not quite related, but I learned something yesterday. My wife tells me that she wants to be smarter so while we were walking I was trying to teach her mental chess so we can play chess while we walk. And she didn't want to because she was mentally exhausted (perhaps from all my talking, which is totally okay). Some of the smartest people I know don't actively seek out to improve their thinking skills. Its sim…
Write, read challenging works of literature, learn an instrument and play music, listen to art music, learn to paint or draw, or take an acting class. Or any other art, such as woodworking or pottery.
Study higher level math! Category theory is a brainfuck that exercises that skill well. This book https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/category-theory-sciences doesn't have any real mathy prereqs but is fun. Added benefit from studying math is that its a foundation for a whole bunch of other cool stuff.
My answer to your question is math. Learn to read and write proofs. Any intro to proofs will do: those employed in discrete math, the ones in analysis, the diagram chasing ones, whatever...Working with math proofs will definitely straighten out your thinking and whip your mind into shape. Some suggestions to get you started: Book of Proof by Richard Hammack: https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/ Discrete…
A Logical Approach to Discrete Mathematics: https://www.amazon.com/Logical-Approach-Discrete-Monographs-...
And a more pragmatic approach to the same material (with a lot of cross-over in terms of proof-style, etc):
Programming in the 1990s: http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387973821
But one I particularly enjoyed early on was written for liberal-arts level students of maths (who might've been traumatized by maths in the past):
Introduction to Graph Theory: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Graph-Theory-Dover-Mathe...
It will actually get you into writing proofs in set theory within the first couple of chapters.
The idea that abstract thinking is devoid of specifics has never struck me as a prohibition that you can't get to abstract thinking by starting with examples and metrics. Looking for patterns, mind mapping, and tabletop exercises all seem like ways to take concrete thinking elements and bridge them to the abstract.
In doing so, I think there are some specific areas to watch for, namely the influence of cognitive bias. I'm a big fan of the Cognitive bias cheat sheet which has been covered on HN in the past, https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a...
I also believe that the concept of multidisciplinary approaches can be one of abstract thinking -- when you begin your exploration of a topic from the viewpoint of a discipline you have not mastered, your mind is more likely to be able to explore concepts and solutions which are not bound by fact -- you simply don't know the facts and principles of these foreign disciplines intimately.
And just as disciplinary viewpoint can provide interesting triggers in abstract thinking, so can applying empathy and imagination. The best books on things like this are often written for children. Try "The Book of Think: Or how to solve a problem twice your size" (Burns, 1976).
"Possible Worlds: An Introduction to Logic and Its Philosophy" https://www.amazon.com/Possible-Worlds-Introduction-Philosop...
Analytic philosophy has produced a methodical approach to thinking about things that we don't seem to teach as methods. Instead it trickles down into pop-science takes on thinking which tells you a lot /about a domain/ but not how to /use/ things in the domain.
Thinking in terms of "possible worlds" is a nice little hack that unifies a lot of our intuitions in how we determine what is true. It also implies a lot of nice methods that we already use implicitly, like making thought experiments, or conceptual analysis, or testing arguments with ad absurdums, or working with modalities (like treating what we should do differently from what we could do). This book teaches possible worlds at an introductory level, when typically it's considered a graduate-level topic. It also gives exercises, which are ultimately the important bit. I don't think I've seen too many books that teach philosophy /as a method/ beyond argument construction.