I would say this in response, what you describe: being good at middle and high and able to get perfect grades there, isn't particularly impressive. Most good students can excel in high school. You note that things got harder for you in college, this is more normal, "smart kids" usually get found out in college when the work becomes harder. I'm not sure if you went on to postgrad education but I'd hazard a guess that if you went on to do a PhD you would have had a big shock.
My point is this, being able to "ace" teenager level work isn't actually all that big of a deal. I went to a private all-boys school where there were many, many boys who aced every piece of homework and tests they took. It didn't mean they were super special, that's just what you get when schools select for the brightest kids. Now, if they went straight from school and then aced their PhD in a year, that would actually unusual.
Must be nice to have that kind of recall at the age of 100.
That being said, some people (John Von Neumann) seem to have had fantastic visual and textual recall.
A number of artists (Kim Jung Gi) and musicians (Mozart) seem to develop excellent visual and auditory memories as well.
> brags
I wonder if at one point or likely one age you will never be able to gain an intuitive grasp on some subjects.
I think not only of subjects like higher-level math and physics, but also language skills, like chinese or japanese for a lifelong western speaker.
on the other hand, I wonder if some subjects might be easier without baggage, like having a lifetime of newtonian physics, then learning relativity or quantum physics.
Surely it's a combination of nurture AND nature. It's likely some people are just born smarter than others, much like people are born with the "right stuff" to go further in athletic pursuits. Just like athletic training would play a part in the end result combined with natural athletic potential. It seems crazy to me that people would think that every brain starts as a blank slate, with the same potential, with the end result being purely due to education.
I know that people are worried that even admitting it is a possibility immediately invites ideas of eugenics/racism, but surely we can entertain this idea without the discussion devolving into us goosestepping into oblivion.
Someone being born with the genetic code to be 6’8” is gonna have an entirely different experience playing basketball than someone who is born with 5’8” code assuming equal effort put into training. We see this huge gap in professional sports because those advantages make it incredibly obvious - same as many other physical feats. People train incredibly hard but can’t win something due to an arbitrary constraint.
The issue with mental stuff is that it’s basically down to niche tricks to make one stand out now. Yes - some people are born with an incredible(y useless) ability to calculate multiplying numbers quickly. Meanwhile - there’s folks who learn how to do something similar using a finger counting method… and then the rest of us just type it into a computer for basically no effort. Same with other things like memory and what not. (Which is easily defeated by typing something into Google)
For most people and most positions in the world - these abnormal features are mostly irrelevant. The rest of things is down to ability to grind, experience, and not being too narrow in thought.
On the other hand, if you're really smart you are probably capable of getting away by doing less at work and enjoying many more different aspects of life VS concentrating only on your job.
But this is really besides the point, because Seth says:
> The number of tasks in our culture that require someone who was born with off-the-charts talent is small indeed.
I think we can carve off advanced theoretical physics and pure mathematics as a tiny field where the 1/50,000 'genius' people are needed, and that leaves basically all the rest of society.