I think you’re fooling yourself about “not being gifted”. Your rate of absorption is extraordinary and extrapolation is one of the highest aspects of intelligence.

In what ways do you think “a lot of people” were “way smarter” than you?

I’m not sure, though, how you measure this stuff accurately–Do you go by how much of the sentence you read per glance, or by the number of words?

I was stunned, once, to realize that a lot of people actually read and sound out individual words into their adult years–I think I started reading whole chunks of sentences sometime in my grade-school years, and I’m told by my Mom that she thought I taught myself to read before I started school. My memory of that is different, but I do remember being bored out of my ever-loving mind about every day I was in school. Which probably says a lot about why I am mostly self-taught for subjects past high-school level… My idea of hell would pretty much be a classroom full of “normal learners” and having to put up with going at their pace, yet again.

Don’t think I was gifted, just able to process information better/faster than average. There’s a certain ineffable difference between bandwidth uptake, processing speed, and raw intelligence. I have known a lot of people who had much slower baud rates than my own, but who were, in my opinion, a hell of a lot smarter than I am. Problem-solving ability doesn’t always imply speed, and speed ain’t smarts.

Although, I’ve always had a knack for being able to work out implications better than average. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at something my peers were planning, and went “Yeah, that’s not going to work out well, or at all the way y’all think it will… I’ll give this a hard pass, thankyouverymuch…”.

This sort of thing is why I’m highly dubious of much of the “conventional wisdom” concerning intelligence. You have to be clear about what you’re measuring, and the lightning-quick guy isn’t always 100% accurate. But, he’ll generally do better on the tests than the slow, methodical plodder who gets every question right–Eventually.

There’s a place for every sort of thinker, in my opinion. We’ve put way too much emphasis on some aspects of “intelligence”, thanks to unclear thinking on the issue.