“Made Me Feel Like My Brain Was Spaghetti”: 65 People Share The Creepiest Displays Of Intelligence They’ve Seen In Others

I'm a guy and my best friend in my teens was a girl. She was that nice, but cliché dumb blonde girl. Always extremely naive. The better I got to know her the more she acted differently, but only towards me. I could have highly intellectual discussions with her about nearly anything. But as soon as other guys were around, she acted like barbie again. I asked her why that is and she very bluntly told me "Well, guys feel threatened by intelligent woman, it is easier to play dumb to get my way around them.". And she told that in that calculated, manipulative, ice-cold manner. I was convinced I was talking to a real psychopath. She ended up with a full scholarship and studied in a prestigious university. She is now working for a very well known IT company.

My roommate could recite every lie I’d ever told him, word for word, years later. Never used it against me.

Just liked knowing he could end me anytime he felt like it.

The silence was louder than any threat.

My Greek teacher in high school had an endless memory. One morning I ran into him on the train and told him I couldn’t chat because I had a history oral exam (not his subject). He asked what topic it was on and then started explaining, in incredibly detailed fashion, the dynamics behind the decisions made by the rulers of that particular period.
He never prepared a lesson: he would walk into class and ask, “Where did we get to?” and from there he’d start explaining whatever came next. About anything.
Once he told me that this ability of his was also a curse, because he could feel any pain he had ever experienced in his life — including losses — as if they had just happened.

Wasn’t creepy really but I did a group coding assignment with a guy who was as logical as a computer. He could just know where a mistake was and fix the error in an algorithm. Made me feel like my brain was spaghetti.

My 9 year old non-verbal son can pinpoint where a certain number is on his math square blocks (that aren’t numbered and are about the size of a large sugar cube with different colors) He lines them up in different patterns and more than 400 so it ends up being a long rectangle. One day I asked where some random number was and he immediately touched one so I counted and he was right. He’s never been wrong. I’m not a math person so maybe it’s common but I can’t look at 400 blocks and tell you where 233 is without counting every block 🤣.

I had a friend who picked up languages easily. He wasn't fluent in every language he knew, but he could hold lengthy conversations or help people if he could. 


It was the way he would switch languages. He would get a blank face, no blinking and suddenly back to normal speaking in the different language.


Most people like blink or move their eyes a certain way because they're thinking of the translation. Not him. It was like every language was a first language for him.

Mention any popular song from the 1950’s, 60’s or 70’s. My uncle knows what date it came out and what DAY OF THE WEEK IT WAS. He can also do this for almost any random event you mention. And no, he’s not just making it up because I have checked many times. He’s accurate. I have no idea how he does that. I can’t even remember what day it is today!

Those people who can look at like a twig on the ground in someone’s video and somehow pinpoint their exact location.

In my first IT job I was having an argument with a colleague over password complexity.

I argued “of course people are going to write these passwords down, they’re 12 random characters including symbols, we should provide them with some kind of password management software.”

He argued that you only need to look at a password for thirty seconds to remember it.

So to settle the argument we set up a laptop with a random password, write it on a piece of paper, give it to him and set a timer for thirty seconds, then we take the paper away, agreeing that we’ll slide the laptop in front of him at a random point in the day.

We catch him in the middle of a phone call and slide it in front of him.

Without stopping his phone call he then proceeds to type the password into the laptop using his middle fingers which he then flipped up at us as it logged in.

Still argue that I was right and his demonstration meant nothing haha.

I had a kindergarten student who told me exactly when a 7 minute timer was going to go off on my phone. I had forgot that I even set it and out of nowhere she said 3,2,1 and it went off. The wall clock was out of order. There were no computers in the room and she didn’t have a phone or watch.

I’m pretty good at this as an adult, like I can set the microwave on three minutes walk out of the room and return just as it goes off… but I’m over 40. How could she do that at 5 years old? She is still my student years later and I know that she can tell when I’m lying. It will be like little things, to avoid hurting someones feelings. I think I’m a pretty good liar but she will call me out on it.

My autistic son (low needs) learned sign language at 7-9 mos old. His math skills were outrageous by 2nd grade. It was then I started envisioning taking him to Vegas, like Rainman. He could look at math problems and just know the answer. Eventually, they became too easy and he lost interest, started acting out so my Vegas dream was shattered.
Today, he is the head of a MECA tronics program at an engineering program. So much for my quick million!

Not sure if creepy, but my best friend in high school had STEM classes like he had the answers hard coded in his head. Would drive teachers crazy because he HATED showing his work. He could solve calculus problems in 1/5 the amount of chicken scratching a normal human would need. He got an electrical engineering degree, masters in bio-chemical engineering… would skip class because the teacher “was an idiot”, read the book and get a perfect score on the tests.

Could not act, dance, play music, but anything that needed computational power… he just has it. Being brilliant in certain ways meant he couldn’t release his particular types of analysis thinking that makes life pretty hard: relationships, work, parenting- things that are anti-pattern to computation.

In real life up close, my husband. He’s a genius and sometimes he makes a call months in advance if something happening. It’s so unnerving. We watch the news and see a report he clocked months ago.

If you've ever seen the mentalist with the character Patrick Jane, I knew somebody who was just like that. He was extremely good at reading people from their body language and words. He made a full time living from playing poker.

Scary guy cos I'm sure he always knew what everyone was thinking.

I know a couple people who have numerical intelligence beyond my understanding. my friend's ex, who was an engineering student who did his homework at the gym- took one look at the problem he had to solve, worked on it in his head while doing his set, then wrote the answer when he was done. correct every time. then my aunt who is now the head of her math department at the university she works at, I've watched her not just solve huge complex equations in less than a minute but run through ten or so at a time as a fun hobby. She's a great teacher, too, and the only reason I passed my college calculus classes, which to me is one of the best signs of intelligence there is.

My kid, at the age of like 5...

We're from the midwest but would often travel all over the world, and took public transport.

No matter how many twists and turns it was to get on a subway car or how many curves and twists and turns and etc the actual subway route was, ...

while we were still underground, he'd be able to tell me exactly which way we would be facing when we got up the stairs to top side---

Not just north, South, east, West but he would actually say Northeast Southwest and be right.

Not really creepy, but I found it impressive. My 16yo nephew is one of those kids that can solve a Rubiks cube super fast, which I understand is pretty common by just memorizing a sequence of movements once certain patterns are established.... but the other day, he kind of blew me away with how his mind works.

I brought over a slot car track set to test out before I set it up as a fun activity at an event coming up later in January. The set has 4 or five different styles of track pieces, and several copies of each piece to arrange. Like, curved surface loop segments, flat straightaway segments, squiggly segments, turn segments, criss-cross lanes (its a 2-lane track set) etc.

We did the set up featured on the packaging, then started talking about what if we made it into kind of a banked track set up, or had a segment run vertical up a wall. Each time, we broke down the pieces and he would just rattle off the order for the different segments bits to piece together to get the array we just talked about -not as we were assembling, but before hand. Like, he mapped it out in his head and broke down how to get the shape, the loops, the vertical or banked segments by combining the different style pieces in order without actually laying it out. This included twists, loops, turns, banked areas created by repurposing the loop pieces, and changes in elevation. And he did this quickly and repeatedly for each array or concept we talked about. Then, he recommended buying another identical set to make an even more complicated track and told me exactly how to piece it together (it was a fairly cheap set, so I actually did order a 2nd one).

Maybe this is something lots of people can do, but I was impressed, because I know I can't do it unless I have the actual parts in hand and am actually assembling them, or if I have written and drawn out plans ahead of time. He could just envision the components and mix and arrange them spatially in his head, the rattle off the order in which to attach one to the next to the next in order to make the circuit.

"Creepy" isn't the right word, but over the Christmas break my dad reminded me about one of his uncles.

My family owned a wholesale grocery store, and used to get deliveries of big hoops of cheese. The hoops had random weights, which was stamped on them: "24 7/8 pounds", "19 1/4 pounds", "22 5/6 pounds", etc.

As the hoops came off the rail car via a conveyor belt, the uncle could have a full-on conversation with you - not just "uh-huh, yeah, yeah", but an actual conversation - all the while adding up all the weight. At the end, he'd be like "OK, so that's 1,280 and 3/8 pounds, is that what the invoice says?" and he'd be right every single time.

I would have to write all those numbers down, convert them to decimal, and use a calculator to add them all up... Uncle James just did it all in his head.

Guy gets a perfect score on the LSAT, but something *glitches* in his mind and he goes home to notify the test creators (College Board back then), that one of their questions on the test is incorrect.

They respond to his email and were astonished he was correct then asked him to work there.

I dated a girl in the 90s that could remember huge number sequences at a glance.

She mentioned this when we first met, and I assumed she was full of it so wrote my number down and briefly flashed it to her.

I didn't think any more about it until she called me the following day.