“It’s Really Creepy”: 59 Times Someone’s Intelligence Was Impressive And Freaky At The Same Time

I have a child in my class who is scraping a pass. She struggles with focus and is a bad test taker as a result.


But the observations this girl makes are incredible. She sees connections between things that are amazing. 


She is also tiny, which has meant she has a lot of sass to make up for being physically so small. I have seen her command a group of boys that are all older and bigger than her and get them to work on the task at hand. 


She is going to do great things with her life.

I knew a guy that could remember everyone's phone number, name, and employer. He was in sales and was a living database.

I remember this kid in my speech/debate class. Asian kid, introverted, has facial twitches, but brilliant. We had to give spontaneous talks on topics literally pulled from a hat. We'd reach in, read the topic, and get about a minute to prepare a 3 minute talk. His had to give an ad hoc speech on how science made the world better. And he gave something that sounded like he'd researched it for weeks starting with Galileo and ending with the fact that we had all survived childhood in a place where alligators and disease carrying mosquitoes roamed.

My 10 year old brother got a Rubik's cube as a gift and immediately reprogrammed a simple robot he'd also gotten as a gift to recognise each colour and solve the cube for him. He built working arms for it so all he had to do was place the cube in a compartment, turn on the robot and wait approx. 2 minutes for it to be solved.

I once had two guys come pull my truck out of a tall, steep ditch. The amount of “common man” physics these guys had in play to not only pull the truck out of a peat bog, but also keep it from tipping over while it was creeping up the ditch bank was incredible. I almost had them call it off and I’d figure something else out, but they assured me there was nothing to worry about. Sure enough they got it done without any trouble. It took a while, because they were continually stopping to recalculate (in their minds), but I was amazed.

I said something about my car to a coworker and she said something like “Is yours the one with the license plate 8HR32G?” I wasn’t even sure, but I checked and she was right. I asked how she knew, and she said she knew everyone’s plates. And she did - people were coming up to her and she would rattle off their plates. There were about 40 people in our office. So strange and impressive.

I used to do graphics design on all kinds of material that used bar codes, and I would do the coding on the system that generates the bar codes. After many years working with this, I started being able to "read" barcodes, recognize which coding had been used etc. I couldn't exactly read the code in the sense that I could read the content of the code, but I could recognize barcodes belongings to different items, like "this barcode is for milk", and I could recognize which coding had been used, if the coding was right etc., just from looking at the barcode itself.

My colleagues used to test me by introducing errors in the system, enter the wrong codes, doing the format wrong etc., if they entered data in to the system to get the barcodes they needed, just to see if I would spot the errors. I caught it every time.

On one occasion, a wrong code had been printed on the label for a box, that a courier was picking up, and he freaked out, because in passing, I saw that the barcode on the label was a nonsense code, so I told him to wait while I made a new label for him.

I have a female friend who has almost superhuman memory. But only when it comes to conversations she partook in. She can remember whole conversations, who said what in what order etc., that happened 10-15 years ago. Like it's really creepy. But if she reads a book, she has a hard time holding on to what she learned from reading. She started taking a pilots certificate last year, but had to give up, because she would read and read and read and keep forgetting what she read.

I had an elementary student who was incredibly accurate at picking things up and guessing its weight.

We later found out he was raised in a [trap] house.

My dads boss has an idedic memory or whatever it’s called where she remembers absolutely literally everything she’s ever seen or heard etc.
during meetings apparently they’ll be discussing strategies for what machines to use and how (it’s a tech manufacturing plant) and their reasoning and someone might be saying “well machine #2 was having this issue three or four times in the last month…” and she will interject and cite the exact numbers for all of machine 2’s reports in the last three years and extrapolate trends in her head from the multi-page long data reports on hundreds of machines daily from the past year.
And when one of the people under her tries to lie or whatever she catches them every single time because she just has to LOOK at the data once and she just…knows it forever. Like if someone says “yeah I cleaned that machine two weeks ago. I’m 100% sure of it”, if she’s seen the logs for it she will reply, “no, you signed off in blue pen on this date at this time that the machine was cleaned and it has not been cleaned since. Two weeks ago you cleaned machine #8 and John cleaned machine 12, and last week you took a long lunch from 12:31 to 1:45. Pull up the logs and you’ll see.”.

Saw a guy wire a grinder to a dimmer switch so he could slow down the rpm without buying a new grinder.

My cousin's son had some very thorough and well thought out ideas about time travel, string theory, and other dimensions. He's nine with AS. The kicker is that his true scientific interests lie in geology. The other stuff is more of a hobby for him.

I installed cable internet for a man from Ghana. In our conversation I discovered that he was a research physician at the University and he needed the Internet connection because he is the system admin for his brother's Internet based business. While he was happily chatting away about the research project he was doing his fingers were clacking away at a pretty decent clip writing lines of code.

I can't type and talk at the same time unless I'm saying the words that I'm typing. This guy was coding while talking about something completely unrelated at the same time. It makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.

My human anatomy and physiology professor last semester. You could ask him anything about the human body and no matter how irrelevant to the current topic, he would go extremely in-depth and finish off with a simple metaphor to help explain.

My brother could explain techtonic plate theory before he could spell his full name.

A kid I babysit knew the scientific names of different kinds of clouds when he was three.

My husband is the Leonardo Da Vinci of anything related to your house for building and repairs. He grew up on a construction site with his dad.
one day he was watching ESPN and talking to his BFF about which wire goes where. Very detailed instructions. I thought he was reading a data sheet on his lap, out of my line of vision. Nope, it's all in his head and he's flipping thru ESPN like an a kid off of ritalyn. He was helping his bff rewire his 100 year old house.

I knew a 17 year old girl who got paid $100,000 to skip high school and go to college to do her groundbreaking PHD research in new-age mathematics and physics, sponsored by the Thiel Foundation.

I knew this guy in high school with buck teeth and a mullet, talking to him, you’d definitely assume he was mentally handicapped, and extremely high…….. however, one day he brought in a rubik's cube and just blasted it out in a few seconds without looking at it. Then we were in class one day and I think someone was doing algebra homework near him so he just looked over and started giving them the answers. apparently this guy can just look at an algebra equation and drop the correct answer with only a glance. I’m pretty sure he’s living in a trailer somewhere with no shirt on.

I was involved in a real fracas from my company. It got litigious, and both sides were lawyered up - all men.

After months of legal negotiating I hired this very senior female partner to get it over the line. On a call with her and their lawyers, they threatened it was my last chance to agree before they fired me. There was a lot of testosterone flowing.

She paused, and then said “well, if you do that tomorrow morning we shall certainly be in court by the afternoon. And clearly no one benefits from that. So let’s agree not to do that so we can agree on a deal and end this sooner rather than later.” My employer’s lawyers completely caved, and caved to my final objections in a few days.

What I am not conveying yet is her tone. When she said it, she sounded like she was a mom telling her thing boy and his friend s from doing whatever they were up to she disapproved of. Every guy lost his testosterone buzz quickly after being scolded.

I’ve been involved in a lot of corporate litigation, and some personal. She did this for a flat rate (a lot of money). Even I would be shocked at what I paid per hour. But it’s the most effective legal spending I have ever seen.

This was a lot of EQ, but she was also an unbelievable lawyer. So she could back up her threats.

I’m sure I’ll get questions about this so I’ll explain why they didn’t just fire me. This typically happens when you are senior employee, but due to politics they want to get rid of you. But they don’t want you to go to certain competitors and have the headline “joe smith has surprisingly moved from company ABC to company XYZ.” It happens a lot in entertainment.

It may be one reason they did not just fire Jimmy Kimmel. He undoubtedly has a contract but things change: ten years down the road competitors, you may have new competitors they never thought of.

There is a lesson here. If you ever have legal problems, hire the most expensive lawyer you can find. Other lawyers know their reputation and tend to want to not go to court against that lawyer. Most people hire the cheapest. You can always change lawyers later, but you’d be surprised how fast things get settled when tho other side starts worrying about losing in court.

A guy i was in college with didnt speak one word of english and didnt use a calculator he was from china.. he did everything in his head including logarithms. He got 100 percent on everything…. Insane intelligence.