33 Times People Observed Strange Displays Of Intelligence That Totally Caught Them Off Guard

Lived next to a guy in college who could just simply play any musical instrument you put in his hands. Drums, guitar, keyboards, an oboe, sax... you name it.

And any song he could hear just once and play it back.. just bonkers.

When my friend started studying at university, she was an engineering major. After a while, she decided that she wanted to change her major. **Because there wasn't enough math**. Now she's studying just straight up math.

Sometimes she makes the 9 hour drive back home, and she plays a game to keep herself alert.

She adds up the numbers that she sees on license plates of passing cars and then add all of the cars' totals' together. She tries to go as long as she can.

I think she's brilliant and insane.

EDIT: she hopes to work as a research intern for NASA this summer. She loves space.

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 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 high school history teacher blew our class away when we had visitors from various countries sit in on a few classes. At the end of their time in our class they had the chance to ask him some questions but, none of them spoke English well enough to properly articulate what they wanted to say. So my teacher casually went back and forth answering questions in Russian, Mandarin, Spanish, you name it, he spoke it. After they had left he just went right back to teaching as if that was not impressive at all.

I own some property in a real rural area and we deer hunt. We wanted to plant some food plots.

The farmer down the road has never been more than 500 miles from home, barely graduated high school, and would be no ones idea of a worldly man.

Until I couldn't get my plots to grow, or my tractor won't start.

Man the things he taught me... how to test soil, cover crops to fix the soil, PH balances and how to get things running.

Taught me a lesson not to judge someone... He is smarter about the things that matter to him and should me how ignorant I was of many things.

Back when game controllers were wired, my dog learned without being taught, to step all 4 feet carefully over controller wires, when passing through the living room.

Met an autistic savant once. I think that's what his diagnosis was, I could be wrong though..

Anyway, somebody said for me to ask him what day of the week I was born on, by simply telling him my birthdate: month, day and year.

So I did, he quickly said IT WAS A TUESDAY.

Hmm, says me. My mother always said It was a Thursday.

So I googled it. He was right, mom was wrong.

Amazing.

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 knew a merchandiser for a soda distributor who could glance at a display and know exactly how many packages of each flavor were needed.

No standing in front of it. No counting. No notes. Just a short walk around the store aisles, to the back room, and "24 Pepsi 12 packs, 31 Mountain Dew, etc.."

I was impressed every time.
I think it was a mixture of him being very experienced, being the person who merchandised he displays last time, and some form of neurodivergence.

My parents have a papillon - a little fluffy dog with giant ears - who is cute as hell. If no one wants to play with her, she will pick up her little ball and throw it for herself.

Well, she tossed it one day and it got stuck in someone's shoe. She dug her nose in to try getting it out, but it didn't work. She dragged the shoe over to another shoe and tugged at it until it was on top, then pushed it over. We all stopped what we were doing to look. She put the shoe back on top of the other again and gave it another shove with a little more force.

The ball came tumbling out and she ran off like nothing happened. It was awesome.

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. 😀.

Had a buddy in highschool with an eidetic memory and an IQ of 80 who was still in all the gifted classes.

He could recite entire pages, down to the number of the page, of any book he read. (And he was very, very well read.)

I guess he brute forced his way through school on nothing but an impressive memory. Maintained pretty standard A's and B's throughout his course work, which was surprising given his lowish IQ.

It was actually pretty eerie.

Actually a really cool guy. Used to debate philosophy and psychology based issues with him because we used both subjects as a hobby. He taught me more than my teachers.

A guy who joined my year in sixth form (last 2 years of high school for Americans). I somehow became friends with him, one of probably only 2 friends he had in the whole school.

This guy was a genius. He had already done the entire syllabus (A-Levels) and spent all of his time in classes working on university level problems. In class, he would sit there, working on some unsolvable theorem, while we morons were being taught matrices, calculus, normal dist, and other basic stuff he probably learnt when he was 5 years old. He would only interact when the entire class was stumped on a particular question, he glances up and tells us the answer. Pretty sure he won all the science and general academic achievement awards too. Later he went to Cambridge, and I joked with him if he was top 5 in his year in maths. 'Top 5,' he said, 'Hmm, maybe top 10'.

I know some seriously clever people, people who've gone to Oxbridge, Harvard, people studying PhDs in economics, etc, but this guy was miles ahead of them. I wouldn't be surprised if he won a Nobel Prize at some point. That reminds me, got to keep in contact with him...

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 grandfather never finished high school, but could add a full page of 4 or 5 digit numbers just by looking at it.  Couldn't divide or multiply without struggling, and algebra was just gibberish to him.  
But he had this gift of adding numbers in his head at a glance.  .

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.

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 rubix 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 smoking.

A friend of mine is fluent in 5 languages, not just fluent but he will joke, fully use double entendre, slang, etc. Ive seen him pick up girls in all of those languages.

EDIT: A bit more context. We live in Prague, and in here is not uncommon to be in a group of people where everybody has a different nationality and a different language, so in that context imagine if you are in this group of people and theres a guy speaking fluently in every persons language, its actually quite impressive.

My father was an Ichthyologist. The amount of information he knew about fish from all over the world was amazing. In our main fish store (1,000 salt and freshwater tanks), we had a "fish hospital" where people would bring their beloved 10 cent goldfish or $500 exotic fish to be healed! They were isolated in a separate room with pH tests, medications, etc.

It seemed so normal as an 80's kid - but now that I write this it seems crazy (people don't even have fish tanks any more).