All very intersting!
Question, what do you mean by smart and intelligent? I find these terms can mean a lot of different things in different contexts and different cultures.
As a child, my parents told me I learned to speak differently. They said my older siblings learned individual words and then strung them together. While I apparently started off by picking the sounds, rhythms, and cadences of adult speech, and the placed words in my speech slowly. They said it literally sounded like I was having a conversation as a toddler, but when they listened, nothing I said made any sense.
Later on, at age 4, It was discovered I was disfluent (I stuttered) and started speech therapy. I had 7 years of speech therapy and achieved hyper fluency somewhere around age 12.
As a child, I struggled a lot academically. In looking back in my documents from childhood I found an IQ test that rated my IQ in the bottom 2% of people my age and demographic (I was 7 at the time). Last year however, I took an IQ test that rated me in the top 2% of people in my demographic, which is literally the opposite of my childhood. Yet as a child I know I was very intelligent and I thought about very mature and interesting concepts, but I wasn't always able to communicate this to others because people wouldn't listen to me because they got so distracted by my stutter as a child, and assumed because I talked differently I was not intelligent.
Overall, I have no idea what intelligence is, as if I am smart or not seems to change, and it seems based on someone's idea of smart, and that feels very subjective to me.
One area I have always scored high in, is vocabulary. In both IQ tests my vocabulary was extremely high. However, when writing, I never seem to have the right words and find myself still looking up words I don't know daily. What's the purpose of a good vocabulary if I never seem to use it? IDK.
Also, you mentioned memory, I do have a pretty good memory, I can remember back at least until the age of 2, possibly younger. But I have no idea where I park my car every time I go into a store!
It's all intersting. I am very confused by IQ and what it means to be smart. I've been told I'm very smart, and that I'm the opposite of very smart, often for the same criteria.
I enjoyed the read!
