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33 Times People Observed Strange Displays Of Intelligence That Totally Caught Them Off Guard
We all know beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But perhaps intelligence is too? After all, there are plenty of different ways to be smart. We can probably all agree that aerospace engineers are brilliant. But you don’t have to be a scientist or have a PhD to be intelligent. Maybe your brain really shines when it comes to emotional intelligence, or perhaps you know how to play over a dozen instruments.
Netizens have recently been discussing the most unusual and bizarre displays of intelligence they’ve ever seen, so we’ve gathered their stories below. From people sharing unsettling observations to being able to memorize anything, there are clearly plenty of ways to show off your smarts. Enjoy scrolling through this list, and be sure to upvote the displays of intelligence that would have shocked you too!
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#1
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.
Peter Bear 6 hours ago
There was a time in this country where we actually educated people in physics, and 'common man physics'' like this were common for precisely that reason. No longer.
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#2
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.
Nathaniel He/Him Cis-Het 16 hours ago
I can name one instrument that he could not play if he got his hands on it. The theremin.
#3
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.
That’s all I yam 15 hours ago (edited)
I was lucky enough in college to have a student in the same program as me that was exceptional. It didn't matter what subject came up, she'd had a Wikipedia-style knowledge of it. She had it all - a great laid-back personality, friendly, solid group of friends, partied a lot, never seemed stressed (probably for good reason). She was probably the most innately smartest person I've met.
#4
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.
That’s all I yam 16 hours ago
I worked at a high school for students at high risk. I was asking a student that was having extreme difficulty in class some background questions as she was typing very fast a report for another class. Her answers were well thought out and she had good eye contact. Like what the OP described, she never slowed her typing. I had the same reaction as the OP, it was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
#5
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.
Daisydaisy 15 hours ago
My (Aspergers) nephew can do this - give him any date and he'll tell you what day of the week it was! He's a delightful human being - gawky and awkward but so gifted at maths and music! ❤️
#6
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.
#7
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.
#8
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.
Michael Largey 5 hours ago
Never traveling far from home gives you the time and opportunity to become an expert on what's there.
#9
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.
#10
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.
#11
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. 😀.
Michael Largey 5 hours ago
I'm well versed in bar codes because I have been kicked out of so many for violating them.
#12
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.
#13
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. .
Judes 13 hours ago
This used to be a reasonably common skill. Before cash registers, shop keepers had to add everything up by hand on paper, and my dad would always beat them to the answer by doing it in his head. Even when I was in primary school (in the 80s) we spent a lot of time just adding up 5 digit numbers (partly because I had a s**t teacher who didn't know what else she should teach us).
#14
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.
#15
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...
That’s all I yam 15 hours ago
Yep. I had the same experience. I had always heard about people like that, but finally I met one in college. The one and only one I've met. In my mind, I categorized her as a true genius.
#16
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.
#17
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).
Caroline Nagel 8 hours ago
My friend has a fish tank housing a Betta fish, some shrimp and a very scary glass sucking fish.
#18
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.
#19
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.
#20
I knew a guy that could remember everyone's phone number, name, and employer. He was in sales and was a living database.
fly on the wall 15 hours ago
Had a grocery store manager with that type of memory: he could remember all of our customers, their names ,their spouse and children and relevant personal/social details. He commonly met customers at the door with a personal greeting and a question such as " is your dog/ cat better after their surgery " etc. I don't remember what our customer count was but I am confident it was much more than 2000.
#21
I met a guy at a research conference in September. Lets just say he got two PhD's at the same time (geology and oceanography) and started writing books immediately. The sheer volume of work he has done is staggering. If he isn't one of the ten smartest people alive today I'll donate a testicle.
He was also smart enough to convince the US Army to blow up a delta to see what happens. He also advises the Pentagon on climate change.
#22
My exgirlfriend's boyfriend (poly relationship) was amazing at chess. Nationally ranked master. She would laugh when I said I was going to beat him eventually. We called him a robot. For a promotion once, a local ice cream shop hired him to play against customers and anyone who beat him got free ice cream.
There was no free ice cream given on that day.
Major Harris 2 hours ago
my late father in law had an expert ranking in the american chess federation. beat my pants off every time accept once. most of the time, i would put up a good game but would make one mistake and then my pieces were flying off the board. he would then reset the board and show me where i messed up. but, once, the gods of chess touched me and i could not believe it when i looked at board and said, "dad, i have you in mate in 4 moves with no escape." he sulked.
#23
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.
#24
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.”.
#25
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.
Foxglove🇮🇪 20 minutes ago
I did logs in school but I have no idea what they are used for or how to work them out
#26
One of my colleagues mentioned a few years ago that he'd gotten an offer from his bank for a credit card with 0% interest for a year and a max of $10000. So he took the offer and opened a saving certificate *at the same bank* for $10000 at 12 months and something like 5% interest, paying for it with his credit card. So he got $500 from the bank for free. Fits the bill of smart but strange pretty well. .
M O'Connell 4 hours ago
The last time you could get a CD with a 5% APY was more than 25 years ago. Further doubt comes from the fact that cash-advances on credit cards always have a fee, even if the account interest rate is $0.
#27
My grandfather could apparently add a large column of money in his head.
Impressive on it's own, but this was predecimal Australia, so he'd be mentally converting every 12 pennies to a shilling, and every 20 shillings to a pound.
#28
One of the Professors at my college is a world expert on gibbons and he's used his vast intellect and knowledge of gibbons to also be the world's best gibbon impersonator.
Tl;dr The most impressive display of intelligence I've witnessed in person is a pretend gibbon call.
#29
I know two chemistry professors in different countries who can do the same trick.
Advances in chemistry are published in papers, and retrieving the paper involves knowing the journal, year, and page number (with some journals you may also need volume and issue numbers, but it's usually just those three). Both these profs can remember the entire reference for any paper they recall. They'll just be like, "oh yeah I remember in Tetrahedron Letters 1995, page 4857 someone oxidized an alcohol with hypervalent iodine for the first time.
Mimi M 7 hours ago (edited)
Used to call someone with that level of scholarship and memory a 'Pin Man'. Meaning that if you put a pin through a book or text, seeing the first word the pin pierced through, they could tell you every other word the pin went through on all the other pages, both sides. And these were not simply eidetic (perhaps childlike) simple savants, they were actual scholars who spent their lifetime studying - i.e., they earned that ability the hard way.
#30
A guy in high school could basically do any addition, subtraction, multiplication or division in his head and give an answer quicker than you could type it on a calculator. I can't remember how far we pushed it with number size but could instantly do a three digit number by another three digit number.
Rick Murray 14 hours ago
My mom could do that. I suck at maths and would reach for a calculator. She'd just shrug, tell me the answer, and claim it wasn't difficult. I wrote down a bunch of calculations and tested her against me with a calculator. I lost embarrassingly badly.
#31
The little sister of a friend of mine was one of those kids who develop language at a freakishly early age. She was younger than two, I was eating dinner at their place, and she knocked her sippy cup off her high chair table. She shrugged and said "a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.".
Mimi M 7 hours ago (edited)
I was a little itty-bitty kid. One time on a camping trip with my family, my cat (who I took along for the ride) was hiding under the front seat inside of our car. I went to go borrow some milk from a neighboring camping couple, explaining that my cat was nervous. They said to me 'nervous - that's a big word for such a little girl'. I looked 'em dead in the eye and said 'small in stature, but not in mind'. Took the milk and left, I don't think they even replied.
#32
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.
#33
I went to a NJ Giants football game. My wife and I were wearing somewhat monochromatic clothing while everyone else there was decked out in team regalia. The Jersey girl in front of us (think London Essex girl for those who get the reference) was great fun and drunk as hell and while she was high-fiving us after the Giants scored she looked at us and with a completely straight face said, "You two look like an Ansel Adams photograph." We were stunned.
More Information 14 hours ago (edited)
Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was an American environmentalist, conservationist, and photographer. His photos of Yosemite helped found the land as a national park. He also took wonderful portrait photos.
What do you think ?
Major Harris 1 hour ago
please, you are NOT r.f.k. jr., don't insult your self.
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Major Harris 1 hour ago
please, you are NOT r.f.k. jr., don't insult your self.
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