[goodside]

When I was in high school, I could recite nearly 1,500 digits of pi from memory. This wasn't because I had number-memorizing superpowers, it was because I was a geek and I spent time memorizing numbers. If you look at interviews with top competitive mnemonists, you find very few who claim to have (let alone actually have) any sort of "photographic memory" or even autistic savantisms. It's just a mundane subject with strategies and tricks. People don't close their eyes and see numbers, they break them up into convenient chunks, look for symmetries and patterns, and memorize them.

You can't underestimate what people can accomplish when they have severe abnormalities in their interests. Calendar-counting to compute days of the week is not hard. Weather patterns are easily mentally compressible, with natural chunking points from the seasons. Most people's work schedules are highly regular, so it's easy to break weeks into patterns and exceptions. And so on. Everything that's demonstrated in this article is well within the realm of feasibility for a sufficiently dedicated person without superpowers.

[rue]

I'm sorry to inform you, but you in fact do have number-memorizing superpowers (or, alternately, "focusing on task and persevering" superpowers).

[edanm]

I think the point he was trying to make is this: would you consider someone who could completely crush you at, say, basketball, to have "abnormal powers"?

I'm not talking pros, I'm talking about people who've played sports all their lives. They can probably beat most people at their chosen sports. And a lot of perfectly "normal/average" people are really good at one sport or another. We don't talk about them as if they're "abnormal".

Haven't done it, but I'm guessing that memorizing 1500 digits of pi is easier and less time consuming than getting to a decent level at some sport. Except that for most people, playing sport is fun, so they don't think about it as "extreme concentration". For the op, memorizing digits of pi was fun (I'm guessing?).