It may not interest anyone else, but I can tie together the original opening post, the Children's Encyclopedia, Donuel's flash memory comments and even Bill D's philosophy in a single event.

I guess many children began reading the Children's Encyclopedia with its section on stories. I certainly did, and in particular the subsection "Tales from Many Lands". So at just about seven I read one from China or Japan, concerning a time-honoured mirrors were rare and only owned by the wealthiest in the land. As a result, very few people really knew what they looked like.

One day a farmer was digging in his field and found a mirror, not knowing what it was. When he wiped the dirt off it he was astonished to see he had found a portrait of his father. Amazed at this he took in home and put it in a cupboard wrapped in a cloth. And many times he went to look at this wonderful portrait.
After a little while his wife noticed him taking something from the cupboard, gazing at it and the wrapping it back up and closing the cupboard. So one day when he was out working she went to cupboard and took out the mysterious parcel. Imagine her shock to find it was a portrait of a beautiful young woman!   So when her husband came home there was a blazing row, each arguing that it was a portrait of what they said.

Eventually the noise attracted the attention of a nearby priest who came to see what was the matter, and each loudly and emphatically proclaimed what the portrait was and how they were wronged by the other. So the priest took the mirror and looked at it. Then he told them they were both wrong and it was a portrait of learned holy man and took it away and placed it in a shrine in his temple.
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I was seven when I first read that story. And immediately I understood several things at the same time. Firstly, it was a good entertaining story. Secondly, that was not its point: it was actually about how what we see in the world is a reflection of us; we see very much what we want to see. There are no observations that are truly independent of the observer. And even the most learned of us can fall into the trap as easily as the least learned.

So what is fact and what is feeling in this case? And more importantly and more generally, how do you know? They are not that easy to disentangle. A good teacher - and in this case it was a book reporting on a form of teaching centuries old - can open a new way of looking at things in an instant, even if most of the time it is a long slow slog. And flash memories can form from intellectual revelations, not just emotions in the more obvious sense.