I think we all have our mental quirks.

For instance, I think I'm pretty intelligent, but I have a rather poor memory, especially for numbers. The only phone number I've memorized is my own. I have called my mother weekly for several years, but I still haven't memorized her phone number. I don't know my car's license number. I don't remember what year my car was made. I could never tell you what my salary was, closer than the nearest dollar per hour. If I wanted to know my annual salary, I'd have to do the math: $X * 40 * 52. There were times when I couldn't tell you how old I was, until I subtracted my birth year from the current year.

Of course, I have all these things written down somewhere, and can look them up, if I need to.

The most striking way I notice how different I am from other people, is when I play cards. (My favorite game is hearts.) I marvel at people who can count cards, and who can tell you, at any stage of the game, how many hearts and how many spades have been played, and who is short of what suit. I could never do that. At the end of a hand, a lot of people will want to have a post-mortem discussion: "When you played that ace, I thought you were going to...." I can't comment, because at the end of a hand, I can never remember who played what!

I can do math pretty well, though, at least in practical situations, because I have no trouble remembering the principles that math is based on. I just can't remember the numbers.

For some reason, though, accounting is a different story. Remember the joke about the sea captain that kept a slip of paper in his safe and looked at it every day? When he died, the company broke open the safe and found that it said "Port = left. Starboard = right."

Well, I needed a slip that said, "Debit = add. Credit = subtract." (Or maybe the other way around!) (Yeah, I know, it's not that simple, but I don't want an explanation!)