I’ve already figured out that unconscious aptitude is rarer than focused thought (and thus fortuitous), but not until this point did I realize that it might actually be the innate sort of intelligence!

While walking, I hypothesized that unconscious intelligence, the state I tend to prefer to very focused concentration (except when deeply involved in, say, a particularly fun math proof), is most likely a more natural form of intelligence that most people lose because they are conditioned to specialize (and thus must think – consciously – very hard about very narrow subjects, leaving no time, and eventually little will, for “free” contemplation). After all, most gifted people that I know tended to think that way until they reached college. It follows, then, that I retained my ability to think as I do quite definitely because I was never significantly challenged. That explains why I accomplished my greatest intellectual achievements outside of the context of formal education (with the exception of graduating with the highest GPA in my class, which wasn’t so much an achievement as a reward). The fact that I could achieve such things at such a young age simply served to reinforce the behavior, and thus now I can advance my understanding of many fields in parallel where the others I knew cannot. Their knowledge outside of their specializations ends at whatever proficiency they built it up to at the time they were teenagers, and by the time they revisit it again, it will be too late to master… but mine continues to grow.