The strange path of accepting how your brain works

I think you are onto something quite important. There's a ton of work being done right now on the psychology and cognitive mechanisms underlying learning. Part of the difference, it seems to me, is not just that you encode spatial information differently - it's also that you have no option but to use your spatial memory, and it's working all the time. It gets flexed naturally in a way that the part of your brain that memorizes a formula doesn't unless you have no choice but to exercise it very frequently, or possess a truly unusual brain.

Put another way - I have terrible visuospatial skills, but I still am able to navigate the world and manage fine because I have no choice. I had to learn to do visuospatial tasks in order to function, so, I can do them, and I do them constantly with low error rates. The muscle isn't naturally as strong as other peoples', but it's exercised enough to not make a functional difference.

This is where the idea of "mind palaces" come from - maybe such a visualization would help you.

I think there is actually a lot of benefit in being "smart enough" but not a genius in some areas.

When I was growing up, if you were too smart as a young kid, you'd be singled out as "gifted and talented" and then put in special classes, asked to do more schoolwork, etc. This separation had both positive and negative effects - on the one hand, it was a lot less boring to work on accelerated material. On the other hand, adults came to view you as "special" and just inherently smart in a way others weren't. That's both denigrating to others, and an intense amount of pressure for a kid.

Personally, my response to this pressure was always to shut down if I didn't immediately grasp something. I just didn't bother to try - why fail and look stupid? It wasn't until college that I learned how to study and flex mental muscles that weren't already strong. In fact, I took introductory calculus three times - once in high school, twice in college - before I actually understood what was going on. Unlike language-related fields, higher mathematics just didn't come naturally. It took three tries because I had to figure out how to study, which I had never needed to do until that point, and because I'd taken the idea that I had to study as a sign I was unfit to be learning the material at all.

I went on to do just as well as my peers, or better, in the other higher mathematics classes I needed to take, but the fear was always there - what if this is finally the thing I can't do, that my brain just can't learn? What if this is just too hard, because it doesn't come naturally at all?

It's much better, in my view, to be someone who knows they can do anything, but that they have to put in effort. Learning to put in that effort consistently and not be disheartened by the challenge is much more valuable in some ways than knowing how to do the specific thing one is learning.

I am older now than John von Neumann was at his death.

I do not possess his genius, but my life has been far from worthless.

I do not feel myself slipping, and I have much to look forward and appreciate.

When did you start noticing that change? I am going through it right now, and I am barely in my mid 30s.

It's not awful. I am still sharper than most, I find. But damn if it isn't depressing.

Interested in hearing about your app. I am building an app which uses high frequency words gathered from a body of text (eg TV subtitles), and allows a student to learn them using simple example sentences, synthetic audio, & spaced repetition. The goal is to learn a language subconsciously while taking a walk, doing the dishes, sleeping, etc. If you’re interested in chatting about your project, or language learning apps, my contact info is in my HN profile.