Natural Talents

I got my first Statistics exam back yesterday. I got a score of 106. My teacher kept coming up to me and making comments to me like, "You don't need a review, do you?" and "You must be using a lot of patience to sit through this class." Come on, I don't want the other people in my class to hate me! The majority of my class is having a very hard time with the material, while I am picking it up pretty easily. I have always had a natural aptitude for math, but this is the first time I am realizing how my mind naturally picks up the patterns and works them out. I guess I have never given it much thought. It was only recently that someone told me that this kind of stuff was hard for most people. Two of my brothers have been taking calculus and having a miserable time at it and I didn't understand why until my roommate told me that she, who is extremely intelligent, had a very hard time with it also. This is really interesting to me, the fact that people's minds work in such different ways. To me, math is logical, it makes sense and that is that. I figured that people who weren't good at math just weren't that smart. I didn't think about highly intelligent people having a hard time at something that made such basic sense to me. I once took a class on how the brain works, called Behavioral Neuroscience. It was a fascinating class. I had a very hard time grasping how memories and thoughts are really little electrical impulses going on inside the brain. It is even more amazing to me now to know that each person's brain works in such a similar way, but so differently at the same time, and that is what makes each of us unique. I think if you study the brain, you can gain a better appreciation for the complexity of human beings and how they function. I know that for me, it gives me an even greater appreciation for Hashem's creation and solidifies the belief that there is no way it could have happened by chance.