>'When I would talk to someone about an idea, I found myself not understanding a word they were saying.’

Ha! It goes both ways! Penrose gave a colloquium at my institution when I was a graduate student (physics department), and I've often reflected on how it was the most impossible to understand talk I've ever attended.

He had multiple overhead projectors going to different screens (and this was in the early 2000s when wet-erase transparencies were already less common), and he kept mixing up the slide order or which projector he wanted them on. Then the geometry was so far beyond my capabilities that getting to the science was impossible.