I'm a fast thinker and good at debating but I'm a relatively slow learner. It's probably because I tend to initially disbelieve everything I'm taught - I need to see a lot of cross-references and utility value before my brain will accept new information and it will still not seem like it is a sure fact. I never feel like I know anything with 100% certainty. Every piece of knowledge I have is more like a probability in my mind.

I have great memory when it comes to useful or interesting things but if I can't figure out the utility of some information, my brain struggles to learn it and will quickly discard it.

The most interesting experience I remember was at school when I was a small child. I didn't understand the concept of school or education at that point. I remember after I moved up a grade, the teacher was referencing concepts which I had learned the year before (I think it was related to alphabet and reading) but because I was in a different class (and different teacher), I did not make the (supposedly obvious) assumption that the teacher was referring to concepts from the previous year (which came from a different source). In my mind, because I didn't understand the purpose of education or school, I had fully compartmentalized the knowledge from the previous year/grade and I couldn't make sense of the content from the later grade which built on top. Once I learned the purpose of school and figured out that knowledge from previous years was still relevant and that knowledge wasn't supposed to be compartmentalized based on the teacher/class, I was able to start learning faster. At least fast enough to be a slightly above average student throughout all my school and university years. I remember being surprised that all other kids seemed to know intuitively that knowledge 'stacked' regardless of the teacher or context. It was a big revelation to me.

I still think I have a tendency to compartmentalize information/knowledge provided to me by different people. My brain compartmentalizes everything based on source until there is enough consensus/synthesis between the sources and then it gets merged into the trunk.

But now that I think of it, it doesn't seem that ridiculous for a child to think that knowledge taught by different people isn't compatible... If you think about modern education, it's actually quite amazing and weird that two different teachers who never met might have the exact same knowledge as each other to the extent that they can reference each other's thoughts and ideas... To a child, it can seem like telepathy.