Did you really figure this out in the time since the question was posed? Please say no, so I don't feel so inadequate.
This ability manifests itself on a daily basis in one useful fashion. I can look at an entire screen of text (say a log file) and almost immediately take the whole thing in and spot something 'odd' or 'interesting' to examine.
Drives me nuts watching people using computers though. I can find the button or icon they are slowly searching for in a flash.
Sorry... I'm adding on more questions! Hope they aren't too cumbersome:
are normal anagram puzzles all trivial for you?
is "where's waldo" equally easy?
Words to me often look like what they mean. My favorite example is "eager." It just looks like it's barely restrained, waiting to leap forward: a kind of "visual onomatopoeia" I guess. I used to think everyone was like this when I was a kid, but asking a few people about it soon pointed out that I was just a weirdo :-)
I think the reason it's declined with age is that as a child I read constantly - I always had my nose in a book - so words became associated with mental pictures. As an adult I read much less.
My feeling is this is just a very strong "coupling" of vocabulary to the emotional centers. Fast activation, in other words. If this is the case, I also suspect it wouldn't correlate very much to anagram-solving ability.
Up till now I'm the only one I know who was like that. But mine only works for proofreading -- and it seems to be declining with age :-( I used to be able to glance at a page and immediately get a feeling that "something is wrong." Then when looking more carefully I can see the misspelled words.
As an aside, spotting spelling errors is not the same process as solving anagrams. Did you decrypt the anagram in the OP instantly as well? I would consider these two different things.
I remember once figuring out that dataset was bad just from the way it scrolled by; everyone was baffled.
Same issues with watching people do stuff, too.
I heard a story about one of the pioneers in genetics around Watson's time; a woman, forgot her name, who once walked into a room where two researchers (also forgot name) were building a physical model of the double helix. It was at least a couple thousand plastic molecules. She took a look, said that there was one mistake, and turned around and left.
After studying the brain for years I still can't tell why this happens.