Is there someone in your life who surprises you with their knowledge?

Myself sometimes; even I don’t know how much information on diverse topics that I’ve inadvertently soaked up over the years! :D

Seriously though, I don’t. Everybody in my life has pretty much the knowledge I expect them to, and when I ask about something outside of their known expertise, they generally don’t have an answer :/

My 7 year old grandson, who knows one hell of a lot about things that I wouldn’t expect.

My boyfriend, he knows so much about sport it’s scary. We play that ‘win a million’ online game and whenever there is a sport question he knows the answer. He also knows a lot about medical things, not in terms of like you @JLeslie but he can predict what the doctor will do when I visit. It’s kind of odd! He’s an archaeologist so that is his learned knowledge.

My SO fits this bill. His formal education ended after high school and has worked on a line in a production factory for 30 years. Despite that, he knows a lot of stuff and never ceases to amaze me.

If you allow people to just talk, nearly everyone will tell you some interesting and often fascinating things. And with elderly people whose memories are intact, every single one of them without exception has some area (or several) of expertise. For those of you still young and frivolous, let me warn you that one aspect of your life that shifts as you age, is the number of hours you’re going to spend visiting people in hospitals and rest homes. I was in my late 40s, leaving a hospital after visiting a 94 year old former ship’s captain. I was annoyed, because I’d spent more time visiting than planned—2 hours more. I at least had the sense to call and cancel a previous appointment from Cap’s room. Thinking about it, I realized that in such situations with old folks, I ALWAYS overstayed my time, and the reason is simply that I am too intrigued with the things tumbling from them to tear myself away. By now I have an expertise on visiting folks in institutions that comes only with practice, and I’ve arrived at some interesting realizations. Here are 2 of them. First, the amount of knowledge and talent locked away and wasting in our institutions must be absolutely staggering. The second revelation is that excursions to such places should be planned like picnics.

@stanleybmanly That sounds like our downstairs neighbor, whom we jokingly refer to as “The Historian”. Through him, I have learned more about the histories of wars from the Civil War to World War 2, along with the early years of baseball, hockey, country music, the Navy (he spent many years working with the Chaplain corp) and fractional reserve banking, along with the etymology of the Bible (often centering around the Aorist tense, and how it can make translation from Greek “interesting”). Great guy, but sometimes (okay, often) turns a 5-minute trip next door to the supermarket into an hour-long excursion.

Like @elbanditoroso my grandson never ceases to amaze me. For 8 years old he seems to have a very broad scope of knowledge, especially considering his father I deny saying that and his ADD addled brain.

My youngest sister who’s 14. She knows so many random facts and I’m pretty sure she has seen the entire internet. But she also does very typical 14 year old girl stuff. One time we went past a play ground, and she climbed on top and started bossing around all the other kids. During a 2-hour car ride, she found a list of terrible puns and read them the whole time. Other times it’s like, “how do you KNOW that?”