Maybe I'm a bit abnormal or had some kind of mild defiance disorder as a student in the 80s. Despite testing high and being told I was "gifted", I never could m

Maybe I'm a bit abnormal or had some kind of mild defiance disorder as a student in the 80s. Despite testing high and being told I was "gifted", I never could memorize the multiplication table. I learned the diagonal (the squares) up to 11x11, but even as an adult am more likely to fast-forward through some sequential calculations in my mind rather than trust a memorized answer. For something like 6x8 I'll still almost immediately decompose it into either 2x(3x8) or 6x8 = 8x8 - 2x8 = 64 - 16. And if I did the latter, I'd second guess myself as to whether I'm going to make fence-post errors in the subtraction. Even something basic like 5x7 I might mentally turn into 5x5 + 5 + 5 and just mentally step through the answer 25..30..35 on a number line. I get more error prone when incrementing by 7. As an aside, it kind of blew my mind when I discovered that my wife seems to work a completely different way "in floating point". She'll often come out with a good answer for the mantissa but having lost track of the exponent. My mental calculations don't work this way at all.