I had almost the same experience mentioned above. I was in an academic excellence program in fourth grade. In fifth grade, I received zeros for three assignments in a single day and flunked out of it. The school ordered an IQ test while they were trying to see if I had a learning disability. I scored 186 on the test and was promoted to Gifted classes, much to the chagrin of my former teacher.
My problem has always been application. I get distracted very easily and lose interest. Just about the only thing I've never (yet) burned out on was music, which I seem to see very differently from the people I've worked in bands and projects with. To me music is almost entirely math. I'm pretty terrible at playing by ear, to the point that I usually can't pick out how to play my own songs from a recording, but if I treat a song like a formula, I can remember it forever.
I'd also say my memory is well above average, but only if stored correctly. In college, I was able to memorize the text and pictures from most of my textbooks just by reading them while listening to some music. By the end of my first semester, I'd figured out that all I really had to do to study for a test was to listen to whatever album I'd been listening to when I read the appropriate textbook right before going to class. I was even able to turn the pages in my head (which was invaluable during lab practicals where we had to identify tissue and cell types!). To this day, Sonic Youth's Washing Machine instantly downloads an entire Anatomy and Physiology Textbook into my memory's temporary buffer.
The downside is that I have almost no sense of the passing of time. It literally feels like I graduated high school a couple of weeks ago when it has actually been ten years. It causes some social difficulty as well, seeing that I tend to remember entire conversations (verbatim) with people I may have only had a tangential relationship with. It is also trying in relationships, because I remember everything that transpired, good and bad, albeit without any sense of time attached, so that it is as if years of history with someone are compressed into a few days time.
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