BTW, I have always had this weird tendency to recognize the flags of various nations, and I had wondered why. It's not a perfect skill, but I get more right than I should given that I had no memory of ever studying flags. Why would I, right?
One day, when I was an adult with kids of my own, I ID'd some random flag on TV when I was with my mom and I said something like, "It's so weird. Why do I know that?"
She replied, "Probably because when you were a young child--4? 5? 6?--you memorized all the flags of the world for fun. You were obsessed with it for a while there."
Aha! Until she told me that, I had no conscious memory of the flag obsession. Once she told me, I could vaguely remember the plastic placemat I had that had all the flags on it. Oh yeah...
The moral of the story: those odd obsessions do stick with you in some form or another, even into adulthood!
