Either just by having developed their brains in a way that word facts just stick, or by constantly seeking out new word facts because that's what they love doing.
I believe that the gentleman in this case instantly saw the word 'cinematographer' hiding in 'megachiropteran' because his brain is a highly trained anagramming machine, and knew that it wasn't allowed because he knew all of the allowed 15-letter words, just in case he might get the opportunity to play one.
High-level players memorize staggering numbers of words. All 2- and 3- letter words is entry-level. All X-J-Q-Z, all Q-without-U, all words you ending in -MAN, all 70+ 7-letter words of the form SATINE+... top-level players know the 4000 4-letter words, the 5000 5's, and way, way more.
In a book release event for Stefan Fatsis's book on tournament Scrabble players, Word Freak, the host posed the "megachiropteran" anagram as a trivia question for a book giveaway.
One of the top players in my club _instantly_ replied "cinematographer," and added, "but megachiropteran isn't in the OSPD [Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary], so it doesn't really count."
Had to start researching this when a family member was recently diagnosed.
Parkinson's has many forms and many causes.
There's a big divide between Parkinson's _disease_ (idiopathic Parkinson's) and Parkinsonism from a variety of sources - stroke, drug-induced, and so on.
There are also other conditions, like progressive supranuclear palsy, that are considered either to masquerade as Parkinsonism or to constitute another cause of Parkinsonism.
Recommended treatments differ by the root cause of the symptoms. Some of the treatments that are recommended for one form may be contraindicated for other forms, or for different stages. For example, the recommended dopamine agonists are also the primary cause of Parkinson's hallucinations, so you have to trade back some strength and mobility if those start.
Something like 80% of Parkinsonism derives from idiopathic Parkinson's Disease.
Overall, it feels like we're really just getting started on these conditions. For decades, it's been thought to be primarily a motor disorder, but it turns out that there are scads of cognitive symptoms that develop years earlier than motor symptoms.
And that in some cases they assume familiarity with a large body of knowledge of _other_ people's commentaries on the works, and in fact, those second-hand sources are what they're really responding to.
The greatest weakness of the school is that the list of works was compiled in 1922 and has changed only incrementally since.
It's also a great _strength_ of the school, but you could enter the world in 1988 from SJC knowing absolutely nothing about it. I'm sure that that's still true now.
Talking about them in a small class of people who read the same thing at the same time, led by 1 or 2 professors who are practiced in _not_ acting like more than advanced students, is _really_ different from just reading the book.
I'd read _Pride and Prejudice_ many times before the seminar on it, and I could not have predicted what other people saw in the book and wanted to talk about with a pile of postit notes, a ball of red yarn, and ten hours in front of a big wall.
That's what you do literally every day in math - take turns going to the board and working through proofs.
Ptolemy is Waterloo for anyone who has trouble drawing big circles.
We actually read some Descartes in math-- some of the papers from which we get the term "Cartesian coordinates."
What he does in those papers fascinating, but has very little to do with the way that we learn and use Cartesian coordinates.
Class of '87 here.
Most valuable takeaway is that you can read almost _anything_ directly or in translation. You don't need to read a summary of Hegel, you can read Hegel. You don't need to read an article about a Supreme Court case like Marbury v. Madison, you can read the case itself.
When you go into technology, you're then willing to dive into the guts of the actual docs instead of waiting for a book or blog post about it.
Another way it prepares you for tech-- understanding philosophy is the skill of drawing incredibly fine distinctions between things. Designing software is also the skill of drawing incredibly fine distinctions between things. Having years of experience in arguing these incredibly fine distinctions was a huge leg up fr me when I was getting started, and remains useful to this day.
I think that the careers of my graduating class are primarily in software, law, academia, and medicine.
Funny things about it - there are a lot of places where your undergrad experience just doesn't overlap with that of people who didn't go there. Everyone studies the same thing at SJC, so if I meet a Johnny who went there years after me or years before, I can tell them what I did for my senior thesis and they'll have a similar reaction - why the hell did you do that?
It's also _extremely_ small, so if they went there during the same years I did, I almost certainly know them.
The original-works thing works gangbusters on philosophy, science, and literature, and breaks down a little in math. You spend a frustrating amount of time doing Ptolemaic astronomy, because it's an excellent classical treatment of trigonometry. You study Newton for calculus, but you don't actually learn anything that the modern world thinks of as calculus from Newton, so you study supplemental materials that teach you derivatives and integrals over algebraic expressions.
It's culturally pretty liberal on the inside, although it's bizarrely worshipped by some right-wingers who didn't go there because of the curriculum's focus on works from the European tradition.
Save the Cat specifies page numbers because scripts are formatted to one page/minute of screen time, and movies have ideal lengths.
If you can't turn to the exact center page and find the climax, the script is either formatted wrong (wasting your time) or written wrong (wasting your money).
Overall, when someone says _my favorite movie X_ doesn't fit this pattern or _legendary novel_ Y doesn't do this at all -- well, sometimes they might be right about that, but many, many non-linear movies and books still hit the beats Save the Cat describes.