” He seems to take a picture of it all with his eyes and store it in his mind.”
exactly. And for those on the spectrum with difficulty sorting Important vs unimportant facts, this can be a very overwhelming amount of information.
I remember sitting at that conference when Temple Grandin explained that theory, it was shortly after she published the book by the same name, and it was such a lightbulb moment. It helped explain so many things about the way I process information, and tangential thinking (to you it is a separate topic, but to me it is part of the same ‘picture’).