Not at all. When I was in college for comp sci, the Asians and Indians had amazing memories, they could easily remember the rules and syntax and all sorts of stuff. But when it came to applying that knowledge and solving problems, they were fucking terrible.

Yes. Without memory, you can't have a high IQ, but I forget.

Yeah, I pretty much know everything. I just have trouble remembering most of it sometimes...

Bacopa monnieri, omega 3 fish oil DHA + EPA, exercise, meditation, adequate sleep and reading books can help increase or preserve long term, short-term and working memory. Will also help with other cognitive functions.

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Sometimes I'll go on a deep dive into some topic, let's say health or quantum biology or light-based protein folding or deuterium or whatever. But in the end, it all "condenses" down to extremely basic principles about how to live, eat, sleep, move, etc. So while it is fun to get into a nice conversation with people and go down those rabbit holes, if you can't distill it into an elevator speech of why it's interesting or useful, it's useless to most people who don't have the time to look into it.

I could say that I don't recall x, y, z exact details or data, but I damn well know where to get you that info if you yourself were curious enough. For me it just comes down to reinforcing or reflecting on basic behaviors, and knowing where to pivot or evolve next.

Here's a crappy analogy / example: I watch a bunch of videos of people making god-awful saftey mistakes, stepping under ladders, being precarious on ledges and the such, or not double-checking certain steps in a process. Do I remember each and every one? No, but in the exposure fashion, I have little threads that I either pull on or that become apparent when a given scenario related to that past learning comes up.

So I'd say it has less to do with precise memory, and more to do with how one algorithmically compresses the "learned data" into useful "instinct/intuition" when a relevant scenario comes up.

Intelligence itself though, is a bit broad of a subject. I'd say a measure of intelligence is one's ability to percieve the current scenario, percieve how other agents in said scenario are operating, feeling, thinking, and then dismissing most of it as junk data unless some type of flag comes up. Being able to acheive one's goals, or operate in the context of an adversarial environment (stress, others getting in the way or hampering flow, evading danger or pre-emptively readying oneself for alternative options, are all "signs of intelligence." I think a better question would have to be how is intelligence tempered in an individual, and how do they reflect on the memory of their own evolving intelligence