I realize this topic is somewhat old now, but I have a novel - where novel is to mean that it has not so far been listed - experience to share. My ex girlfriend's sister did something exceptional with words and I've never met anyone else who did this. Given any sentence, she would identify the letter furthest in the alphabet, determine how much that letter must be 'shifted' in the alphabet to become z, and then shift all other words accordingly. We'll take my name as an example: Brendan. R is the latest in the alphabet, and it must be shifted by 8 letters to be 'z'. Doing this to all the letters now: b -> j, r -> z, e -> m, n -> v, d -> l, a -> i, n -> v. Brendan is then Jzmvliv. Now, this is easy when sentences contain a z, but she would also sometimes choose to work with each word individually! This would greatly increase the calculation involved, but she would always spit an answer out in under 5 seconds!
As for myself, I do all sorts of things with words. I'll translate them into numbers and sum them, or I can very quickly count the number of letters in a long word (15+ letters). Somewhat related is the calendar calculating I do, though I'm not especially good (by this, I mean that I do this one date at a time; nothing too crazy).
It should be noted that I also have a 'high' I.Q. - I put the term in quotations to indicate relativity, as I know a few people with much higher I.Q. - and that this behavior may be more common among the highly intelligent (though this is a personal observation, not one that I've researched in any depth). I am a member of The Glia Society, and have an I.Q. between 150-165, the bulk of my scores at the lower end thereof.
