High Cognitive Minds

There's a quote from John Stuart Mill's autobiography that has always tickled me because it illustrates so well how we make assumptions about other people based on our own interests and abilities. He received a classical education typical of the time, so Homer's Iliad was naturally part of his curriculum.

He said "...It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it
became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted:
I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through.
I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste
apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think,
observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of
narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I
should have expected both a priori and from my individual
experience."

I wonder how old he was when he discovered that his taste in literature wasn't shared by the average schoolboy. Since he was educated at home, by his father, I imagine that it was at least a few years before real-life experience taught him differently.

Even after years of such experience, and in full knowledge of how different my mind and my interests are from the norm, I still have those moments of impatience when assumption takes over. "Why would anyone say something that stupid?" "Doesn't she know anything at all about...?" I'm not sure it's possible to reach a point where hard-won knowledge about education and intelligence always rule, rather than the assumptions that we'd like to pride ourselves on having left behind.