Really? I have a knack for putting together dates and names and events in my mind, and history's sort of been a passion of mine forever, so I never had any trouble in history. Managed to sneak in a course on British History as my "other cultures" requirement, which strictly speaking probably wasn't kosher, but...
And Calc 1 was fun. It wasn't until vectors that I hated Calc.
That must all play into the difference in "how people think"... thing.
I'm useless with math *until* I get to vectors, and a more geometric view of things. I'm OK with visualizations of vectors in two or three dimensions. Maybe that's why I really got into navigation... which is really all about vectors in two dimensions. For me I didn't have to solve for the answer, but I'd just visualize the solution and 'see' it. It was the geometry of the solution that just fell into the spaces.
But give me an algebraic problem... and I'm helpless until I can work it out on paper. If then...