Are mathematicians smarter than us?

The blog assignment of the week asks us if mathematical insight translates into smarts. Why is it that Mathematicians are seen as hyper-intelligent? Here you should take the formalist approach to mathematics into account, where 2+2=4 is only another way of saying (1+1)+(1+1)=(1+1+1+1). Here we are only unpacking numbers, which is doable if your short term memory is really good. Do mathematicians simply have a better short term memory than the rest of us?

I think that the correlation between short term memory and mathematicians is not correct. Maths is not about memorising stuff. Mathematics is about understanding concepts and being able to apply them to different situations. This gives a mathematician a certain kind of "mental elasticity" that allows him/her to being able to immediatly detect a method to solve a problem. I guess it is for this reason that mathematicians are seen as "hyper-intelligent".
It could be that "all mathematicians are intelligent"because they train their brain with calculations and finding solutions to problems, but it's not that if you don't have mathematical insight you're stupid. Maths is not the only discipline in which you have to look at deeper meaning or methods: reading and understanding a poem is also something challenging for the brain, maybe even more than maths, where there are no deeper meaning and most of the things are on the surface.
In conclusion, I think that mathematical insight can be seen as a sign of intelligence, but it's not the only characteristic a so-called ïntelligent"person should have.