I used to be able to tell what refresh rate they were set to because everything below a certain point flickered. I'd ask people why their screens were flickering and they couldn't see it.
Now that is a superpower. I've always thought the ability to see fast was such an interesting skill.
Think about it: you could go to the Olympics in a skillful sport like fencing or boxing, and defeat every opponent without much formal training simply because you can see them telegraph their moves. No anticipation or planning required, you just watch them come to you.
Do you do any competitive sport?
Though just because you can see such fine movements doesn't mean you can react fast enough to stop it. You'd just see your loss coming from a mile away.
I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.
Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing... the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity... I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.
The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they'll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.
Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.
No, I have very poor hand eye co-ordination. Every time I have tried to play table tennis people have been on the floor laughing at how poor my reactions are. My eyes are just very sensitive to light.
When I lived in Canada for a year and then moved back to Europe I saw CRT TVs flicker for the first week I was back home. Even on so called 100Hz CRT TVs I saw flickering. Got used to 60Hz CRT screens so 50Hz CRTs were very noticeably
You might want to get yourself checked for Autistic Spectrum Disorder because I notice CFL tube (fluorescent tube light) flicker if I pay attention to them when no one else does
Some people with ASD are more sensitive to things other people don't notice
Mate, there are so many things that suggest I am on the spectrum now that I have given up keeping track of them all. I'm not sure that at my time of life there's anything that can be done for me even if I did get a diagnosis.
Try that with cheap mobile phone charges. They have an annoying coil whine.
... Wait. I assumed it was my extension cord keeping me up at night. I just learned to use it as white noise.
I swear my therapist says she sees no reason for me to be diagnosed as autistic
I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.
Got gaslit about it by my family as well.
You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.
You'd think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.
Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.
So that has a name! Hahahaha There's no way I can memorise that, I'll keep call it "eeenergy" instead.
Good to know what it is in case someone wants a serious answer.
My brother and I always enjoyed going out to the woods together when we were young because you couldn't hear everything humming out there. I still enjoy it for the same reason.
My hearing isn't even that great because I've spent years around loud noises (industrial and concerts) without hearing protection. But I can still "feel" cheap chargers, bad screens, and florescent lights.
A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers ... yeah I can often literally hear when you've plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.
Also, if you're near high tension power lines?
You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.
But... that hum? The buzz?
Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.
Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.
Out of all the ways I've ever been told I may have autism, this is certainly the most unexpected! At a certain point I should probably get a diagnosis.
In my family's defense, they did believe me as soon as they tested my hearing (after trying to trip me up several times, without success), so I never felt gaslit, I just felt proud of my hearing hahaha.
Yeah, I didn't mention this in my previous post but it was annoying, for sure. I would listen to this annoying noise, nobody would hear it, and I'd eventually discovered that somebody had left the TV on.
That phenomenon is also something I saw, but never really gave it much thought, I just assumed it was just something our eyes did
Well I'm glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.
I've been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis... yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.
Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).
... Anyway, there's much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.
There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations... if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.
entoptic blue field phenomenon
Thank you. You've solved a mystery that bugged me since forever lol. Yay, I am not crazy. I legit thought there was something wrong with my eyesight all these years, or that they were just weird floaters. Thank you so much, friend. Relate hard to the sound stuff as well, it's nice to know it happens to other people al well.
I used to hear it too, now I'm old and I can't hear anything above 16KHz, maybe less now.
Same, but more like 13k Hz last time I tested myself.
Welcome to the world's most useless club.
Used to be able to walk down the street and know who's home watching TV by the whine (sort of like an extremely high pitched white noise).
Now CRTs are gone I've since realised I also have tinnitus and am constantly hearing that same sound in my left ear.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Diagnosed autistic?
It's very common for us 'spergs to have a very high frequency cut off on our hearing, all the way to old age.
I'm 43 and can still hear the bats chirping when they're hunting insects in the twilight round the gardens. People think I'm making it up, until I point the bats out, tracking them by sound until they flutter high enough to see their silhouette against the sky.
CRT TVs and monitors used to annoy the hell out of me. The high pitched whine of the flyback transformer that runs the motion of the electron beam makes a very distinctive hiss. Like someone else on here, I could tell what refresh rate your monitor was running in by the noise it made.
That, plus an abnormally high flicker fusion frequency meant I had migraines every other day when I was working. :-/
Ah, the "Mosquito" device.
I have strong feelings on those things. Strong enough to drill holes in one while up a ladder wearing a visi-vest.
Side note: It's amazing how invisible you become while wearing a high-vis vest and a hard hat.
An IN-visi-vest, if you will
Not as cool as Predator camouflage but just as effective.
think I was crazy or had tinnitus
When you have tinnitus, then you will know it. And then you probably can't hear that CRT screen anymore.
About "crazy" I don't know ;)
Nope, I usually hear both! 🙃
Should be an age thing. I remember at school that some teachers would leave the TV on when they were done showing something and the CRT noise would make us students crazy and we had to remind the teacher to turn it off.
So you will probably lose it at some point.
I had this before my hearing was damaged in my mid-thirties. I could hear if any electrical device with large filter capasitors was turned on, even from another room. I discovered by accident that the high pitch noise was emitted by the capasitors when I was fixing old audio gear, I guess they vibrate while doing their job or something like that.
I talked about this with my friend who was specializing to be an ear/hearing doctor, his theory was that my upper hearing range was a bit higher than average. He also talked about how brains filter sensory data and it could just be that my filters weren't blocking these frequencies.
It was also impossible for me to sleep in a room if there were any mosquitoes. The whining of their wings even in the far side of a room was maddening, so I had to kill them all every night before hitting the bed. The one good thing that came out of the damage to my hearing was that the mosquitoes bother me no more, unless they fly right in front of my ears.
Approximately 15.5KHz. Not out of range for healthy human hearing. Most of us are damaged by noise pollution and blood pressure issues by the time we’re adults and high frequency sensitivities drop off first.
If a CRT is on in a large space with volume off, I can still hear it a bit, but mild tinnitus masks most of it.
It might happen with non-crt screens too. I remember a flat screen (LCD?) that made a different noise depending on the color it displayed. White and light colors made a lot more noise and if you had good ears you could tell the difference without looking. Not sure how they work though to explain this.
"Coil whine".
The inductors used in the power regulation circuitry physically vibrate due to the electromotive force the part relies on to function. Changes in the load on the power supply changes the characteristics of the vibration, allowing audible detection of the variation.
The physical vibration slightly alters the electrical characteristics too, which is why inductors are glued down or "potted" in some equipment to try and negate this effect.
Edit: The inductors on your graphics card can whine too. This generates noise on the ground line of the whole PC which is then amplified by cheap sound devices, which is why you can literally hear the mouse moving on the screen on some PCs.
Some power-supplies also do this high pitch noise too and it bothers me a lot. Most people can't hear it.
You probably should get yourself checked for Autism Spectrum Disorder and so does anyone else who experiences anything similar
Some people with ASD have a sensitivity to things neurotypical people don't notice
Autism is a Spectrum Disorder so not all autistic people have the same symptoms and you can't self diagnose yourself, you need to see someone specialised for that
You have adhd
I can hear it too. Its a fuzzy buzzing noise.
Oh I got that to a lesser degree. At night, I interpret sudden bangs (door slamming) as flashes of intense white light.
I realised that the lights were not real (phantom lightning, or bright outdoor lighrs winking on and off) once I started sleeping with a blindfold
I have this too, and it’s almost exactly the same. I get little from music though.
It can be really distracting when camping and an acorn falls on the tent or things like that.
I also smell in colour, if that makes any sense at all.
My husband used to work night shifts. When he came home in the wee hours of the morning he would get undressed in the dark, so as to not wake me up. If he happened to make a loud noise like dropping his phone, banging his belt buckle, etc, I would wake up seeing a specific pattern "behind my eyes", so to speak, triggered by the noise. With time I realized the pattern changed depending on the nature of the noise!
Are there any music pieces that are your favorite because of synesthesia? Or pieces that you couldn't enjoy because of it?
I'd also imagine that watching movies must be a very different experience for you too haha.
I prefer music without vocals. Not sure if the Synesthesia is the cause. But my Synesthesia doesn't trigger on voices, which is an interesting way of showing that speech and sounds are processed differently in the brain.
The only way that voices trigger my synesthesia is when I can't speak the language and it's all just "gibberish noise" for me
That's interesting! Thanks for the reply!
The language thing is fascinating to me, thank you for sharing
Being resistant to pain killers and anesthesia is a bitch... Drinking is indeed no fun and very expensive, I also woke up multiple times during various surgeries. Also, dentistry is also a major bitch....
I have the annoying kind of synesthesia that’s more of a sidecar to OCD. People are hues. It’s even more frustrating that I can’t remember names, and I clearly can’t use that as a reference to another person without coming off as a whackadoodle.
This is the most accurate depiction of it I found so far. Although I don't see it like stuff around me, but more like a memory with "the minds eye", so to speak
In a room full of power supplies i was the only one able to find which one was still powering something, because apparently out of the ~20 people that tried before me, i was the only one that could hear the transformer whine.
Also a general annoyance since i need to charge my phone in another room if i want to sleep without simulating tinnitus.
That's something you might lose over time, that's why some places would install speakers with certain sounds outside their door, kids wouldn't hang around because it disturbed them, older people just didn't hear it.
don't think that autism has to do with it. The cause for the higher frequency hearing loss is a physical degradation of the small hairs in the cochlear. And in some people it just happens a lot less
We don't? I can still hear the whine of a CRT. I don't think I have ever heard a mosquito alarm. Maybe I wasn't paying attention.
For what it's worth, about that age is when it started to go away for me.
Masquito alarms should be illegal.
When do we stop hearing the damn things? (27 here)
SO that's what I keep hearing in those dame phone chargers.
I don't hear it all the time though, it sometimes starts happening and after that never stops. I believe it is that something breaks or is about to break that makes me suddenly able to hear it.
If someone more knowledge, knows what's up with them please tell.
So my theory of suddenly making noises means broken don't use, is good.
I envy you so much. Yours is an actual superpower. My ability is the opposite, I can wake up from an alarm no matter the circumstance, slept only 3 hours while completely drunk? Still wake up instantly and start doing things, I've never missed an alarm in my life.
I can also fall asleep very easily, but I cannot just get up to save my life. I envy that ability.
You sleep a lot and I do everything? Doesnt sound very nice to me, tho in FF14 there is a quest chain where one guys is always awake and his 'wife' sleeps for him because of a magical item.
But never suddenly, out of your control, right? As long as it's not narcolepsy, I would appreciate it if you gave me that skill.
I have a blurry photographic memory.
What I mean is that I can remember where/what an item looks like but can’t read it. This was especially lame and stressful in nursing school because during a test I could recall exactly where in the textbook or PowerPoint slide the answer was, but couldn’t “read” it from said memory. Stuff like “it was in the yellow shaded an the lower inner quarter of the page, second and third billet points” or “halfway down the page, highlighted in pink, and next to it was a graphic of the Krebs cycle” Not as helpful as you might think.
I can smell fear. I always thought that was normal, because it’s used idiomatically, but the first time I said something in a group of people, they looked at me like an alien. When someone’s anxious, their sweat smells more metallic to me, like amphetamine/coke sweat (which makes sense).
My boyfriend can smell when someone drank alcohol hours (or even days!) later. He seems to smell it in a person's sweat, so we suspect he senses some kind of metabolite.
As to me? In-person I seem to emit a comforting, trustworthy aura. Children and stray animals approach me like they just know that I'm a safe space for them. As a result, I've acquired quite a list of no-kill shelters in my phone. I also ended up working in children's therapy.
Adults who share my wavelength can also recognize it in me, and I can recognize it in them - we're drawn to each other in the same "inherently trustworthy" way. I suspect it's an aspect of neuro-divergence.
I can count almost perfect seconds. Most people think they can count seconds until they try to prove it.
Like, give me a stopwatch. I can count seconds to within an average of .05 of a second.
I can do this consistently over a long period of time, i gave up counting when i tested it.
It's because i used to have 3 clocks in my living room, and they all used to tick at different times. I guess from when the battery was connected and it would create all these different rhythms.
After many years of hearing these rhythms and noticing the different rhythms that would be made as we changed the batteries over time, i ended up being able to tap the rhythm out on a table/in my head etc and now its just ingrained into my head.
taTA ta... taTA ta... taTA ta...
Absolutely useless.
I used to wonder why adults didn't run up the stairs. I figured adults must just be no fun and didn't want to look silly running upstairs.
So all throughout my childhood, teens, 20s, and 30s I would usually run up my stairs because it just felt natural. Then not too far into my 40s, my knee was just like "nope".
Now I have to walk upstairs, which is lame as hell.
No way man, I'm gonna keep on rocking forever!
Forever!
Forever
Forever...
My mouth doesn't have the receptors to detect capsacin, the chemical that makes spicy food burn/hot. I can eat the spiciest food imaginable and it will not burn my mouth at all.
That said, those receptors exist in other parts of my body. Very often while I'm sitting on the toilet I'll realize my dinner the previous night was particularly spicy.
Also, after more than 1/3 of a century of eating spicy food indiscriminately, my stomach lining has taken quite the beating.
Have you considered working night shifts?
I have abnormally good colour vision.
I have no idea what to do with this.
Found out when studying photography. We did some colour tests that get gradually harder. You are supposed to fail at some point. I kept on passing all of them. My "regular" vision is just normal though.
I can repressurize my ears without yawning, just by flexing a muscle. Even less useful, I can focus my eyes to different distances without using the finger trick, which comes in handy never.
I can focus my eyes to different distances
That's not common? Tbh I never asked around if others can do it I just assumed it's normal.
Maybe it is? When I was a kid people would have the magic eye things and they would have to focus on a finger, and I didn't have to.
Check out the Function->Voluntary Control section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...
Next time you yawn, listen for a low rumbling sound. Some people can do that voluntarily. Apparently 55% of the general population, but many people think you could train almost anyone to do it with some practice.
Not everyone!
Check out the Function->Voluntary Control section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...
I tried to find stats on what proportion of people could do it, with claims of "a small number" through to "over half the population".
This study says 55% in the general population. It's also interesting as it's exploring the ability to use this voluntary rumble as a control method for assistive technology.
I thought everyone could do this and always wondered why people complained about having to pop their ears
you can easily view parallel or cross view images
Actually no, those have never worked for me, idk why
Tensor tympani is the muscle
That's true.
I can focus my eyes to different distances without using the finger trick, which comes in handy never.
I'm assuming you're talking about convergence. When your eyes are physically turning inward to align on a nearby object, that's called convergence. Focusing is what your lenses do, although the technical term is "accommodation".
I'm excellent at controlling convergence, too. I can be looking at my phone screen (like right now) and diverge my eyes just enough to make neighboring letters overlap. Or diverge them so much I see two phone screens entirely. Or anything in between. Same with converging and going cross-eyed.
I can even diverge my eyes slightly further than parallel, making individual stars in the night sky look like two stars. But not by a lot. Looking at me, you'd probably just think was looking in the distance. I can't make my eyes look in different directions like a chameleon.
This does have one handy use: I can see those Magic Eye posters at will, in a split second, even across the room!
Brother 😎
My super power? Invisible to government bureaucracy. Every time I fill out my absentee voter reg, I get a response back telling me I forgot to fill out my birthday. On my last one, I took photos of the filled out form. I've never been assigned jury duty. When I go to the BMV it takes hours because they forget to put my number in the ticket system. (This has happened at multiple BMVs, across multiple states) and it's not like I'm being an asshole or anything, I just get my number and wait patiently for my name to come up on the board, and after seeing the entire room cycle out once or twice I check in with the staff and they're like "weird, your number isn't in the system" despite me holding the paperwork/ticket with my call number on it.
My wife is a super taster/smeller. Like to an extreme level. She can't eat bell peppers because they are too spicy. ( They do produce capsaicin, but so little that they are a scoville rating of 0), she can tell if I steal a sip of her drink, because she can taste the difference on her straw/cup. When we make pasta or mashed potatoes, she knows if I put a little sprinkle of salt in the water (were talking a pinch of salt for maybe 6-7 cups of water), and she can smell that much salt before she even tastes the food. When I eat out for lunch at work, she can not only tell me where I went to eat, but she call tell me what I ordered and if I made any alterations to the order. And no, she doesn't just know what I like to order, I try new stuff for my lunch all the time. The craziest one was when we had a staff lunch, and she was like "Jimmy johns, roast beef, with mustard and hot peppers mix" and I was like "WTF" and she said "that's what you said for lunch, please change your clothes and take a shower". Here's the rub... That was my first time trying JJs roast beef.
Maybe I'm just a filthy stinky person and don't know it.
I can't stay angry; I have multi-sensory aphantaisa, this comes with not being able to re-experience emotions.
I remember that something made me angry, but I can't relive the emotion. It lets me dispassionately examine the past to see what made me angry and thus work through the trigger and try to reduce it in the future.
There is the downside to this, it is on all emotion, so I also can't re-experience happy emotions either.
I just learned from another thread that mine is... fantasizing smells and flavors, and being able to mentally combine them to know what two ingredients will taste like together before I combine them. Apparently not everyone can do this?
A lot of these are skills that people can learn, but they’re not something that most people care to learn. I can only recommend this one though
Didn't knew this was not normal. Although I've screwed with mine by moving. Some stuff tastes slightly different from what I expect, and those small differences accumulate. But I suppose I'll eventually get used to the ingredients here and it will come back.
I have extremely sensitive hearing. I can tell when there's an animal scarer nearby.
This brings me to Microsoft Teams. You might have seen people mention that their dogs know when someone joins the call before they do. That's because they introduced "ultrasonic howling" to detect if they're in the same room as you, and mutes their mic.
It hurts like fucking hell with headphones on.
I have a few different versions of synesthesia.
The most prominent one is that is see words and letters in color. If you tell me your name I can more or less paint your name like a weird color code. Whenever it is brought up it's almost like a fun little party trick where people ask me what color their names are and I tell them.
Spoiler alert, though: if your name has A or S in it, it will most likely have red in the mix. M and N are differnet variations of green. Some letters are dominant and others are submissive so depending on the word they either pain other letters a specific color or take color from dominant letters. E is a submissive letter. Tends to be a pale yellow, but will change color depending on the letters it is put together with. D is a weird dominant letter that changes color all the time. Either black or a deep purple. Completely depends on the word.
Numbers have colors too.
0 - white
1 - black
2 - pale yellow
3 - sky blue
4 - red
5 - dark brown
6 - black
7 - yellow
8 - dark purple
9 - orange
Random names and their colors:
Jack = black and red, white and black again.
Stephanie = red, yellow, green and yellowish white
Peter = gold and black
Mary = forest green, red, black and orangy yellow
Robert = black, white black
Lily = white, silver, yellow like sunshine
William = black, white, red, forest green
Karen = black, red, black, a sprinkle of yellow and spring green.
Russell = black, golden yellow, red, yellow
Evelyn = sunshine yellow, white and spring green.
Etc etc
To me, pretty names are not just pretty if they sound good, they also have to have beautiful and unique color combinations. Most names tend to have red and green color combos for me so whenever yellow, blue, purple or pink appear in a name I really like it. In my country there's a man's name Åge which isn't the prettiest sounding name, but to me it is so friggin beautiful because it's one of the rarest color combinations I have in my head: dusty blue, morning pink, white, misty overlay and a bit of golden brown. The letter Å is the prettiest letter to me as it is this rare double color of blue and pink and it is a dominant letter so whenever it appears in a name or a word, it is like a breath of fresh air among all the greens and blacks and reds.
I have hyperthymia. It's a constant state of mild mania and when I get flare ups of it it's like I'm on speed
Excellent colour vision, forget what it's called but I have being a girl to thank for this one!
I have hyperphantasia too, and didn't realize this until someone posted a diagram on here. When I imagine an apple in my head, it looks the same as me seeing it in real life. I never knew this wasn't normal until pretty recently!
I used to absolutely hate cucumber, to the point that I could taste it if someone cut a tomato salad with the same knife they used for the cucumber without washing it in between, the whole tomato salad would be ruined for me.
I could smell instantly when someone started chopping cucumber in the other room.
That's it, my superpower is to detect traces of cucumber.
I don't actually know if this is unusual, but I can smell when people have a respiratory illness, like a cold. It smells vaguely like the rooting hormone that you can get from a garden center.
I can bend my thumb further back than most people :3 this literally does nothing of use for me x3
I’ve got mild EDS and so far (thirties), it’s just helpful (as long as you stay active and maintain good core muscles). Extreme EDS can result in your skin sloughing off or all of your joints dislocating in your sleep, so it’s not something to ignore, but if the only symptom is your thumb touching your wrist, you might just be lucky.
That sounds really inconvenient, I’m sorry. I can dislocate certain joints at will (fingers, shoulders, knees, and hips), but it doesn’t just happen, luckily. I do wonder how much worse it will get as I get older, but I haven’t been able to find much on mild cases in later years.
It's just my thumb that bends :3.. the only other mildly flexible thing I can do is put my legs over the back of my head
Hypermobility can have side-effects. If your diet isn't right or you live in a very warm or very cold area, it can affect your tissues. If I'm not mistaken it can sporadically be linked to auto-immune diseases.
And autoimmune diseases suck. We don't really understand them, have no good treatments, and some are disfiguring and ultimately fatal.
It's never a good time when your body is attacking it's own tissues.
I could hunt down old tube tvs from a block away just by the electricity sound of the crt tubes when they where on.
Same, being able to hear when electronics are on is very useful when you work with computers.
I can unhook a bra through a winter coat.
Not, that I would
I once unhooked a bra with a hug. Sadly not a superpower I retained.
I can whistle both ways, without a tonal shift. So I can basically breathe as I whistle and do it indefinitely. Full control, too, because of years of doing it.
Do you just mean whistling while breathing in and also while breathing out? I can do that, but there's a short break in the whistle when I switch the airflow direction.
Ie I can whistle a long song without pause, but I can't whistle a single sustained note without a short but noticeable break in the sustain when I switch from breathing out to breathing in and vice versa.
There is a hitch, but you can time it to cadence or the song's note changes. I mean indefinitely in the sense that I could theoretically go on for a whole day.
And no tonal shift in the sense that I can maintain the same note, with that slight pause, but without changing the intonation, strength, etc.
I can do the same thing. It's fun!
I just wish my tonal range were higher. Some app I just installed says my high is C7 and my low is G#5. What's that... An octave and a little?
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.moekadu.tuner/
But that doesn't indicate the range where it sounds the best.
It's a very useful skill when you have a melody on the tip of your tongue and need some software to recognise it :).
Picking stuff up with my toes. I use the two big ones like chopsticks or just scrunch something up with all of them together. My toes can spread out as wide as my fingers, so it's easy to manipulate things with them. Also, I am very well balanced on one leg, probably because of doing this for so long.
This power is more and more useful as I get older and find it more of a chore to bend over, with my beer belly getting in the way (I'm almost 50, it's a sign of success!). If it's below my waist I'm going to pick it up with my foot 50% basically.
I live in a warm climate and hardly ever wear closed shoes luckily, I know some places it wouldn't be practical..
I get SO many weird looks when I tell people I don't like bleu cheese because it tastes like ants
I used to be able to tell if a TV was on or not. I can't really explain it, but it was like I could vaguely hear/feel it? I don't know, I was a kid. My grandma would play her games without sound sometimes so she wouldn't wake people up (and probably to play without a kid hanging off of her), but I evolved to counter it. 😂
oh wait i got another one, my tinnitus it a pretty constant pitch, and i can measure my intervals offa it so i got perfect pitch. i can't tell you what note it is (except for b3, i hit that one perfectly every time because of this one ave maria) but it takes me a minute. the note is e11 or e12 i can't remember which anymore
I am very hangover resistant. I'm into my 30s now, I've only ever had one hangover, and I attribute that to a bit of blood loss (mishap trying to open a bottle of champagne with a sabre, I have now mastered that art)
I don't drink particularly often, I'll often go a few weeks without a drink, but I do occasionally find myself in a position where I get absolutely hammered and I wake up the next day feeling absolutely fine.
Years ago I was camping out at a music festival and got totally incoherently drunk, stumbled halfway into my tent and crashed there for the night. The next morning my friends who hadn't gone nearly as hard woke up all feeling pretty rough, and we're created by me already awake and making breakfast feeling fresh as a daisy.
I do tend to mix in plenty of water and food with my nights of debauchery, so I can't say that it's genetic or if I just happen to be doing the right thing. It's not a purposeful anti-hangover measure, I just want food and water while I'm drinking.
I'm not totally immune to the negative effects of alcohol though. I absolutely get red wine headaches, and a good night of drinking may sometimes give me a Charley horse the next day.
I can plug in a USB drive/cable on the first time, successfully, without flipflopping the connector (and then USB C had to come along and invalidate my only worthwhile achievement)
I can rumble my ears, do the vulcan greet, do Stan Laurel's kneesy earsy nosey and the finger wriggle. I can also measurable lower my heart rate by conscious effort alone, and increase my body temperature by concentrating on it.
I can also measurable lower my heart rate by conscious effort alone
I read somewhere a while back that people can learn to do this with training and a visualization. If you have a heart rate monitor that shows different color shades depending on your rate, apparently people can learn focus on making the color turn green and lowering their heart rate.
I do it by focusing on my torso and in my head decelerate it, I guess it's similar. Also, a guy I know can do it through breathing technique, and I suspect breathing is part of my deceleration too.
I think I can smell progesterone, in some women, and in some months (far more than others/other times). Being male, this is absolutely is not something I can collect a lot of data on very quickly, and I don't know whether the strength or clarity for me correlates with women who have higher levels than normal, but I do know it correlates really well with this chart in terms of timing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...
So often I know that it's a week and a half before your period, and I know what that means, but I promise you that I have never ever used this knowledge, partly because I'm pretty shy, but not even with my wife (who doesn't know I can tell) when we were aiming for pregnancies, because that was a very busy time indeed in that arena and I saw no reason to reduce that in any way whatsoever.
My knee makes horrible, disturbing crackling and popping sounds when I move it, even just a little bit. It doesn't hurt at all, and grosses out anyone who is unfortunate enough to hear it. I especially enjoy telling family members to "listen to this" and then slowly extending my leg out.
I shattered the upper portion of my tibia while bouldering to get this ability. I asked my surgeon about it (my tibia/knee required a total of 3 surgeries to repair) and they told me it was likely scar tissue, and would persist.
You should've gone with Ambiguous Pops then for your username. 😄
I can wiggle my ears.
Both. And each one individually.
Every time I've read this in this thread, my ears flex hard. Sometimes if I do it too many times in a row one gets "stuck" for a moment before it can relax.
Well, not really superpowers since they are common in humans. However, they are pretty interesting abilities nonetheless.
Advanced speech recognition. I can filter out speech of one person while ignoring other background noise and even other speech.
Advanced face recognition. I can see faces in clouds, floors, and other inanimate objects. Also helps when looking at real faces of people in a crowd. See also: pareidolia
Auditory hallucinations during hypnagogia. Look it up. It’s weird and trippy.
Desensitization and habituation to capsaicin. I can eat spicy foods.
I have the opposites of all of these.
I can’t differentiate noises, I’m awful at picking out speech in loud places, I’m bad with faces, and spicy foods upset my stomach (I can eat them, but it has consequences).
My evil twin from the mirror dimension. We meet at last! Or maybe I’m the evil one?
You are not alone.
spicy foods upset my stomach (I can eat them, but it has consequences).
Same. It sucks. My brothers have continually given me shit for decades for being a bitch that doesn't like spicy wings. I'm like "dudes, it's not that I don't enjoy the taste, it's that my stomach will literally cramp up 4 hours from now and I'll be shitting pain."
They don't care.
lol well done. the clinical language makes these very mundane skills seem mystical. Hypnagogic AH!
This must have been terrifying for the ant.
If there's some important time by when I need to wake up (flight/train to catch, or waking up to travel by car or go for an appointment) I wake up around 5-10 minutes before my alarm. Like, always. I wish I was joking.
I am a very heavy sleeper. But I have no idea what happens to my internal clock at moments like those.
Probably odorous house ants (sometimes also called sugar ants). I'm fairly sensitive to their scent, myself and recall being in tears as a small child ~6 because one of them walked across my finger and no amount of washing would get the smell off. I'm not a fan.
I can play a spontaneous and convincing harmony on my violin to any song I hear. Sometimes I can even do this as I'm hearing a new song for the first time and trying to join in. I also suck at reading sheet music, so this could be a survival adaptation?
I can bend the top segment of my second toe backwards, 90 degrees on both feet. It feels comfy. It freaks my husband out when I do it.
I have super sensitive hearing, so while I can hear the faintest of noises, it also means loud noises are overwhelming and painful.
Does ADHD count? As it has a few superpowers you just can’t turn them on when you want sometimes. It also comes with some kryptonite.
I can stop hiccups at will. Whenever I get a hiccup, I just stop.

I'm really bad with names and faces, but I can distinguish twins. I mean not the twins like "and my twin has a penis" but monozygotic twins.
I don't claim it to be any kind of a super power, but with my inability to recognize people even after they've been at the hairdresser it's really astonishing.
It's definitely not 100%, and I'm rarely waking up at 6am, but I can usually just decide when I want to get up, and wake without an alarm. It's like I can tell the time in my sleep.
Knowing a timer is almost ready to go off.
I have this stupid sense to know that any timers I set (for cooking mostly, but other tasks around the house too) are very close to going off. Without watching the time when I set them with Alexa, if I ask how much time is left, it generally is always < 10 sec left. If it happened somewhat often, that'd be over thing, but this happens like 80% of the time.
I've even had 12h timers (slow cooking, etc) where I've checked once the entire time and it was within 10 to 30 sec remaining.
Nothing to do with my time management skills though, because I'm still late to all events. Whoops.
I can also smell ants but only after I squish them.
My superpower is I can accurately pour one or one half cup of rice by sight and feel without going by the line on the measuring cup.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/...
Weirdly flexible joints are a sign of this condition. I found out recently (at like 32) that I probably have a mild version of this. Mainly due to weird allergies and being able to bend/dislocate my fingers in weird ways.
May be worth checking into if you don't know already. Don't consider this a diagnosis. I am not your doctor, nor am I a doctor at all.
Hypermobility can be a health risk indicator for more than just EDS. Consult your GP.
I get to be the favorite of pretty much all the family pets. Always been.
Some family and friends joke that I probably could go to an African safari and the lions wouldn't harm me. Not really rushing to find out if it's true tho.
Hyper-compartmentalization. Everything can be falling apart around me, high stakes, emergency, danger, but I just proceed calmly and steadily toward the goal. I am a rat in a maze, and each decision is just an ab node in a tree. I make best guesses and don't shoulda woulda. If I can't make it and everything is horrible, that was the outcome, I did the best I could with the knowledge/data given, or I put in what I felt was right, and if I'm wrong, oh well.
I don't consider any part of my personality as a super power, although I am aware I have a few oddities on me.
I can "smell" a shift in air humidity. This led to me learning I can cook by my nose, as I can smell the very onset of burning or low content of salt or spices.
Anyone else can smell crickets?
I gave differents colours in my mind to the days of the week, I color coded my emotions in order to know how things are inside my head and I have a colour bar to range my dialogue intensity to other.
I always thought these were normal things, growing up. Just like having a narrator voice in my head (this one comes really handy when reading a book; all character have a voice and the narrator has another).
I’m with you on crickets.
Crickets, grasshoppers, ladybugs, ants are all smelly insects to me. My wife thought I was crazy for a while hunting down bugs and smells in the house by sniffing like a hound. Now she just goes with it.
I can smell small amounts of sugar added to water — very helpful when we get coffee on the road and can’t tell whose cup is whose.
There’s a lot I can smell from bathroom smells and body odours, which can be more of a curse than useful.
I think I have the same cooking technique as you, I’m constantly smelling and adjusting by smell.
Wait so not everyone can smell ladybugs? I think they smell horrible. I don't detect ants though. Grasshoppers have a distinct smell to me too but I don't find that nearly as offputting.
Ever got the "are you part dog or something"? Always makes me laugh.
Smell is undervalued in humans. I could smells if my partner was about to have her period before she started using contraception.
I have, and I’ve been able to smell the same thing.
Definitely agree it’s undervalued, I don’t even think you need to have an especially good nose, you just need to stop and do some sniffing.
Back in university, I studied basically all day long, which was tiresome after long sessions of study, even if with friends. My great superpower is that it used to just take me ~10 seconds of resting with my eyes closed to feel a huuuuge boost of energy that lasted for 1-2 hours. After that boost expired, I just did it again.
Incredibly useful.
I guess we are only talking about the oddly specific ones so.
I like acidic foods so much, that I drank a cup of vinegar once, and survived.
My teeth are also weirdly resistant to decay.
I constantly drop stuff and catch it mid-flight like a spiderman and there's never anyone seeing it.
I can blur my vision on command, kinda useless but a bit of fun to play with.
I also have a lazy eye, so I can scare unsuspecting people, sometimes two at a time if they're positioned right.
Books. I own probably a thousand physically, have hundreds of thousands of PDFs and epubs between my laptop and NAS.
The superpower is that I have a book “sense.” I know about where each book I own is - my shelves are not organized in any meaningful way, because I’m ADHD and will just pull one out to look at something and reshelve it. I’m not at home right now, but I can imagine my shelves and stacks in my head - can tell you where Palestine and the Palestinians or The Forty Days of Musa Dagh or the beautiful English translation of the 左传 or House Made of Dawn or the book on Scottish coins i thrifted a few days ago all are.
I can look at almost any given strangers bookshelf and recognize/have read at least one of their books. I navigate libraries by feel and don’t need to look up books.
I also read inhumanly fast I think, and have somewhat of an eidectic memory for text. It’s been almost twenty years since I read The Great Gatsby but a student brought it up and I was able to do a 45 minute lecture on it, with quotes from memory.
I’m also prodigious at sex. I’ll read more books in a week than most do over their life, and I’ll also fuck more people in that week than most do over their life.
I can speak Finnish.
I believe I once killed a fly with my mind. I had just read an article about a Japanese kid who could supposedly project images onto camera film mentally. The way he described it was building up a storm of energy in his mind and sort of throwing it at the camera. So I noticed a fly on my window right then. I did the same mental exercise, picturing a cyclone of energy whirring through my brain, building up more and more power, and I visualized unleashing it suddenly in a burst at the fly. Pow! The fly instantly fell off the glass and was dead on the windowsill. Either I killed it or it was ONE HELL of a coincidence.
I can make my wiener dance but that's about it with superpowers
My sister and I were talking about benign superpowers and decided the X-Men probably have someone like a band director with a superpower like perfect pitch who watches after the school while everyone else is off adventuring.
I'm really, really good at peeling oranges with my bare hands (or at least I used to be in grade school when all my friends would make me do it for them). The problem is, I hate the taste of oranges so I never use this power.
i can breathe in strong winds
My super annoying power is a sense of smell similar to the person in the post. I can smell ants, roaches and sick humans. I can smell all kinds of things and it has its uses. I can small bad food and mold a day or so before it is apparent to others.
The downside is that I can small all kinds of things such as horrible BO that others can't. I can smell when women are menstruating. I can smell so many things that others can't that I'm jealous of people who just smell things normally.
wait i'm a supertaster and i fucking hate ants, if that's the scent i can do it too. well i could if i didn't shitbomb the bathroom so often. but you may have legitimately helped me in my lifelong war against the ants (i'm farsighted i cannot see them until i sit down and they crawl up and bite my jibblies thank you)
I have an impeccable nose for work BS.
When a new initiative or proposal or project or just a simple inquiry comes my way, I seem to have a really good instinct as to how feasible/likely this project will come to fruition. BS projects get tossed into a corner, Non-BS projects get attention.
99.9% of the time, the BS projects are cancelled or get completely rectified into non-BS projects before I had to waste a single calorie on them
90% of the time, the non-BS projects are actually developed or, if cancelled, it's due to forces outside of our control
The consequence of this "power" is that I am rarely busy since I don't waste time on the BS and I get solid work done as I can move the time to the non-BS stuff... 23 years into my career I have never been late for a delivery or caught with no progress on a request
I think those are the same ants in the southwest us that can find a box of cereal in a vault. Not sure if I could smell just one ant, but they are insanely smelly until you’re too hungover to pay attention and get a mouthful
Sorry, a mouthful?
Okay, I was imagining waking up to ants in your mouth after a night of drinking.
Lmao it is in fact the worst, but you feel like a boss when you work it out with the ants
It wasn't the sugar, it was the ants!
(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ Depression ♥
I can make the sound of one hand clapping.
It was a thing that went around my middle school. You keep your hand at about a 90 degree angle to your arm, and then flap back and forth with your fingers loose so it hits your palm. Takes a little practice.
I can turn ducks around... but only when they are in the water
If my partner or I visualizes something, the other can see it in their head. We freak out our friends a ton with this. It's hilarious.
I can raise my middle toe like I'm flicking you off
i dont feel anything when i have caffeine. so i can drink Unfathomable amounts of tea :D
I have two superpowers:
Mosquitoes don't find me delicious. When everyone else is getting hammered, they generally leave me alone. When I do get bit, the bites barely swell and they don't usually itch.
Rock star parking- Anywhere I go, I always check out immediately in front of the place I need to be. There's almost always an empty spot, and if there isn't there's someone just leaving that I pull into. I dunno how that helps me fight crime, but it sure would be useful if I were a bank heist getaway driver.
Idk what my super power is but my weakness is salt. Too much and I first lose my hearing followed by dizziness and vertigo.
Same one as everyone else’s., seeing the future.
I subconsciously hear GIFs and silent videos. On repeating GIFs, the same sound plays over and over. Some GIFs sound satisfying and hypnotic and keep me entranced for a long time, while others are loud and obnoxious and make me scroll away from them immediately.
I eat rice in rows like a dot matrix printer
I have never been, nor seem to be able to get motion sickness. No seasickness either. I can read books on all sorts of moving vehicles, and I love roller coasters. Whip me around upside down in pitch dark at 60mph and I'll just call it a good time. My husband says I am squandering my powers because I can play as much of whatever motion intense VR game as I want, but I just end up playing Beat Saber most of the time.
Two. The first is that I can make traffic lights turn green within 5 seconds of putting the car in Park.
Secondly and perhaps more usefully, there's a computer Problem Exclusion Zone around me. I can just stand next to a misbehaving computer, not looking at the screen and with my hands in my pockets, and it'll start working properly.
A lot of my memory is based on Music. So if I hear a song I get all of my memories of both the things that have happened in my life while that song was playing, and where I first heard the song (if I heard the song in a movie or show I can say/picture what was happening in that when the song was playing as well). To the point where many have said it's a photographic memory based in song. Importantly, if there wasn't music playing then I only remember the rough details instead of pinpoint details when there is music.
Now if only it worked for studying, then I would have been able to listen to music while studying and remember all the shit I was supposed to instead of being terrible at tests.
Predicting psychopathic behavior hasn't been based on my 401k.
I can do the Skype notification sound with my mouth, but it's not a natural ability, a beatboxer classmate taught me during highschool. He could also mimic a cricket and that derailed more than one lesson, but he never taught me that one.
I can hold electric (cow) fences without getting shocked. Perfect for fence hopping through paddocks.
now, regarding my superpower i give good hugs
I can smell pizza from three rooms away, does that count ? 🤔
If I read something my brain stores keywords/phrases to it anywhere from 30min to years. Sounds super normal (I think, least for 30min), but this has served me really well in two areas.
I'm able to predict when Holes, starring Shia Labeauf, is about to air on Disney Channel. If I have a strong desire to watch the movie, odds are it's about to air. I was able to do this for years.
I no longer watch cable tv. This power is vestigial. Nowadays when I have a strong desire to watch Holes, I just watch Holes.
I'm really good at smelling food and when it's about to go off. If my nose even picks up a hint of rot that's all I can smell. It's really bad right now because our fridge died so everything smells like carcass in the house right now (even though it's gone).
I have the same super power
Depends on the day, today not really.
I can time travel by picking up my phone and checking social media
i can make some weird sounds that sounds like suffering by closing my nose and then try to "breath out the closed nose and then opening something at the throat"
Dont use it often because it actually hurts, even more without training.
But i never met someone who can do it too
I'm curious. We may need a demonstration.
i made a video now if you are interested. Its a bit longer than just the sound because i try to explain it and did not cut my awkward thinking out. You can skip a bit through it if you simply want to hear it like to 5 second before ending the video there is an easy to find one
https://clip.place/w/j4BBF9oFc2a3j7z1FryCUh (german peertube instance)
I am cold resistant in general and I never had a brain freeze headache. Can load up my whole mouth with crushed ice or popsicles and let it all melt, never had one.
I can make warts go away by touching them while counting. It's been in my family for generations.
I can mimic sounds and voices almost perfectly after hearing them a couple of times. Although as a kid i mostly just did do that to troll people, it did prove useful exactly once when me and a bunch of people i was with were at a forest edge and were gonna get attacked by a troop of monkeys so I barked to scare them off (they often had dogs patrolling that area that the monkeys were afraid of) The monkeys ran away but it was equal parts funny and embarassing to have to explain to these people I barely knew what that even was since I had never told them that i could do that
Mine is knowing there is probably at least one ant in everybody's bathroom and with enough determination you you'll find it.
That one again?
I was able to read Foundations of Leninism in just one day! And I don't even know Russian!!
sleeper agent training
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Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
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Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
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I can hear CRT screens. They emit a high pitch noise that nobody else in my family can hear, I assume most people actually can hear it but never noticed it. My family used to think I was crazy or had tinnitus (jury's still out on both) until they tested me by making me close my eyes and tell them if the TV was on while turning it off and on at random, with sound off. It was a weird test from my perspective, since I could hear it fine anyway. So far I haven't noticed a decay due to age, but if it had little use when CRTs were widespread, it's now completely useless.
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