What's your superpower?
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Really interesting. I allways wonder whether some mathematical geniuses were able to see way more then just numbers and I could imagine color might be a useful tool when you get into the weird stuff. Thank you for sharing.. That was really interesting.
I am sure there are some of those out there! I saw a guy online who had color and shape based synesthesia with letters and numbers and he had built is own alphabet from that and actively used it for note-taking. He seemed exceptionally intelligent and his notes were a complete trip to look at. Some people called him schizophrenic in the comments because they didn't understand it, but it was very clear to see that there was a logic and a system to his alphabet and his notes that wouldn't have been there if he had schizophrenia. People fear what they don't understand xD
I wish I could remember where I saw that. It was awhile ago. It was so cool.
From what I have been able to tell, many people with synesthesia are either artists or scientists. I'm sure there are also bankers and accountants with this affliction out there, but I guess you don't hear about them as much as they don't tend to become famous.
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I don't have a complete favorite, but generally anything with R or M are appealing. Room is one I like - dark green, white and blue-purple.
I have a real mix of colors. Lots of primaries and whites/blacks too, but definitely more blues. For example, A is red, K is bright pink, but then V is fuschia and X is brown. I find it interesting that numbers have their own colors, but the letters than make up the name of the numbers don't match. So 7 is a very pale but intense orange, while s-e-v-e-n are yellow, bright blue, fuschia, and tan.
I'm curious how your color preferences apply to your synesthesia. I personally dislike certain shades of orange and yellow, so J and S get unfairly judged.
That is awesome!! My version of "room" isn't too different from yours, actually! Black, white and dark, rich forest green. Im pretty jealous that you have so many blues and pinks. Urgh, lucky!
And I totally get what you mean! 8 is dark purple but eight is bright yellows and whites, with a bit of beige in there somewhere before ending a little spot of black.
Well, for me, the colors show up in ways that tend to make them appealing or unappealing, so for example, I'm normally indiffernet to a plain orange color, but when I see the letter Æ, it is orange like a sunset. Shining, vibrant, light and shadow ripples through it like leaves in front of the afternoon rays.
Almost everytime Æ appears in a word, it gives the word an afternoon, golden hour quality that makes the word prettier than normal. The Danish word længes (longing) pretty much has the color combination of you walking through a beech forest in the afternoon sun in May. The browns, the greens and the orange and the gold makes it one of the most beautiful words in the Danish language to me.Meanwhile the word lærer (teacher) just has a regular flat orange and is surrounded by blacks and browns and isn't the most appealing word to me for that reason. If the Æ had somehow managed to get the space and support from the other letters to become the afternoon color, then maybe I would like lærer better?
There are other words that are incredibly ugly and either have dull or clashing color combinations like høreapparat (hearing aid) which is a distressing combination of a dry, desaturated brown clashing with a more rich, reddish brown, then black and vibrant red and a yellowish orange and then some reds and blacks at the end. Hideous word. Any time r's, a's, ø's and h's are put together I see puke colors and we have those letter combinations in plenty Danish words so that's fun. And yet, sometimes it just works too. Ørsted is sleek. The brown is almost consumed in a pure black, the red is bold and fresh and there's a little spark of a pale morning yellow in there to give it a bit of life. When the colors are clean, I like it. But with høreapparat, it's just muddy, ugly colors that don't fit together at all.
My personal favourite color is green, but I have so many green words and in various shades of green too, that I am bored of green when it comes to my synesthesia. Pinks, blues and purples are much more interesting to me in that context because they are so rare.
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I can smell ants too, and it's been useful here in the land of fire ants...
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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 want to see a MCU series that just follows around mutants with helpful but mostly benign mutant powers or powers that can't really be used in fights. Like every-day people who can do almost fantastic things like always know what time it is without looking at a clock or never needs to use the bathroom.
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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.
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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.
CRT TV's emit a high frequency noise while in operation. Apparently there must be a significant number of people who can't hear frequencies that high. My wife can't hear it and had no idea those TV's made any noise at all.
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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..
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Reminds me of the show "Extraordinary". Watch it, if you got the chance. It's really funny and also deals about pointless superpowers.
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To disappear without anyone knowing.
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I want to see a MCU series that just follows around mutants with helpful but mostly benign mutant powers or powers that can't really be used in fights. Like every-day people who can do almost fantastic things like always know what time it is without looking at a clock or never needs to use the bathroom.
I did like in the Invincible comics that Atom Eve realized that her matter-manipulation powers were better used for things like providing food, shelter, and resources to the world than fighting people in suits.
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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.
Tensor tympani is the muscle
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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've hit some killer long-range underwear-into-the-basket shots with my toes that honestly should've been on Sportscenter.
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I aquired this superpower trough habits, but i can intuitively find the north.
Apart from that, well, I'm just myself
You're far too humble, Captain North-man.
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My super power is that I always know the difference between a fart and a shit before it exits.
"Oh, excuse me, I accidentally farted..."
"COME NOW, CITIZEN, WE BOTH KNOW THE TRUTH."
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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'm similar. Ever since I was a kid, my mom would notice that "babies love me." They really do. If there's a baby nearby, it'll probably love me and I'll probably be making faces at it, etc. I think it's partially the beard, but it was true pre-beard, too.
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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 organized my books by color long before learning some people hate that.
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I can't really speak for you of course, but I can add that I thought it was the same for me. Until it turned out I was the only one who was hearing these noises.
I have some version of this that thankfully only happens very rarely. But it is more like a violent electrical sound that "feels" so loud that I should be dead. It is awful.
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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.
I had this too! I think my high frequency hearing is just really good.
I recently was at a wedding and only the little kids and myself (in my 30s) were really annoyed by this device the venue had which used high frequency beeps to scare away rodents and things.
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Old. Repost.
I beg your pardon, elucubra, but I'm deeply afraid to say it might not be the spring chickeny of content, but rather +/- 6h in lay online. 'Tis but a smattering of minutes aged. Not a repost, good elucudra.
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I organized my books by color long before learning some people hate that.
To me, it communicates that you prioritize the aesthetics of the books over their contents. (That hackneyed phrase, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ I think is part of the “hatred” people express towards this choice.)
There are def books to be collected because of their aesthetics - I have a gorgeous Taschen on the Crusades, a Maimonides text in Hebrew (which I can’t read), or very old English translations of Chinese texts. I’m very jealous of people who have things like complete Harvard Everyman’s or lots of vintage Penguins. Or people who just love Moby Dick so much that they’ll fill shelves with Dicks (Along color - Penguin put out a beautiful blue edition that I still can remember holding and debating on buying back in 2018.)
I don’t get “hating” the way someone else chooses to collect or organize their books. (And I’d have no room to stand on, because some of my shelves have more stacked on them than they have in them, it’s chaotic) I do “judge” people on the books they have and show, because the books you read and consider important are pretty easy ways to see what ideas have influenced your mind.
I love the opportunities for conversation that looking at a bookshelf brings, because I suck at small talk. It gives me a deeper understanding of a person - I can pick up a few niche interests and broader themes with a quick look.
