What's your superpower?
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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.
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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.
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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.
I was going to say VR, I almost never get motion sickness, never got motion sickness from reading on vehicles nor roller coasters. But the first time I put on a VR headset to play roller coaster simulator I almost threw up. Nowadays I can play Sairento doing backflips and wall running comfortably, but that first roller coaster simulation took me by surprise.
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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.
I got some training in this. I once had a task of waking everyone up at a forest temple by ringing a giant bell with a hammer over about 3 minutes, at 4:30 AM. Around 400 people relied on that bell to keep things going. But my alarm clock died at three days into a three week session. It was a no-speech retreat so I just dealt with it.
I didn’t miss a bell but the first couple of nights were iffy. Now I will sleep in unless something urgent is going to happen.
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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?
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.
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I can do this, in addition to being able to vibrate my eyes.
Can also wiggle each ear independently, though the scalp always moves along with them
I graduated from this to accessing the muscles that open up sinuses, and can clear up most congestion with a little concentration. I wouldn’t have noticed except that I cured my headache problem that way, and it has baffled every health practitioner I mention it to.
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i can touch my thumb to my wrist. Not terribly useful.
Hypermobility can be a health risk indicator for more than just EDS. Consult your GP.
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Generations of panicking string musicians have prepared you
Yeah. I think it started when I was playing 2nd violin in a community orchestra. I'd get lost and think just keep playing and look like you know what you're doing. As long as it doesn't clash…
Then I joined a band and they said there are no rules here. Make up whatever you want to go with the song. I was in Heaven!
One time, I was at some kind of open mic thing and an old guy walks up, introducing himself as the official city poet laureate. (Yes, that turned out to be legit!) He started reciting a poem about a local historic event and before you know it, I was playing along. He looked at me but continued. I think it sounded vaguely like something you might hear in a Ken Burns documentary, and when he was done, he came over.
Wow, that fit the words perfectly! What piece did you choose?
Oh what? No I just made it up on the spot.
Really! Could you play it again?
Yeah, no. But if someone made a recording, I'm sure I could harmonize to it!
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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.
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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.
Are you a tetrachromat?
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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.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.
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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.
My mouth doesn't have the receptors to detect capsacin
Unless you have a beak instead of a mouth, yes, your mouth does have "the receptors", like all mammalian tissues. They're just desensitised. Which is why if you happen to laugh/cough while eating spicy food that you can't even notice the spiciness of in your mouth, and get some almost going in the nose...
That feel like getting fking maced. I've pretty much maxed out tolerances in my mouth as well and quite literally most things which are supposed to be spicy as fuck I don't even notice and my own food I use so much other people find it hard to eat them.
Also capsaicin doesn't actually burn, it doesn't "burn a hole in your stomach" or anything.
But yeah same here buddy
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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.
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My mouth doesn't have the receptors to detect capsacin
Unless you have a beak instead of a mouth, yes, your mouth does have "the receptors", like all mammalian tissues. They're just desensitised. Which is why if you happen to laugh/cough while eating spicy food that you can't even notice the spiciness of in your mouth, and get some almost going in the nose...
That feel like getting fking maced. I've pretty much maxed out tolerances in my mouth as well and quite literally most things which are supposed to be spicy as fuck I don't even notice and my own food I use so much other people find it hard to eat them.
Also capsaicin doesn't actually burn, it doesn't "burn a hole in your stomach" or anything.
But yeah same here buddy
Well, whatever it is, when I was a toddler my parents mentioned to my pediatrician that I loved eating hot peppers (apparently I would just grab them off the shelf in the grocery store and chow down. It was a bit of a problem for my mom because I wouldn't wait for her to pay, or so goes the story she likes to tell). The doctor told my parents that I don't have receptors to detect capsacin. I haven't had it independently checked as an adult. Maybe they were mistaken or my parents mis-remembered what they were told.
Regardless, I don't think I've ever experienced what you refer to as feeling like getting maced while sneezing or laughing. I haven't been directly maced before, but I have been in a crowd that got pepper sprayed. It burned the fuck out of my eyes and lungs, but I didn't notice it anywhere else.
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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.Same! The good news is that in real life there is an abundance of reference materials, but little time to parse them. So this skill is MUCH more useful. I have legit had coworkers tell me that my ability to quickly navigate long complex documents to find the one paragraph that applies to our situation is a superpower.
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Well, whatever it is, when I was a toddler my parents mentioned to my pediatrician that I loved eating hot peppers (apparently I would just grab them off the shelf in the grocery store and chow down. It was a bit of a problem for my mom because I wouldn't wait for her to pay, or so goes the story she likes to tell). The doctor told my parents that I don't have receptors to detect capsacin. I haven't had it independently checked as an adult. Maybe they were mistaken or my parents mis-remembered what they were told.
Regardless, I don't think I've ever experienced what you refer to as feeling like getting maced while sneezing or laughing. I haven't been directly maced before, but I have been in a crowd that got pepper sprayed. It burned the fuck out of my eyes and lungs, but I didn't notice it anywhere else.
You probably kept grabbing them because they gave a funny sensation.
Why else would you have had a fascination to eat them?
Personal tolerances vary, and build really fast. I'm exaggerating when I say "maced", but I like to make food hot enough to make my nipples feel it. My digestive tract is completely used to it and I barely feel it, which is why I have to keep making it hotter and hotter. As in my fingers will burn for a day after I've cooked just from having to touch the chilis a little bit and I add a little bit of super hot sauces depending on the food, and a few times I've had a cough or something and the difference in the tolerance is noticeable.
I don't fall down on the floor grabbing my face, it's just noticeable.
(And I've been exposed to actual tear gas, it's very different sensation than mace btw on a tangent.)
You may have less sensitivity naturally, and then build tolerance on top of that, would be my guess.
But for you to completely lack the receptors would be a medical miracle.
but I have been in a crowd that got pepper sprayed. It burned the fuck out of my eyes and lungs, but I didn't notice it anywhere else.
So your mouth probably didn't burn. Mike wouldn't either. When we were in the army some of the MP's used their maces to spice the food. It's literally just a capsaicin spray most of the time. (There are other irritants as well but most times...)
Can you taste vanilla?
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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.
My cat has the same ability to know when it's time to feed him. When he comes to me and starts to gently tap me with his paw, I look at the clock and it's 30 seconds till his feeding time.
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To be clear, I can’t differentiate between fear, anxiety, stress, and stimulants, except for intensity. It might be any of those if it smells a little like a battery. The first time I noticed it on someone else, it was someone with a crush on me who had to spend all day with me, so not exactly fear, but nerves.
A sudden change in BO can indicate all sorts of things though, from Parkinson’s to diabetic shock to sepsis, so you might want to let her know.
The first time I noticed it on someone else, it was someone with a crush on me who had to spend all day with me, so not exactly fear, but nerves.
What did you do about it if you could notice? Has it ever worked in your favor?
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My super power is that I always know the difference between a fart and a shit before it exits.
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The first time I noticed it on someone else, it was someone with a crush on me who had to spend all day with me, so not exactly fear, but nerves.
What did you do about it if you could notice? Has it ever worked in your favor?
In that case, I wasn’t interested and just felt immense pity at the situation, so I completely ignored it and talked to another coworker about our SOs at the group lunch table with him.
I’ve definitely noticed it on job interviews I’ve held and first dates/relationship milestones. In the former, I just ignore it, and in the latter, I do keep it in mind.
I have to shower after I have something like a job interview though, because it’s not a pleasant smell.
