1w ago

What's your superpower?

580 comments

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.
- 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?
  
  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
- 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.
  
  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
  
  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. :-/
  
  Interesting, never knew that. I’m in my 40s and can still hear the annoying high-pitched whine from the speaker outside a shop near me that’s designed to keep kids from hanging around.
- 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.
- I could detect it as a kid, but definitely not past 25
  
  I can still hear the bats pinging for insects round the back gardens. I was 43 last week :-p
- I can hear CRTs too, but I haven't seen one in so long I don't know if I still can. It was so high pitched I've probably lost the ability to hear the frequency.
- 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
- I can hear it too. Its a fuzzy buzzing noise.
- You have adhd
- Yeah I think everyone used to be able to hear that. Elementary school videos all the kids could hear of the teacher left the TV on in our class rooms.

Synesthesia. I can see music. It's fun.
Also, being resistant to pain killers. Not so fun (takes ages to get drunk, and I woke up 3 times during a surgery)
- 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
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome
  
  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
- 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.
- That's kind of cool, what does music look like to you? I assume it depends on the genre. What's your favourite?
  
  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

I can fall asleep, near instantly, at will.
I call it my time machine function.
- 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 an I... We are either going to form an unstoppable super team or... You ate going to end up as my nemesis.
  
  I can sleep at will and wake up at will. Like I am traveling early so I have to wake at 4:30am no problem!
- 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.
  
  No, not at all. In fact I am pretty good at being able to stay awake for rather long periods of time. I can comfortably go 48 hours without sleep.
  If I could donate it I would happily do so.

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.
  
  Unless you're autistic. We don't lose the top end of our hearing for some reason. Those "mosquito" devices can trigger my migraines, at 43 years old.
  
  Masquito alarms should be illegal.
  
  When do we stop hearing the damn things? (27 here)
- Found the youngest person.
- Another one!
  It's a common autistic trait, FYI 💛
- My solution to the charger wine was to get a better quality one. I find branded ones don't have that issue anywhere near as much.
- 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.
  
  Usually it's a bad capacitor

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.
- You have to wear glasses, obviously.
- I have a watered down version of this, but I'm a lawyer so it's very very valuable. If I get a question I might not know the answer to, if I've read it somewhere I usually know roughly where to go back to get it. And since lawyers mostly look things up instead of trying to memorize everything, a powerful "indexing" memory is valuable in the profession. At least in my practice.
- Same. Also, I can see things from when I was an infant up until now. All of my past memories are like normal childhood memories, there is no cut off before 2 or whatever everyone else has. It's not every single memory, but the ones that stick out in your mind like every other memory from your past.

I can smell reposts and pictures I have already seen a mile away.

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).
- One time I had to wait in line behind this guy who had a very strong metallic odor, it was making me sick. I’ve smelled it a few times since and recently smelled it on my mother. Not sure if it’s a drug. Probably not fear. Very interesting though.
  
  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.
  
  there are a few diseases (mostly in the cold/flu family) that i can smell. it's something in the sweat.

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 don't think being a Disney Princess counts as a minor power 😜
  
  Well yeah, they're saying it's their super power, not their minor power.
  Or are you saying attracting minors doesn't count toward Disney Princess credentials?
  
  Especially if they use it for evil. This could be a fork in the road for their origin story! Controlling animals to do their bidding.
  
  No, that's divine.
- I also have that aura, and I am here to lend credence to being able to see it in others, and them seeing it in me.
  I have this cute phrase for when it's not just that aura but also the obvious background of trauma, "We have so much in common! I'm so sorry."
- 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.
- I know people like that. They have some sort of social worker aura. People just come to them, they are not close with them but tell them the craziest things that happened in there like, usually for advice but sometimes just to have a confident.

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'm a stair master. I sprint them 3-4-5 at a time, smooth and quiet as a ninja. Up or down, doesn't matter
- 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...
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE

I have special ability to fall asleep quick if deciding to take a nap during office hours.
Unfortunately, it's not effective going to sleep in the evening
- Have you considered working night shifts?
  
  I did, it was the final nail in the coffin for my sleep schedule 🤣

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.

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.
  
  Are you a chameleon?
  
  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.
- Is it the same muscle as when you do the rumbly ear thing?
  
  Ear rumbling was gonna be my superpower. And I can indeed also use this to some extent to repressurize my ears.
  
  I thought everyone could do this. That's a super power?!
  
  The what?
- 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
- If you are diving the first comes in very practically.
- Tensor tympani is the muscle
- 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!
- It'd probably come in handy if you started sports shooting. I do Olympic-style air pistol shooting, and part of what I'm currently training on is focusing my eye on the forward sight, not the target.
- It could come in handy if you took up archery.
  
  That's true.
- I can do both of those things too, but my ear repressurising abilities aren't that strong, I usually have to either yawn or blow my closed nose.
- 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.
- The craziest one was when we had a staff lunch, and she was like "Jimmy johns, roast beef, with mustard and hot peppers mix"
  Next time she does that, say "joke's on you, I actually just went down on the neighbor lady" and see how she reacts.
  
  Probably by explaining he's wrong because she smells like a whole different list of ingredients.
- Maybe you're just a really messy eater, and she doesn't have the heart to tell you? Does her prediction change when you tied a napkin around your neck before eating?
  
  I'm exercising my 5th amendment right.

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?
- As far as I'm aware, this is a skill that can be learned by training your palate
  
  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
  
  Makes sense, I've done food and wine training for years.
- I'm one of those. I really couldn't make my own recipes when I was homebrewing.
- Have you read The perfume by Patrick Süskind? You sound like a real-life Grenouille. Without the murdering, hopefully :D
  
  Screw you for making me remember XD
- 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 can do this. I'm also good at trying food at a restaurant, then recreating the flavors at home.

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 can 'flex' my Eustachian tubes and 'open them' at will, e.g. equalising pressure when ears need 'popping' on planes. I'm sure it isn't that uncommon but no one ever knows what I mean when I say it.

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!
- Diagram on that last one? the apple not appearing like it does in real life sounds weird to me.
  
  Anything less than a 1 makes me raise eyebrows, but the fact some people see just an outline or even nothing still blows my mind

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 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 bend my thumb further back than most people :3 this literally does nothing of use for me x3
- Bending your thumb to your wrist is one of the signs of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome
  
  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.
  
  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 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.

There's a woman who can smell Parkinson's Disease with almost 100% accuracy.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/820274501/her-incredible-sense-of-smell-is-helping-scientists-find-new-ways-to-diagnose-di

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 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.
- Wait until you hear about inward singing! I can whistle inward too but not as well as outward (it takes a lot more air, and my range is reduced).
  
  https://youtu.be/lyb1mA0hGX0
- 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 :).

I get SO many weird looks when I tell people I don't like bleu cheese because it tastes like ants

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 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 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 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 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/wiki/File:Estradiol_and_progesterone_%25_changes_across_the_menstrual_cycle.tif
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.

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.

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. 😄
- Huh. My knees make rice krispie noises but pretty much only when I'm using stairs. No pain but maybe a little stiffness. I never knew what it was.

I can cut butter to the exact weight each time.

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.

I honestly can't think of a damned thing I'm weirdly good at. Maybe that's my super power. Extreme averageness.

This must have been terrifying for the ant.

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).
  
  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.
  
  My evil twin from the mirror dimension. We meet at last! Or maybe I’m the evil one?
  
  You are not alone.
- lol well done. the clinical language makes these very mundane skills seem mystical. Hypnagogic AH!

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.

Remember those "exercise while you sleep" infomercials? I have parasomnia, so sometimes I wake up sore from moving around all night. Turns out, it really is like exercise while you sleep.

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 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 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?
- 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! 👍

My super power is that I always know the difference between a fart and a shit before it exits.

I can recognize a song with just a snippet playing. My piano teacher was apparently surprised by that.
The catch is I never remember the names, just the melody/bass 😅

I have super sensitive hearing, so while I can hear the faintest of noises, it also means loud noises are overwhelming and painful.

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.
- Ants release nasty chemicals when squashed, I smell those too! Can't say I smell them before though like in the image. But after squishing one, I gotta wash my hands.

580 comments