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
I don’t think so – the noises I hear are real, they’re just accompanied by flashes of light if my brain can’t place the source of the sound in realtime
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.
Hah! Oh jesus, this will be a fun rabbithole for me to think about over the next few years.
Appreciate the warning, strangerHere’s a redditor that describes it quite well:
Me. I have this. Happens several times a night. Sounds like a door slamming or a gunshot. The weirdest part is you also get the feeling that there was an impact, like that feeling when someone stomps near you. So it’s not just auditory it’s almost physical. It’s a very strange thing and hard to describe because you’re always 3/4 of the way asleep when it happens. I’ve had it my whole life and always found it curious but have never questioned it out loud. I thought everyone had this until I saw “exploding head syndrome” on the internet. Asked my parents and siblings, no, none of them have this and what the fuck am I talking about? I’m in my goddamned 40s and thought this was normal.
Goddamit I said stop, I’ve already got a ton of other neuroses to worry about!
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.
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You dare best me? Better than you have tried and been found dooooooooooooooooooooh.
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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.
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 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.
Fuck, I knew I chose wrong.
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 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 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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
Yeah, if my memory is correct the flickers stopped completely for me at around 80hz. I’m talking about monitors here rather than TVs.
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?
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.
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.
True, but with some training you’d learn to anticipate as well. Pairing that with your Uchiha eyes, and you’d be unstoppable
“awww shiiiiitttt I’m about to be punched in the face”
…
…
…
“Ouch!”
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! 🙃
I can smell reposts and pictures I have already seen a mile away.
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’m partially deaf but I can hear those really high whines anyway. I can pretty much only hear high notes.
I can’t imagine how infuriating that must be. How do you live with it?
I have super sensitive hearing, so while I can hear the faintest of noises, it also means loud noises are overwhelming and painful.
That sounds like a curse. how do you navigate public space?
Musician’s earplugs
I avoid most of them! But as Lagoon indicates, earplugs are a must, especially for events and venues!
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…
This was almost the complete comment, answered all the questions it raised as I read along except one thing.
How wide can you spread your toes? I just checked and my fingers (without thumb) is ~18cm.
I’ve hit some killer long-range underwear-into-the-basket shots with my toes that honestly should’ve been on Sportscenter.
Same here! Why isn’t this a weird Olypmic?
…Why don’t we have weird Olympics?
Same one as everyone else’s., seeing the future.
yawn
I thought it was really clever actually tyvm
It was a sarcastic yawn because you were one of the only one to list an actually cool power. I guess that wouldn’t be immediately clear, in retrospect.
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.
If I get drunk, I can picture colors for different instruments. Drums, wind, and string instruments are varying shades of red, yellow and orange depending on pitch. Synthesizers are always cool colors depending on their sound. The more artificial they sound, the further away they are from yellow or red for purple and green synthesizers) Human voices are pink if high pitched and red if low pitched.
I can fall asleep, near instantly, at will.
I call it my time machine function.
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 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.
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.
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.
Conversely, I can eat any spicy food. My mouth feels it, but that’s all. Never any heartburn or painful time on the throne.
