What is something you can sense that few-if-any people you know can sense? Literal answers only.
I’m a super-taster and thanks to lots of childhood abuse I’m hypervigilant. So pretty much everything. If a person anywhere in the area has been smoking or in a smoky room any time in the last day or two, I’ll know it. I know what you last ate - and drank, if it wasn’t water. I can hear a woman sobbing quietly in a locked room down the hall when nobody else can.
I see beauty in the clouds in the sky at night. I smell faint smoke on the wind. Scents that remind me of long ago, when I was a child - like the smell of shrinky-dinks coming off a hot metal mold, or pastries coming out of an Easy-bake oven. Autumn leaves swirling in an icy breeze. Or the smell of something like earwax, or tar.
I often wonder how normal people live without sensing so much of the world!
Not me but my gf has a rare condition called SCDS. Basically, she can hyper hear her own body. Her heart sounds like a loud bass drum. She can hear her eyes when they move. She can hear her bones when they creak.
It is unsettling and can be quite dis-orienting and painful. She has surgery scheduled next year to fix it!
I have Synesthesia. When I hear certain sounds, I see these little bubbles of color. It’s sort of similar to the eye-floater things you get sometimes, that’s the best way I can describe it. I’ll also get a taste in my mouth looking at specific colors.
I’m not sure if that counts, but it’s the first thing I thought of.
Yeah, synesthesia counts!
i can hear power supplies. kinda annoying.
Older TVs I could “sense” when they were turned on or off like a room over.
I assume it was a sound but I couldn’t really explain it back then lol, it really was more of a “feeling”
CRT TVs have a very iconic high pitched noise. It’s somewhat similar to the sound of tinnitus. Combine that with some people not being able to hear those high pitched noises very well (especially as they age) it makes sense that you may have been able to hear them but not really consciously be aware of it.
Right, I assumed it was sound but I could like feel it in the hairs on my body too. Was weird lol
It does do some static stuff but I don’t know if you’d be able to feel that from another room.
i can see very well in the dark, like pitch black night in the arctic circle in a forest i can see the ground enough that i wont trip and can avoid things like snakes
i fucking hate all the bright lights on cars now btw. the sun is genuinely distressing to me i just simply cannot go outside without sunglasses, even when its very cloudy
Found the vampire. Nostrafeu?
Gangrel
I actually play Banu Haqim a lot, and my avatar is marceline from adventure time lol
Nostrafeu? Restecpa.
Changes in air pressure(I think). Its like everything goes quiet theres ringing it feels very weird. I always ask to see if anyone else notices.
You how you get up on a winter morning after the rain and everything sounds different and the air is crisp. Yeah sometimes I can feel that a sudden shift and its very jarring like ive been stunned for a few seconds.
I get this too. I didn’t think/know it was air pressure though? Seems to happen to me randomly, and rarely.
I can smell when someone is about to be sick. They start smelling like cucumbers to me. I hate cucumbers.
Some dogs can also smell it.
The god-awful taste of sugar substitutes.
A lot of people can taste things like saccharine I think? But I can taste any fake sugar, even when there is a mix of real and fake sugar in the same thing.
Aspartame/acesulfane is definitely the worst of them all, but sucralose, stevia… all of them taste like medicine kind of.
I can also taste the difference between cane and beetroot based granulated sugar. Beetroot sugar is sharper.
I thought I was the only one that could not stand aspartame like how is it in so many things and no one says anything haha
Right?! So basically now I drink water when I am out and about because so much stuff has fake sugar now
So much this. I live in a country with a sugar tax, so almost every soft drink on the market has part of its sugar replaced with some kind of sweetener. I didn’t drink a lot of soft drinks before, but now I can’t drink them at all.
Exactly the same for me. Full fat coke is basically the only option now if I do want one.
I can definitely taste the difference between aspartame and sugar but its not unpleasant to me.
This is so interesting, since I simply can not tell a difference between the aspartame/acesulfane and actual sugar in fizzy drinks. I guess I have it easy because of that, but I have a somewhat keen sense of taste otherwise, I cook a lot and can detect what the taste is missing or has too much of pretty consistently, and know the “opposite” tastes/ingredients to apply. And wines and such, it’s sort of a synesthesia thing too, since I kind of feel them as something close to colors. But sweet things I have trouble with. I thought, not sure why, this was a human thing, but it’s interesting to hear someone can detect the sweet things granularly! Cool!
I used to be able to smell ants and hear electricity. My senses aren’t as keen as they used to be though.
Same. If there’s a fair amount of particular types of ants I can smell them still but not which corner of the yard has fire ants anymore.
The frame rate on high refresh monitors
I’ve got friends that say they can’t tell the difference, who’ve only ever used 60hz
I’m kinda like that. While i love high frame rates, i don’t think i see the upgrade. From 60 to 120? Not really sure. But from 120 to 60? Why is my game a slideshow?
Idk if it’s rare, but my wife thinks it’s weird that I can smell on the breeze if we are near a winery. It’s kind of an astringent smell
The fucking documentation for the libraries we program with, apparently. Everyone else at work either just vibecodes or goes “aw I don’t know how to do that, it probably can’t be done :c”
I can smell when a woman is pregnant. I’ve shocked several friends by congratulating them before they even took a test.
I‘ve got this one too. It smells like dry hay or straw to me.
what does it smell like?
I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just different than their normal smell
I have a heart condition that I get an ECG (electro cardiogram) done for every 6 months or so. It’s just an ultrasound on your heart. They always take mine from a bunch of different angles and a bunch of different types of pictures.
But I was recently in the hospital and told the technician that their machine was loud. She looked baffled. I told her I can hear the ultrasound and hers is the loudest I’ve encountered. Apparently I’m the only person she’s ever done work on (or however to say that) that’s been able to hear it.
So I guess that is my super power. Or I’m just autistic, as apparently many autists can hear very high pitched noises.
But the ultrasound is pretty cool. The frequencies and the pitch will change depending on what photo mode they’re in. Like a doppler mode is all pewpewpewpewpew while the normal mode is all eeeeeeeeeeeee. Lol. It’s hard to explain.
I was entirely confused for a moment- I think you might be getting an echocardiogram, rather than an electrocardiogram. If you could hear an electrocardiogram, there would be something seriously wrong with their machine- It’s meant to be a passive electrical measurement. Echo on the other hand is exactly what you described, an ultrasound of the heart.
I was actually thinking you might have a strong interoception, which is when people have an awareness of their own heartbeat signals- super rare but super cool.
Wah! Yep. My bad, hahaha. Brain toot
Annoyed by the commonly imperceptible sound an ultrasound machine makes? Possibly autistic
Facinated by how and why the machine works while it annoys you? Definitely autistic
I joke but im exactly like this too lol.
Lmao. Yeahhhh, I always get a crick in my neck because I try to watch all the work they’re doing. It’s fascinating
That’s a wonderful superpower! I can hear cars or footsteps approaching before my friends realise them, but high-pitched electric mole traps and ticking clocks can be annoying. Listening to music with good hearing is like taking drugs though. You should check out well-mastered music, commonly going as audiophile music.
My friends have called me sensitive to everything. Apparently most people don’t love walking through neighborhoods just to smell other people doing laundry? Hahahaha. I love it.
I’ve wanted some really excellent headphones for a while now, but it’s haven’t yet been at a place/time where I can pull the trigger. It will definitely happen one day
I got some pretty nice headphones a while back. Not the really high end ones or anything, but good enough that I can get lost in the shapes, textures, and sometimes colors of the different instruments. Like someone else said, it’s a bit like being high.
Cheap studio monitors are fun too because they really separate out the sounds. It can make me a little tired, listening to all that detail, but it’s so fun.
I had this exact experience and tried to ask the technician about it. She didn’t understand what I was asking. I thought I was just explaining it poorly.
Lemmy needs to stop trying to convince me I’m neurodivergent.
Its seriously wild that you can do this!
Apparently, ultrasound machines can use frequencies that start just higher than human hearing, 20kHz.
Can you hear dog-whistles, bats, or other electronics?
Get a hearing test and call Guiness (c:
I hear bats, absolutely. I can hear electronics as well, and some are just so frustrating. I’ve never heard a dog whistle, as in I’ve literally never seen one in person, but there’s a house near to me that has a warning thing when someone approaches their yard, probably to ward off dogs? But my god, it’s loud and high. I try to avoid that route at all costs.
“I hear bats” - Astounding! 8]
It would be very interesting to get a hearing test done. One which provides you with a chart of frequency against intensity perceivable. I’d check that they are equipped to go over 20kHz first.
In the case of bats for me I think I feel the pulses of bats because it’s quite powerful, more than hear it. It’s probably undertone resonance or something.
I haven’t heard any for a while and my hearing is deteriorating but bat numbers collapsed and I haven’t seen them either.
Modern Guiness is corporate propaganda.
Obviously he should go get a Guinness instead
Off topic, but I’ve not seen that emoticon before (unusually left-facing too!) and it’s adorable.
It’s my favourite emoticon, the most calm and cartoony.
I also created my own questioning emoticon about10years ago,
what do you think of it "?
Took me a second but I see it now - very cartoony. I like it!
That’s awesome! I can’t hear ultrasounds, but I can hear electronics, which gets really annoying
Yeah me too. I think this is called “coil hum”. I notice it with things like usb-c thunderbolt ports. Often you can swap a cable or something and it’s resolved.
I definitely can’t hear high frequencies (I’m assuming due to ear infections as a child, feels mildly unfair that other people my age get to hear and understand conversations better but oh well) but coil whine is a thing for me as well.
Had a router once that would whine depending on the network packet rate. My computer screen makes a noise when displaying large grids like a screen full of terminal text or a mostly blank spreadsheet. The led lights in my bathroom make a noise and I often turn them off while transacting my business. My Bluetooth headphones make similar noises depending on the connection state but that one is probably interference and not coil whine
It happens at all frequencies. Although you don’t need to be able to hear special frequencies for it, of course you’ll hear it in more places if you have superlucg hearing ^^
