I can voluntarily open my eustachian tubes and hold them open, without needing to yawn or swallow. Makes it much easier to clear the pressure in my ears when changing elevation (like when flying in a plane).
Feels like a super power when you’re scuba diving and you see all the other divers holding their noses!
Weirdly, I can only do this with my right ear. Definitely helps on airplanes.
Huh I think I can do the same. I always thought it was one of those things that everyone could do.
Same. Sometimes I can’t, such as when congested, and it’s super annoying and unbalanced.
yep, I have the same issue when congested.
This is my time to shine, my body is full of useless, I can:
- gleek intentionally (saving people a search: it’s causing the salivary glands under your tongue to shoot saliva, people often do it unintentionally when yawning)
- open my jaw wide enough that it goes out of socket, and twofer I can then move it side to side and produce a loud popping noise
- bend my thumb down to my wrist
- cause my heart rate to spike for short periods even when at rest
- make a three leaf clover with my tongue
- click my tongue extremely loudly
oh my god, so that’s what I’m doing when I yawn! It started happening a few years ago…
Tongue clicks are absurdly useful. In my family we use then to communicate over long distances and to find each other in big crowds
A friend taught me how to gleek in 7th grade. I never stopped doing it lmao
click my tongue extremely loudly
Learn Xhosa.
I can also gleek but it’s nowhere near what my grade 11 English teacher could do. I don’t know how it came up in class, but, in front of the class, she turned sideways and made the biggest arc I’d ever seen: maybe 6 feet long
I remember when I was a kid we were all trying to gleek and some of us could do it easily. I never could, so anytime as an adult I accidentally do it, I can’t help but laugh.
By shoot, does it have force or do you mean it just comes out?
It has “force”, but it’s not very impressive, I can shoot saliva in approximately a 1ft / 30cm arch.
You can partially wave at the wall in a dark, but cold and loud room.
We don’t talk about The Room
Lots of things that ultimately come down to hyper-mobility (thanks Ehlers-Danlos!), including:
- Lick my elbow
- Pull my shoulder visibly out of socket (not painful at all, and happens if I carry something heavy if I’m not careful)
- Pop my hip out of socket while standing (sometimes painful, always somewhat unpleasant, so I’ve had to learn how to not do it)
- Hold my hands behind my back and pull them to my front
- Rotate my arm >360°
- Bend my thumb to my forearm
Sooo I can cause what honestly feels like a small and constant electrical current flow through any part of my body. If I center this feeling on my chest it is easily more prominent than anywhere else with my head being second. Extremities are dead last. If I am hooked up to a heart monitor I can make it freak out at will. Any location I focus it on tends to want to tense up.
I like to tell people this is the result of me grabbing onto a metal item when I was younger that was still hot. Couldn’t let go for a solid 6-10 seconds, can’t say exactly how long. What I am able to do feels very similar.
a metal item when I was younger that was still hot
Still hot as in temperature or electricity?
Electricity. Hand curled around it to grab and got rooted. I still remember the sensation of my repeating mental command to “LET GO” feeling as if it was slowly travelling down my arm. Weird is a word that comes to mind.
Wow that’s wild, my only experience with that tingling feeling is testing 9V batteries with my tongue. I’ve had a healthy fear of electricity and always LOTO at work, so I’m hoping it stays that way.
The wild part is it didn’t hurt. I don’t remember any pain at all. Just an intense knowledge that something was very wrong and I needed to get away as quickly as I could. But like no matter how hard I tried my body would not listen until that signal I mentioned hit my hand and I let go.
I was also surrounded by people and not a single person noticed.
But yeah, Iiii wouldn’t repeat the experience.
As in sexy
I can throat sing but it’s not completely useless
I can hum and whistle at the same time. Makes me sound kinda like a Theremin
I love doing this because it sounds like you’re charging a laser weapon
Lol I just tried that to see how it works.
It’s hard because if you close your lips too much to whistle it restricts the airflow and kills the hum.
Hmm I can hum independent of my lips 🤔
Ah yes, multiphonics.
Same! I liken it to a knock off version of Mongolian Throat singing.
I can bend my knees backwards by, like, 20°.
Pfff. Everyone can do that… Two times.
I can spiral my tongue, so that the front part is fully upsidr down - but only to the left. I can’t rotate it to the right at all for some reason, it’s like the equivalent muscles are missing.
I can snap with my toes the same way people snap their fingers, but only with the right foot for some reason.
I used to do this all the time. Since I stopped, they don’t pop so easily anymore
I can rotate one finger at one direction and the other on the opposite direction while pointing one to another, simultaneously. I don’t know how uncommon it is but, back at high school, no one else in my class could do it. Totally unuseful skill.
If I’m understanding your description correctly (the image didn’t come through), I can do this too! I heard once as a kid it was impossible and I refused to accept that, so I practiced until I could do it.
Rephrasing to see if we’re talking about the same thing: I can point my fingers towards each other in front of me, then circle one hand away from myself and the other towards myself, and continue looping them in opposite directions. Most people can do it for 1-2 loops, but then end up moving both fingers in the same direction.
Neat! I just tried it and it’s hard (harder one way than the other, for some reason), but doable.
I believe we’re talking about the same thing. Welcome to the club!
My fingers don’t rotate unless you count wrist involvement, so I’m a little confused by what you’re describing.
Something like this. Sorry for the poor image. The wrists can move too, I think it doesn’t change much.
My left pinkie finger knuckle can hold some tension when I from my pinkie into a claw shape, but then snaps forward. Either that’s unusual or my right hand can’t do that as snappy.
I can whistle in three different ways. The classic pursed lip whistle, a whistle using just the tip of my tongue and the roof of my mouth, not using my lips at all, and then another using the tops of my bottom teeth. I can make decent bird sounds using my bottom teeth, but I can do pretty much any tune I can think of with the pursed lip method. It has been relevant to my life exactly zero times, except to entertain myself.
Ah! I have another whistling method! I can use my throat. It’s like a heavily modified sigh? It’s the best way I can describe how to even try to do it.
With practice I think I could get it loud enough to be disorientating to the unsuspecting though. Lol
Ha! I haven’t heard of that, but maybe I should try to learn it just to know more ways. Not that I’m doing much with the ones I do know at the moment, lol
I’ve got a tooth gap through which I can whistle. And it’s working so well, that I can also audibly whistle while breathing in. So, I can actually whistle pretty much continuously for like 10+ minutes, until my cheeks start hurting. Only really useful getting on someone’s nerves…
That’s how I learned the bottom tooth whistle! One of my bottom front teeth was a bit crooked and created a tiny gap at the top, and I learned to whistle through it. When I got my teeth straightened I lost the ability to do the invert whistle and some of my control but I can still do it well enough with the pursed lip method.
Apparently there’s a thing called lucid dreaming that many people try very hard to achieve.
Most of my dreams are “lucid”.
I can also, using only my facial muscles, pull my eyelids back extra far so it looks like my eyeballs are popping out.
I have a hypothesis that there is no such thing as lucid dreaming (before you get the wrong idea, I’ve done it before. My meaning is that it’s misunderstood, not that people are lying about having done it).
That feeling that you’re in control? You’re just dreaming that you’re in control. You’re just dreaming that you have the experience of choice-movement-feedback.
How is the feeling of being in control any more real than other sensations you experience in a dream?
When you experience the sensation of enlightenment in a dream, do you say you were really enlightened, or were you just dreaming that you were enlightened?
When you experience the sensation of blue in a dream, do you say there was actually blue, or were you just dreaming there was blue?
Your brain telling you you’re in control is just as suspect as your brain telling you there’s blue. They are both creations of your brain for the purpose of the dream.
Whatever action you’re taking in an attempt to demonstrate control is just as easily explained as something your brain created as dream decoration.
Remember, this is just a hypothesis.
The question is, is there a practical difference between lucid dreaming and dreaming about being lucid? I like to think it’s the memory afterwards that counts.
cries in has chronically useless dreams that can’t even go in a dream journal
I can crack the knuckles of my big toes at will (only moving my toes, no hands involved).
Ditto.
Me too! But only the ones on my right foot.
