My super annoying power is a sense of smell similar to the person in the post. I can smell ants, roaches and sick humans. I can smell all kinds of things and it has its uses. I can small bad food and mold a day or so before it is apparent to others.
The downside is that I can small all kinds of things such as horrible BO that others can’t. I can smell when women are menstruating. I can smell so many things that others can’t that I’m jealous of people who just smell things normally.
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.
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 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.
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.
Are you a chameleon?
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 can rumble, but have never needed to repressurize my ears - they’re “leaky”.
I thought everyone could do this. That’s a super power?!
Not everyone!
Check out the Function->Voluntary Control section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
I tried to find stats on what proportion of people could do it, with claims of “a small number” through to “over half the population”.
This study says 55% in the general population. It’s also interesting as it’s exploring the ability to use this voluntary rumble as a control method for assistive technology.
The what?
Check out the Function->Voluntary Control section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani_muscle
Next time you yawn, listen for a low rumbling sound. Some people can do that voluntarily. Apparently 55% of the general population, but many people think you could train almost anyone to do it with some practice.
It could come in handy if you took up archery.
That’s true.
you can easily view parallel or cross view images
Actually no, those have never worked for me, idk why
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.
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!
Tensor tympani is the muscle
I thought everyone could do this and always wondered why people complained about having to pop their ears
Brother 😎
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.
If you are diving the first comes in very practically.
I can cut butter to the exact weight each time.
I have super sensitive hearing, so while I can hear the faintest of noises, it also means loud noises are overwhelming and painful.
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!
I have some version of this that thankfully only happens very rarely. But it is more like a violent electrical sound that “feels” so loud that I should be dead. It is awful.
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
That’s interesting! Thanks for the reply!
The language thing is fascinating to me, thank you for sharing
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 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.
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 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 smell reposts and pictures I have already seen a mile away.
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.
Apparently, criticizing inaccessible content.
image of text
no alt text or link to accessible alternative (eg, source)
people with accessibility needs can’t read thisTsk, tsk, OP.
I can blur my vision on command, kinda useless but a bit of fun to play with.
I also have a lazy eye, so I can scare unsuspecting people, sometimes two at a time if they’re positioned right.
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 can touch my thumb to my wrist. Not terribly useful.
I can bend my thumb further back than most people :3 this literally does nothing of use for me x3
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.
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.
I often dislocate a shoulder or hip in my sleep. I can dislocate a knee turning around or just taking steps. I wear a lot of compression and braces, but they only help so much lol
That sounds really inconvenient, I’m sorry. I can dislocate certain joints at will (fingers, shoulders, knees, and hips), but it doesn’t just happen, luckily. I do wonder how much worse it will get as I get older, but I haven’t been able to find much on mild cases in later years.
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
