I can speak Finnish.
I can sometimes see auras around people. It’s fascinating stuff, but the strain of it can cause debilitating pain.
Western medicine calls it “migraines”, but what does science know?
Not hardly a damn thing!
I can smell pizza from three rooms away, does that count ? 🤔
(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ Depression ♥
I’m able to predict when Holes, starring Shia Labeauf, is about to air on Disney Channel. If I have a strong desire to watch the movie, odds are it’s about to air. I was able to do this for years.
I no longer watch cable tv. This power is vestigial. Nowadays when I have a strong desire to watch Holes, I just watch Holes.
I can tell when someone is about to run a red light.
I think we all know what an Nissan Maxima or Altima looks like.
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.
Never heard of ultrasonic howling, but what a cool idea - stop that feedback in its tracks! Bummer that it bothers your hearing.
Animal scarers make me feel like someone shot me in the head.
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.
This is called the tensor timpani and I just learned from my hypermobilty support group that it’s super common in people with hypermobilty disorders generally to be able to move them. Look up Beighton scale and give yourself a quick check.
Finding out I was hypermobile lead to me discovering my ADHD wasn’t inattention, but highly variable blood pressure and a wonky vagal nerve condition. Changed my meds, changed my life.
…aaaannnndddd I’ve just stumbled into a rabbit hole that’s going to eat up half my day.
Oh wow thanks so much, I will have a look at that. I am awaiting ADHD assessment so this could be an interesting twist!!!
I only recently discovered that not everyone can do this. I was telling my teenager to “just pop your ears” when she was swimming under water and neither her nor her mom had any idea what I was talking about.
So that’s what that was called.
Ever scuba dive? Most masks you see have a rubber nose piece that lets the diver squeeze their nose shut so they can blow and equalize pressure.
No i haven’t, but I’m hopefully going to try next month. I’ll try to remember to experiment with this then.
To wander further off topic.
imho Belize is the best place for a scuba vacation. I went last year. Former British colony where everyone speaks English and you can spend American dollars easily. It sits next to the second biggest coral system on Earth so you have abundant wildlife.
Enjoy.
I’ve got that. Very useful for looking unaffected by pressure changes, which is to say, not that useful.
People dont get what you mean with “popping your ears”? How can an adult never experience that?
Most people do it by swallowing? So I guess they shrug it off that I do it slightly differently.
Yeah but I feel like most adults would have had pressure sensitive ears at some point in the life (like from a cold or something), forcing them to learn about popping ears, even if the only way of doing it they know is swallowing.
Like, when you pinch your nose and blow?
Yeah, but when i do it, it sounds like rushing blood in my ears. Found it is something everyone does but it’s not voluntary like when you yawn.
I can do it on demand.
Hyper-compartmentalization. Everything can be falling apart around me, high stakes, emergency, danger, but I just proceed calmly and steadily toward the goal. I am a rat in a maze, and each decision is just an ab node in a tree. I make best guesses and don’t shoulda woulda. If I can’t make it and everything is horrible, that was the outcome, I did the best I could with the knowledge/data given, or I put in what I felt was right, and if I’m wrong, oh well.
I need this power.
I have an impeccable nose for work BS.
When a new initiative or proposal or project or just a simple inquiry comes my way, I seem to have a really good instinct as to how feasible/likely this project will come to fruition. BS projects get tossed into a corner, Non-BS projects get attention.
99.9% of the time, the BS projects are cancelled or get completely rectified into non-BS projects before I had to waste a single calorie on them
90% of the time, the non-BS projects are actually developed or, if cancelled, it’s due to forces outside of our control
The consequence of this “power” is that I am rarely busy since I don’t waste time on the BS and I get solid work done as I can move the time to the non-BS stuff… 23 years into my career I have never been late for a delivery or caught with no progress on a request
I do not know enoug about you to figure this out, so im going to ask: are you sure this isnt a bias thing? Are you sure the bs projects fail becaise they were bs and not becaise you threw them in the corner and never gave them a chance?
Totally fair question.
Basically, I don’t call shots in my organization, I’m a worker bee (best I could call myself is a "specialist worker bee hehehe) I can only work on what is assigned to me and our people are strict on that. Sometimes I get called into meetings as a technical advisor just to let people know if what they are dreaming sounds feasible but even those, if they start to take off, my bosses intervene and demand a project is actually created and put through the paces before it can be assigned to someone.
With that in mind, if I deem a project, task, inquire BS and do not work on it but I am wrong, the interested party (usually my boss) would come back to me to get status updates, ETAs, etc. Therefore, if I deem a project BS and it is not, I would eventually get in trouble.
What usually happens is that my boss would come and instead of asking about the status on the BS project, they would tell me to hold on or provide me new specs which may not be BS or simply to tell me the project sponsors dropped it.
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 have a similar good sense of timing, but not to that precision, based upon a childhood experience with shower length.
My parents were frustrated with how long I would shower, so I brought an egg timer in to help myself keep track of time. Over a year or two of this habit I developed a very good sense of timing in 5-10 minute intervals.
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.
Even one clock ticking in a room is enough to drive me mad. I’m not sure if having three would be better or worse. Adding some rhythm to it might help actually.
My heart used to beat at a solid 60 beats per minute at rest. Could just hear the pulse in my ears and be second accurate
I’ve spent too much time staring at the clock, full of anxiety, watching seconds pass. I’ve internalized the rhythm, just like with a song.
It’s a cool trick, sometimes. People get a kick out of me calling out the microwave timer from across the room.
My resting heart rate is very close to 60bpm, so I can use that as a reasonable timer to “wait ten seconds.” If I’m up and moving around or even playing an intense video game it’s no go but I can do it sometimes.
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’ve hit some killer long-range underwear-into-the-basket shots with my toes that honestly should’ve been on Sportscenter.
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.
If I read something my brain stores keywords/phrases to it anywhere from 30min to years. Sounds super normal (I think, least for 30min), but this has served me really well in two areas.
- Tests. As long as it’s a knowledge test and not a skill test I can skim read right before (even if it’s like 100 pages and I didn’t learn any of it before) and pass (for multiple choice grade is usually in the 90s, write-in is more 80s). Only professional place I use this outside of school is the bullshit PowerPoint “training” at work that makes you take a test at the end… (I don’t work an office job, idk might be more useful there)
- Online message chats. Great for looking stuff up like birthdays or preferences or someone told me something specific a year ago and now wants to talk about it in-depth and I have to go refresh on the exact health conditions of their dog while they’re grieving to me (I mean I could ask for a refresher, but when a friend is needing a comforting ear I’d rather just search it up quick while they type instead of making them back track their narrative which when you feel upset feels really alone someone can’t be right there in the moment with you off the bat, just a small way to care for my friends). Mainly though I do text DND and it’s amazing there lol. Had an unintentional tpk and offered a restart with memories (deus exmachina literally time rewind) which my group was into. I’m like shit we’ve been running this campaign for years, how am I going to remember the exact fight setups, initial NPC reactions, etc. I had a very specific search phrase for every event memory logged and made the whole thing a breeze to re-do literal years of content. And tbh I think I enjoyed it even more than my players cause I’d go back and reread their early murderhobo days and then get to freshly compare it to their evolved anarchist present (…I mean they were still murderhobos, but brought a tear to my eye to compare they’d learned some principles and loyalty lol).
I get to be the favorite of pretty much all the family pets. Always been.
Some family and friends joke that I probably could go to an African safari and the lions wouldn’t harm me. Not really rushing to find out if it’s true tho.
I have also been “the first human” as my wife puts it my entire life. Never had an animal act aggressive towards me and they typically gravitate to me during public events without even showing them attention.
I believe I once killed a fly with my mind. I had just read an article about a Japanese kid who could supposedly project images onto camera film mentally. The way he described it was building up a storm of energy in his mind and sort of throwing it at the camera. So I noticed a fly on my window right then. I did the same mental exercise, picturing a cyclone of energy whirring through my brain, building up more and more power, and I visualized unleashing it suddenly in a burst at the fly. Pow! The fly instantly fell off the glass and was dead on the windowsill. Either I killed it or it was ONE HELL of a coincidence.
