What is something you can sense that few-if-any people you know can sense? Literal answers only.
You must log in or # to comment.
My nose is more sensitive than average to certain types of foul smells mostly in the poop and rotting organic material categories but also things like mouse / rodent urine, skunks, and cigarette smoke. Oh joy.
Mostly it makes me feel like I’m going crazy because I smell these things when nobody else seems to notice leading me to wonder if I’m just hallucinating the smell. But sometimes I put it to good use by being the early warning system of skunks in the area and sometimes I’m the first to notice when the milk is starting to go bad.
I think maybe I’m sensitive to some bad smells other people don’t get. One time someone was demonstrating to a group (including me) making chocolate and it smelled like vomit to me and I had to leave. The others weren’t bothered.
This might be a personal preference thing rather than a sensing-something-undetectable thing but I’ve always hated the flavour of dairy—can’t stomach dairy milk, dairy cheese, dairy butter, etc. The vegan versions of these things are fine to me though because they don’t have that distinct “dairy” flavour whilst still having the other qualities of the product.
Was this a Hershey plant? The specific process they use creates the same acid as in the stomach which makes people who didn’t grow up with the stuff gag.
I’ve been told by Euros their chocolate uses a different process.
If it’s dark and I see a light at just tge right angle, I see an image of the blood vessels inside my eyes.
Coil whine
The flickering of my parents old Plasma they can’t.
I’m very near-sighted. Also means I have a built-in microscope.
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 taste water, irl no one I met really can feel the different tastes of plain water but i can
Low light vision.
I was always very sensitive to bright lights and sincerely fear I’ll go blind at my last years but I can see at higher definition under low light conditions.
My vision stops processing color and I get higher definition of contrast. I’ve walked through dark areas with no difficulty, where others simply said they could not see a thing.
Maybe everyone already knows this but you can generally see better in your peripheral vision in low light.
Almost all of your color vision / cones are concentrated in a tiny central area of your retina.
The grey scale / rods are dispersed around that.
In some ways I think night vision is a kind of skill that some people might be better at than others, even if the mechanics of their eyes aren’t special.
Based on what I’ve read about senses, I think most of human sensory variance is born in the brain and is trainable to be much more sensitive than we’d generally expect possible given our comparatively weak hardware. Some of us have the supertaster gene, but no one comes out of the womb a sommelier.
It should. Seeing in low light is a very useful thing. And we could dispense some of the light polution we create.
I’m not very sensitive to bright lights. But I can also see better in low-light conditions than anyone I know. Not sure how that works.
I can see an actor and know immediately whether they guest starred or were an extra with a line in the TV show Wings.
Constant droning Like tinnitus except very low-pitched. Probably caused by intracranial hypertension.
I can tell where a laser is pointed on me without looking. Like if you blindfold me and got a laser pen and shined it on my arm, I can point to where it feels like it is with pretty good accuracy. It’s easier to detect motion than precise placement, and sensation wise it’s not touch or heat like you’d expect it’s more like raw proprioception.
Also it felt the same regardless of the color of laser we used which seems odd since you’d think higher frequency light would be easier to detect.
Tbf I haven’t done the experiment since I did it with my siblings when I was pretty young. Not sure if I can still do it, but my siblings and cousins couldn’t do it even back then.
Human skin contains photoreceptors, so this makes perfect sense.
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 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.
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.
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:
Off topic, but I’ve not seen that emoticon before (unusually left-facing too!) and it’s adorable.
Modern Guiness is corporate propaganda.
Obviously he should go get a Guinness instead
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 can smell your fabric softener, no matter how long ago you used it. Artificial perfumes of any kind just murder my sinuses. It suuuucks.
I also can hear electronics, even just the lights, if that’s all that’s on. Maddening, because I can almost never find real silence. It’s why I love camping.
Every time I say I hear electricity, people think I lie. But it makes noise! I hear my blood too.
I wish you could try stuff beforehand in a quiet place to see if it’s gonna bother you with annoying quiet noises. Unfortunately that’s not really a thing. Luckily electronics has gotten better over time but a lot of stuff still does it, just usually less.
Can you do that thing where you flex some internal muscle and hear a loud rumbling that I assume is rushing blood? It’s hard to explain. I think the muscle is related to the jaw, or maybe ear movement. It’s not externally perceivable, but it’s useful on an airplane.
Is that something like swallow or gently blow through the nose with closing your nose? This is what I’m suppose to do to release pressure on my eardrum, but I have no idea what you mean.
I experience the first set of powers, and I hate it. Every detergent, shampoo, deodorant I use is “sensitive”, “baby formula” or whatever.
And a few years ago some deodorant company started using some I guess artificial compounds that just pushes the air out of my lungs, it’s so bad. I can not only smell it, it digs into my forehead.
I get this with pretty much all perfumes, scented candles, tobacco smoke (oh god the tobacco smoke) and extinguished matches and candles.
With some people I wonder how they can exist with so much perfume poured over themselves that I can’t breathe while walking behind them. I just don’t understand.
An upside of being smell sensitive is that it helps with debugging electronics. Burnt parts smell very obvious, and I can even smell hot stuff like heatsinks.
I can relatively easily reverse engineer recipes I like.
I forgot to mention electronic vapes with, I don’t know, banana strawberry flavoured vape juice 🤮
Not exactly sense, but my brain’s processing. I can easily pick out the melody of only 1 instrument in music. It’s like Fourier transform but on instrument level.
I didn’t realize that’s not a thing everyone can do. There’s a part of All I Want for Christians is You that’s just someone mashing annoyingly on a piano, and it’s so disgusting that I love it. It starts at about 0:58 on the YouTube Music copy, and then changes at about 1:05. It’s such an annoying sound in isolation.
As a trained musician I do this too. But it also means the “skill” spills over into other situations. If I’m in a restaurant, instead of being able to ignore the hum of background conversations, I will hear (and subconsciosly bounce around focsing on) every side conversation.
It makes listening to things VERY hard
I taught myself to do this after reading about it in a short fantasy promo when I was little. An adult asks a boy what he can hear, and he says people talking, so the man instructs him on how to really listen to what is being said around him, to gather information without attracting notice. I’ve always wondered what that story was because I’d like to read the whole thing.
