What is something you can sense that few-if-any people you know can sense? Literal answers only.
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Despite having tinnitus, I can still hear very subtle sounds and identify them.
- For example, a long, deep hum means a garage door is opening/closing.
- I can also hear (and feel) footsteps and movement from people around a building, even very subtle movement.
- I can also pick up on all the little creaks a building makes.
However, despite being able to hear subtle sounds, I cannot hear “no” sound or silence due to the ringing. :/
I think I can see more colours in the stars than most people. I can also tell the northern lights are coming up earlier, so probably just low-light cone sensitivity.
A wasp died in a vent a bit ago and it smelled awful to me, but nobody else noticed.
I can sense when it’s time to wake up, while asleep.
It’s likely just confirmation bias, but I almost always wake up minutes before my alarm if I have a stressful or unusual appointment, like an early flight or interview.
I assume most people has this with their routine wake-up time, that the body learns when to wake up right on time… but this is like: if I usually wake up at 8:30 but now have to wake up 5:45 or 6:15 or whatever, I’ll wake up on my own right before the alarm goes off. I just need to think about it somewhat thoroughly (wake-up time and approx. how many hour of sleep until then) before falling asleep.
I wish my body was that precise, my body wakes up an hour before I need to get up in that situation and always in a “shit I am late!” way :(
Your body give you an hour long relaxing shower, or the opportunity for continental breakfast at home before leaving. Generous body!
True! It is less stressful because of that
I can smell when a woman is pregnant. I’ve shocked several friends by congratulating them before they even took a test.
what does it smell like?
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.
Same with dairy. I never enjoyed a glass of plain milk, and after switching to dairy free options for milk I also found that vegan cream, ice cream, butter etc doesn’t have that “off” subtaste. The difference with non-dairy really highlighted how badly dairy makes me want to rinse my mouth.
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.
No, it was just on the stovetop. A long time ago so I don’t remember the details but it wasn’t in an industrial context.
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 can taste water, irl no one I met really can feel the different tastes of plain water but i can
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’m very near-sighted. Also means I have a built-in microscope.
Do you have an example of something you can make out that an average person probably can’t?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
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 ^^
