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 can speak Finnish.
(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ Depression ♥
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?
I can smell pizza from three rooms away, does that count ? 🤔
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 hear CRT screens. They emit a high pitch noise that nobody else in my family can hear, I assume most people actually can hear it but never noticed it. My family used to think I was crazy or had tinnitus (jury's still out on both) until they tested me by making me close my eyes and tell them if the TV was on while turning it off and on at random, with sound off. It was a weird test from my perspective, since I could hear it fine anyway. So far I haven't noticed a decay due to age, but if it had little use when CRTs were widespread, it's now completely useless.
In a room full of power supplies i was the only one able to find which one was still powering something, because apparently out of the ~20 people that tried before me, i was the only one that could hear the transformer whine.
Also a general annoyance since i need to charge my phone in another room if i want to sleep without simulating tinnitus.
I have a blurry photographic memory.
What I mean is that I can remember where/what an item looks like but can’t read it. This was especially lame and stressful in nursing school because during a test I could recall exactly where in the textbook or PowerPoint slide the answer was, but couldn’t “read” it from said memory. Stuff like “it was in the yellow shaded an the lower inner quarter of the page, second and third billet points” or “halfway down the page, highlighted in pink, and next to it was a graphic of the Krebs cycle” Not as helpful as you might think.
I can smell reposts and pictures I have already seen a mile away.
My boyfriend can smell when someone drank alcohol hours (or even days!) later. He seems to smell it in a person's sweat, so we suspect he senses some kind of metabolite.
As to me? In-person I seem to emit a comforting, trustworthy aura. Children and stray animals approach me like they just know that I'm a safe space for them. As a result, I've acquired quite a list of no-kill shelters in my phone. I also ended up working in children's therapy.
Adults who share my wavelength can also recognize it in me, and I can recognize it in them - we're drawn to each other in the same "inherently trustworthy" way. I suspect it's an aspect of neuro-divergence.
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.
My mouth doesn't have the receptors to detect capsacin, the chemical that makes spicy food burn/hot. I can eat the spiciest food imaginable and it will not burn my mouth at all.
That said, those receptors exist in other parts of my body. Very often while I'm sitting on the toilet I'll realize my dinner the previous night was particularly spicy.
Also, after more than 1/3 of a century of eating spicy food indiscriminately, my stomach lining has taken quite the beating.
My super power? Invisible to government bureaucracy. Every time I fill out my absentee voter reg, I get a response back telling me I forgot to fill out my birthday. On my last one, I took photos of the filled out form. I've never been assigned jury duty. When I go to the BMV it takes hours because they forget to put my number in the ticket system. (This has happened at multiple BMVs, across multiple states) and it's not like I'm being an asshole or anything, I just get my number and wait patiently for my name to come up on the board, and after seeing the entire room cycle out once or twice I check in with the staff and they're like "weird, your number isn't in the system" despite me holding the paperwork/ticket with my call number on it.
My wife is a super taster/smeller. Like to an extreme level. She can't eat bell peppers because they are too spicy. ( They do produce capsaicin, but so little that they are a scoville rating of 0), she can tell if I steal a sip of her drink, because she can taste the difference on her straw/cup. When we make pasta or mashed potatoes, she knows if I put a little sprinkle of salt in the water (were talking a pinch of salt for maybe 6-7 cups of water), and she can smell that much salt before she even tastes the food. When I eat out for lunch at work, she can not only tell me where I went to eat, but she call tell me what I ordered and if I made any alterations to the order. And no, she doesn't just know what I like to order, I try new stuff for my lunch all the time. The craziest one was when we had a staff lunch, and she was like "Jimmy johns, roast beef, with mustard and hot peppers mix" and I was like "WTF" and she said "that's what you said for lunch, please change your clothes and take a shower". Here's the rub... That was my first time trying JJs roast beef.
Maybe I'm just a filthy stinky person and don't know it.
I can't stay angry; I have multi-sensory aphantaisa, this comes with not being able to re-experience emotions.
I remember that something made me angry, but I can't relive the emotion. It lets me dispassionately examine the past to see what made me angry and thus work through the trigger and try to reduce it in the future.
There is the downside to this, it is on all emotion, so I also can't re-experience happy emotions either.
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.
I have a few different versions of synesthesia.
The most prominent one is that is see words and letters in color. If you tell me your name I can more or less paint your name like a weird color code. Whenever it is brought up it's almost like a fun little party trick where people ask me what color their names are and I tell them.
Spoiler alert, though: if your name has A or S in it, it will most likely have red in the mix. M and N are differnet variations of green. Some letters are dominant and others are submissive so depending on the word they either pain other letters a specific color or take color from dominant letters. E is a submissive letter. Tends to be a pale yellow, but will change color depending on the letters it is put together with. D is a weird dominant letter that changes color all the time. Either black or a deep purple. Completely depends on the word.
Numbers have colors too.
0 - white
1 - black
2 - pale yellow
3 - sky blue
4 - red
5 - dark brown
6 - black
7 - yellow
8 - dark purple
9 - orange
Random names and their colors:
Jack = black and red, white and black again.
Stephanie = red, yellow, green and yellowish white
Peter = gold and black
Mary = forest green, red, black and orangy yellow
Robert = black, white black
Lily = white, silver, yellow like sunshine
William = black, white, red, forest green
Karen = black, red, black, a sprinkle of yellow and spring green.
Russell = black, golden yellow, red, yellow
Evelyn = sunshine yellow, white and spring green.
Etc etc
To me, pretty names are not just pretty if they sound good, they also have to have beautiful and unique color combinations. Most names tend to have red and green color combos for me so whenever yellow, blue, purple or pink appear in a name I really like it. In my country there's a man's name Åge which isn't the prettiest sounding name, but to me it is so friggin beautiful because it's one of the rarest color combinations I have in my head: dusty blue, morning pink, white, misty overlay and a bit of golden brown. The letter Å is the prettiest letter to me as it is this rare double color of blue and pink and it is a dominant letter so whenever it appears in a name or a word, it is like a breath of fresh air among all the greens and blacks and reds.
-
I have hyperthymia. It's a constant state of mild mania and when I get flare ups of it it's like I'm on speed
-
Excellent colour vision, forget what it's called but I have being a girl to thank for this one!
-
I have hyperphantasia too, and didn't realize this until someone posted a diagram on here. When I imagine an apple in my head, it looks the same as me seeing it in real life. I never knew this wasn't normal until pretty recently!
-
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 don't actually know if this is unusual, but I can smell when people have a respiratory illness, like a cold. It smells vaguely like the rooting hormone that you can get from a garden center.
There's a woman who can smell Parkinson's Disease with almost 100% accuracy.
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..
oh wait i got another one, my tinnitus it a pretty constant pitch, and i can measure my intervals offa it so i got perfect pitch. i can't tell you what note it is (except for b3, i hit that one perfectly every time because of this one ave maria) but it takes me a minute. the note is e11 or e12 i can't remember which anymore
I used to be able to tell if a TV was on or not. I can't really explain it, but it was like I could vaguely hear/feel it? I don't know, I was a kid. My grandma would play her games without sound sometimes so she wouldn't wake people up (and probably to play without a kid hanging off of her), but I evolved to counter it. 😂
I am very hangover resistant. I'm into my 30s now, I've only ever had one hangover, and I attribute that to a bit of blood loss (mishap trying to open a bottle of champagne with a sabre, I have now mastered that art)
I don't drink particularly often, I'll often go a few weeks without a drink, but I do occasionally find myself in a position where I get absolutely hammered and I wake up the next day feeling absolutely fine.
Years ago I was camping out at a music festival and got totally incoherently drunk, stumbled halfway into my tent and crashed there for the night. The next morning my friends who hadn't gone nearly as hard woke up all feeling pretty rough, and we're created by me already awake and making breakfast feeling fresh as a daisy.
I do tend to mix in plenty of water and food with my nights of debauchery, so I can't say that it's genetic or if I just happen to be doing the right thing. It's not a purposeful anti-hangover measure, I just want food and water while I'm drinking.
I'm not totally immune to the negative effects of alcohol though. I absolutely get red wine headaches, and a good night of drinking may sometimes give me a Charley horse the next day.
I think I can smell progesterone, in some women, and in some months (far more than others/other times). Being male, this is absolutely is not something I can collect a lot of data on very quickly, and I don't know whether the strength or clarity for me correlates with women who have higher levels than normal, but I do know it correlates really well with this chart in terms of timing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Estradiol_and_progesterone_%25_changes_across_the_menstrual_cycle.tif
So often I know that it's a week and a half before your period, and I know what that means, but I promise you that I have never ever used this knowledge, partly because I'm pretty shy, but not even with my wife (who doesn't know I can tell) when we were aiming for pregnancies, because that was a very busy time indeed in that arena and I saw no reason to reduce that in any way whatsoever.
Well, not really superpowers since they are common in humans. However, they are pretty interesting abilities nonetheless.
-
Advanced speech recognition. I can filter out speech of one person while ignoring other background noise and even other speech.
-
Advanced face recognition. I can see faces in clouds, floors, and other inanimate objects. Also helps when looking at real faces of people in a crowd. See also: pareidolia
-
Auditory hallucinations during hypnagogia. Look it up. It’s weird and trippy.
-
Desensitization and habituation to capsaicin. I can eat spicy foods.
-
This must have been terrifying for the ant.
I honestly can't think of a damned thing I'm weirdly good at. Maybe that's my super power. Extreme averageness.
My knee makes horrible, disturbing crackling and popping sounds when I move it, even just a little bit. It doesn't hurt at all, and grosses out anyone who is unfortunate enough to hear it. I especially enjoy telling family members to "listen to this" and then slowly extending my leg out.
I shattered the upper portion of my tibia while bouldering to get this ability. I asked my surgeon about it (my tibia/knee required a total of 3 surgeries to repair) and they told me it was likely scar tissue, and would persist.
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'm really bad with names and faces, but I can distinguish twins. I mean not the twins like "and my twin has a penis" but monozygotic twins.
I don't claim it to be any kind of a super power, but with my inability to recognize people even after they've been at the hairdresser it's really astonishing.
Probably odorous house ants (sometimes also called sugar ants). I'm fairly sensitive to their scent, myself and recall being in tears as a small child ~6 because one of them walked across my finger and no amount of washing would get the smell off. I'm not a fan.
I don't consider any part of my personality as a super power, although I am aware I have a few oddities on me.
- Smells play a very big part of my reality.
I can "smell" a shift in air humidity. This led to me learning I can cook by my nose, as I can smell the very onset of burning or low content of salt or spices.
Anyone else can smell crickets?
- it was always easier to maintain a memory if I translate it into an image.
I gave differents colours in my mind to the days of the week, I color coded my emotions in order to know how things are inside my head and I have a colour bar to range my dialogue intensity to other.
- noticing something is "wrong" around or out of place always seemed easy, be it because there is a sound too much or missing or something is somewhere it doesn't belong or missing
I always thought these were normal things, growing up. Just like having a narrator voice in my head (this one comes really handy when reading a book; all character have a voice and the narrator has another).
Back in university, I studied basically all day long, which was tiresome after long sessions of study, even if with friends. My great superpower is that it used to just take me ~10 seconds of resting with my eyes closed to feel a huuuuge boost of energy that lasted for 1-2 hours. After that boost expired, I just did it again.
Incredibly useful.
I can smell ants too, and it's been useful here in the land of fire ants...
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.
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.
Reminds me of the show "Extraordinary". Watch it, if you got the chance. It's really funny and also deals about pointless superpowers.
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
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.
wait i'm a supertaster and i fucking hate ants, if that's the scent i can do it too. well i could if i didn't shitbomb the bathroom so often. but you may have legitimately helped me in my lifelong war against the ants (i'm farsighted i cannot see them until i sit down and they crawl up and bite my jibblies thank you)
I eat rice in rows like a dot matrix printer
I can raise my middle toe like I'm flicking you off
Two. The first is that I can make traffic lights turn green within 5 seconds of putting the car in Park.
Secondly and perhaps more usefully, there's a computer Problem Exclusion Zone around me. I can just stand next to a misbehaving computer, not looking at the screen and with my hands in my pockets, and it'll start working properly.
I can level paintings by hand, and usually on the first try. I still always double check with a level
I can do the Skype notification sound with my mouth, but it's not a natural ability, a beatboxer classmate taught me during highschool. He could also mimic a cricket and that derailed more than one lesson, but he never taught me that one.
I have two superpowers:
Mosquitoes don't find me delicious. When everyone else is getting hammered, they generally leave me alone. When I do get bit, the bites barely swell and they don't usually itch.
Rock star parking- Anywhere I go, I always check out immediately in front of the place I need to be. There's almost always an empty spot, and if there isn't there's someone just leaving that I pull into. I dunno how that helps me fight crime, but it sure would be useful if I were a bank heist getaway driver.
I can turn ducks around... but only when they are in the water
A lot of my memory is based on Music. So if I hear a song I get all of my memories of both the things that have happened in my life while that song was playing, and where I first heard the song (if I heard the song in a movie or show I can say/picture what was happening in that when the song was playing as well). To the point where many have said it's a photographic memory based in song. Importantly, if there wasn't music playing then I only remember the rough details instead of pinpoint details when there is music.
Now if only it worked for studying, then I would have been able to listen to music while studying and remember all the shit I was supposed to instead of being terrible at tests.
now, regarding my superpower i give good hugs
I have never been, nor seem to be able to get motion sickness. No seasickness either. I can read books on all sorts of moving vehicles, and I love roller coasters. Whip me around upside down in pitch dark at 60mph and I'll just call it a good time. My husband says I am squandering my powers because I can play as much of whatever motion intense VR game as I want, but I just end up playing Beat Saber most of the time.
To disappear without anyone knowing.
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 can read any book cover to cover even if it is terribly dull or i don't understand it
That one again?
I was able to read Foundations of Leninism in just one day! And I don't even know Russian!!
