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 smell reposts and pictures I have already seen a mile away.
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.
My solution to the charger wine was to get a better quality one. I find branded ones don’t have that issue anywhere near as much.
Another one!
It’s a common autistic trait, FYI 💛
That’s something you might lose over time, that’s why some places would install speakers witg certain sounds outside their door, kids wouldn’t hang around because it disturbed them, older people just didn’t hear it.
Unless you’re autistic. We don’t lose the top end of our hearing for some reason. Those “mosquito” devices can trigger my migraines, at 43 years old.
If a “friend” detonates an IED firework in an abandoned field near your head you will lose that top end… But you will also get really bad tinnitus.
don’t think that autism has to do with it. The cause for the higher frequency hearing loss is a physical degradation of the small hairs in the cochlear. And in some people it just happens a lot less
No, really. It is very common for individuals on the autistic spectrum to have above average acuity of high frequency sound.
Could it be a result of not liking other loud sounds? Loud music, concerts, loud crowded places, headphones played too loud etc all can damage your upper range hearing, and iirc many on the spectrum do not enjoy loud stumuli.
At the volume I have my games and music, I rather doubt it. :-/
Fuck. I’m 35 and I was able to hear a falling ballast in a light fixture at a busy reptile expo.
I have a spectrum analyzer on my phone, which I had to use to prove to my wife that there was a loud high-pitch whine, and that it wasn’t tinnitus or a phantom sound.
This would be a weird way to find out I’m on the spectrum.
Your spectrum analyzer pulled double-duty!
Nice XD
Masquito alarms should be illegal.
Found the youngest person.
SO that’s what I keep hearing in those dame phone chargers.
I don’t hear it all the time though, it sometimes starts happening and after that never stops. I believe it is that something breaks or is about to break that makes me suddenly able to hear it.
If someone more knowledge, knows what’s up with them please tell.
Usually it’s a bad capacitor
I’m a stair master. I sprint them 3-4-5 at a time, smooth and quiet as a ninja. Up or down, doesn’t matter
I used to wonder why adults didn’t run up the stairs. I figured adults must just be no fun and didn’t want to look silly running upstairs.
So all throughout my childhood, teens, 20s, and 30s I would usually run up my stairs because it just felt natural. Then not too far into my 40s, my knee was just like “nope”.
Now I have to walk upstairs, which is lame as hell.
No way man, I’m gonna keep on rocking forever!
Forever!
Forever
Forever…Exactly! And in this case, “what’s it” is having knees that don’t hurt.
shush you, time for your medicine!
(I’m approaching my 40s, so you got me worried haha)
It was 42 for me specifically. Good luck!
I eat rice in rows like a dot matrix printer
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.
I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.
Got gaslit about it by my family as well.
You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.
You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.
Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.
So that has a name! Hahahaha There’s no way I can memorise that, I’ll keep call it “eeenergy” instead.
Good to know what it is in case someone wants a serious answer.
entoptic blue field phenomenon
Thank you. You’ve solved a mystery that bugged me since forever lol. Yay, I am not crazy. I legit thought there was something wrong with my eyesight all these years, or that they were just weird floaters. Thank you so much, friend. Relate hard to the sound stuff as well, it’s nice to know it happens to other people al well.
Out of all the ways I’ve ever been told I may have autism, this is certainly the most unexpected! At a certain point I should probably get a diagnosis.
In my family’s defense, they did believe me as soon as they tested my hearing (after trying to trip me up several times, without success), so I never felt gaslit, I just felt proud of my hearing hahaha.
Yeah, I didn’t mention this in my previous post but it was annoying, for sure. I would listen to this annoying noise, nobody would hear it, and I’d eventually discovered that somebody had left the TV on.
That phenomenon is also something I saw, but never really gave it much thought, I just assumed it was just something our eyes did
Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.
I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.
Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).
… Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.
There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.
My brother and I always enjoyed going out to the woods together when we were young because you couldn’t hear everything humming out there. I still enjoy it for the same reason.
My hearing isn’t even that great because I’ve spent years around loud noises (industrial and concerts) without hearing protection. But I can still “feel” cheap chargers, bad screens, and florescent lights.
A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.
Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?
You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.
But… that hum? The buzz?
Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.
Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.
Try that with cheap mobile phone charges. They have an annoying coil whine.
… Wait. I assumed it was my extension cord keeping me up at night. I just learned to use it as white noise.
I swear my therapist says she sees no reason for me to be diagnosed as autistic
Should be an age thing. I remember at school that some teachers would leave the TV on when they were done showing something and the CRT noise would make us students crazy and we had to remind the teacher to turn it off.
So you will probably lose it at some point.
Diagnosed autistic?
It’s very common for us 'spergs to have a very high frequency cut off on our hearing, all the way to old age.
I’m 43 and can still hear the bats chirping when they’re hunting insects in the twilight round the gardens. People think I’m making it up, until I point the bats out, tracking them by sound until they flutter high enough to see their silhouette against the sky.
CRT TVs and monitors used to annoy the hell out of me. The high pitched whine of the flyback transformer that runs the motion of the electron beam makes a very distinctive hiss. Like someone else on here, I could tell what refresh rate your monitor was running in by the noise it made.
That, plus an abnormally high flicker fusion frequency meant I had migraines every other day when I was working. :-/
Interesting, never knew that. I’m in my 40s and can still hear the annoying high-pitched whine from the speaker outside a shop near me that’s designed to keep kids from hanging around.
Ah, the “Mosquito” device.
I have strong feelings on those things. Strong enough to drill holes in one while up a ladder wearing a visi-vest.
Side note: It’s amazing how invisible you become while wearing a high-vis vest and a hard hat.
An IN-visi-vest, if you will
Not as cool as Predator camouflage but just as effective.
Welcome to the world’s most useless club.
Used to be able to walk down the street and know who’s home watching TV by the whine (sort of like an extremely high pitched white noise).
Now CRTs are gone I’ve since realised I also have tinnitus and am constantly hearing that same sound in my left ear.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
think I was crazy or had tinnitus
When you have tinnitus, then you will know it. And then you probably can’t hear that CRT screen anymore.
About “crazy” I don’t know ;)
Nope, I usually hear both! 🙃
I used to be able to tell what refresh rate they were set to because everything below a certain point flickered. I’d ask people why their screens were flickering and they couldn’t see it.
When I lived in Canada for a year and then moved back to Europe I saw CRT TVs flicker for the first week I was back home. Even on so called 100Hz CRT TVs I saw flickering. Got used to 60Hz CRT screens so 50Hz CRTs were very noticeably
Yeah, if my memory is correct the flickers stopped completely for me at around 80hz. I’m talking about monitors here rather than TVs.
Now that is a superpower. I’ve always thought the ability to see fast was such an interesting skill.
Think about it: you could go to the Olympics in a skillful sport like fencing or boxing, and defeat every opponent without much formal training simply because you can see them telegraph their moves. No anticipation or planning required, you just watch them come to you.
Do you do any competitive sport?
Though just because you can see such fine movements doesn’t mean you can react fast enough to stop it. You’d just see your loss coming from a mile away.
True, but with some training you’d learn to anticipate as well. Pairing that with your Uchiha eyes, and you’d be unstoppable
“awww shiiiiitttt I’m about to be punched in the face”
…
…
…
“Ouch!”
I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.
Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing… the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity… I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.
The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they’ll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.
Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.
No, I have very poor hand eye co-ordination. Every time I have tried to play table tennis people have been on the floor laughing at how poor my reactions are. My eyes are just very sensitive to light.
You might want to get yourself checked for Autistic Spectrum Disorder because I notice CFL tube (fluorescent tube light) flicker if I pay attention to them when no one else does
Some people with ASD are more sensitive to things other people don’t notice
Mate, there are so many things that suggest I am on the spectrum now that I have given up keeping track of them all. I’m not sure that at my time of life there’s anything that can be done for me even if I did get a diagnosis.
Some power-supplies also do this high pitch noise too and it bothers me a lot. Most people can’t hear it.
It might happen with non-crt screens too. I remember a flat screen (LCD?) that made a different noise depending on the color it displayed. White and light colors made a lot more noise and if you had good ears you could tell the difference without looking. Not sure how they work though to explain this.
“Coil whine”.
The inductors used in the power regulation circuitry physically vibrate due to the electromotive force the part relies on to function. Changes in the load on the power supply changes the characteristics of the vibration, allowing audible detection of the variation.
The physical vibration slightly alters the electrical characteristics too, which is why inductors are glued down or “potted” in some equipment to try and negate this effect.
Edit: The inductors on your graphics card can whine too. This generates noise on the ground line of the whole PC which is then amplified by cheap sound devices, which is why you can literally hear the mouse moving on the screen on some PCs.
I used to hear it too, now I’m old and I can’t hear anything above 16KHz, maybe less now since last time I checked.
Same, but more like 13k Hz last time I tested myself.
I could detect it as a kid, but definitely not past 25
I can still hear the bats pinging for insects round the back gardens. I was 43 last week :-p
I had this before my hearing was damaged in my mid-thirties. I could hear if any electrical device with large filter capasitors was turned on, even from another room. I discovered by accident that the high pitch noise was emitted by the capasitors when I was fixing old audio gear, I guess they vibrate while doing their job or something like that.
I talked about this with my friend who was specializing to be an ear/hearing doctor, his theory was that my upper hearing range was a bit higher than average. He also talked about how brains filter sensory data and it could just be that my filters weren’t blocking these frequencies.
It was also impossible for me to sleep in a room if there were any mosquitoes. The whining of their wings even in the far side of a room was maddening, so I had to kill them all every night before hitting the bed. The one good thing that came out of the damage to my hearing was that the mosquitoes bother me no more, unless they fly right in front of my ears.
I can hear it too. Its a fuzzy buzzing noise.
You probably should get yourself checked for Autism Spectrum Disorder and so does anyone else who experiences anything similar
Some people with ASD have a sensitivity to things neurotypical people don’t notice
Autism is a Spectrum Disorder so not all autistic people have the same symptoms and you can’t self diagnose yourself, you need to see someone specialised for that
Approximately 15.5KHz. Not out of range for healthy human hearing. Most of us are damaged by noise pollution and blood pressure issues by the time we’re adults and high frequency sensitivities drop off first.
If a CRT is on in a large space with volume off, I can still hear it a bit, but mild tinnitus masks most of it.
I can hear CRTs too, but I haven’t seen one in so long I don’t know if I still can. It was so high pitched I’ve probably lost the ability to hear the frequency.
You have adhd
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I can wiggle my ears.
Both. And each one individually.Every time I’ve read this in this thread, my ears flex hard. Sometimes if I do it too many times in a row one gets “stuck” for a moment before it can relax.
I can stop hiccups at will. Whenever I get a hiccup, I just stop.
I learned this. The trick is to force yourself to do it. And your body goes “now I don’t want to anymore”
I was able to read Foundations of Leninism in just one day! And I don’t even know Russian!!
sleeper agent training
I can rumble my ears, do the vulcan greet, do Stan Laurel’s kneesy earsy nosey and the finger wriggle. I can also measurable lower my heart rate by conscious effort alone, and increase my body temperature by concentrating on it.
I can also measurable lower my heart rate by conscious effort alone
I read somewhere a while back that people can learn to do this with training and a visualization. If you have a heart rate monitor that shows different color shades depending on your rate, apparently people can learn focus on making the color turn green and lowering their heart rate.
I do it by focusing on my torso and in my head decelerate it, I guess it’s similar. Also, a guy I know can do it through breathing technique, and I suspect breathing is part of my deceleration too.
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 on low content of salt or spices.
Anyone else can smell criquets?
- 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).
I’m with you on crickets.
Crickets, grasshoppers, ladybugs, ants are all smelly insects to me. My wife thought I was crazy for a while hunting down bugs and smells in the house by sniffing like a hound. Now she just goes with it.
I can smell small amounts of sugar added to water — very helpful when we get coffee on the road and can’t tell whose cup is whose.
There’s a lot I can smell from bathroom smells and body odours, which can be more of a curse than useful.
I think I have the same cooking technique as you, I’m constantly smelling and adjusting by smell.
Wait so not everyone can smell ladybugs? I think they smell horrible. I don’t detect ants though. Grasshoppers have a distinct smell to me too but I don’t find that nearly as offputting.
Ever got the “are you part dog or something”? Always makes me laugh.
Smell is undervalued in humans. I could smells if my partner was about to have her period before she started using contraception.
I have, and I’ve been able to smell the same thing.
Definitely agree it’s undervalued, I don’t even think you need to have an especially good nose, you just need to stop and do some sniffing.
I agree. It is possible to train the sense of smell. And it should be actively trained.
I can rumble my ears. It’s not at all useful and often highly annoying.
It’s useful when your ears are under high pressure. It can help relieve it. Sometimes.
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
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)
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
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 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!
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…
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!
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.
I can whistle both ways, without a tonal shift. So I can basically breathe as I whistle and do it indefinitely. Full control, too, because of years of doing it.
Do you just mean whistling while breathing in and also while breathing out? I can do that, but there’s a short break in the whistle when I switch the airflow direction.
Wait until you hear about inward singing! I can whistle inward too but not as well as outward (it takes a lot more air, and my range is reduced).
I can do the same thing. It’s fun!
I just wish my tonal range were higher. Some app I just installed says my high is C7 and my low is G#5. What’s that… An octave and a little?
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.moekadu.tuner/
But that doesn’t indicate the range where it sounds the best.
