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.
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.
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:
Modern Guiness is corporate propaganda.
Obviously he should go get a Guinness instead
Off topic, but I’ve not seen that emoticon before (unusually left-facing too!) and it’s adorable.
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 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.
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.
Every time I say I hear electricity, people think I lie. But it makes noise! I hear my blood too.
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 can see lights flicker when others can’t.
All lights flicker. Just mostly we can’t perceive them.
LED flicker is most noticeable tho. Incandescent the least.
Fun fact. They flicker at similar frequencies (per light output/lumens) but the light drop off is more dramatic for LEDs so we perceive it more.
People who are epileptic or prone to migraines usually are bothered more by LEDs.
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 used to operate a drill rig for taking soil and water samples. I learned to read all the utility markings and to spot the telltale markings of previous drill work. I can walk around an urban area and tell you where all the gas stations and drycleaners used to be just based on a look at the pavement. In that sense I can “see” things others can’t.
Why do dry cleaners need drill work?
Just fyi, they answered your question further down in the thread without replying to you by accident I think. I saw your question and also wanted to know, just passing that along in case you were still curious lol
High pitched noises sometimes. I have an audio spectrum visualizer app installed to confirm these. But they can be pretty weird as they bounce around. You’ll get these heat spots. Unfortunately, I feel like my ears are degrading now.
Anyway, dimmable LED lights are often a problem due to PWM. Only full brightness is quiet.
Smell, I don’t even know what the hell that was. There is or was something in the back of one bus. I wouldn’t say it’s smell, but… something. Just a spicy punch that doesn’t quite let me breathe in. I noted down the license plate if I’ll experience it again to confirm it’s the same vehicle, but this wasn’t the first time, though unfortunately I didn’t copy it that first time. Same line though, so possibly same vehicle as well.
But I am not sure if I was the only one, no one was visibly bothered, but who knows.That high pitch sound from lights and power packs drive me crazy. It’s so loud and high.
The ringing in my ears is my own personal sensation. There are many others with a ringing of their own, but this one is mine and it undoubtedly is as unique as my fingerprint.
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.
It should. Seeing in low light is a very useful thing. And we could dispense some of the light polution we create.
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.
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.
Apparently I am the only one who can smell this odor that is on dish sponges. It it harsh as smelling salts and is like burning chemicals of some kind. It is not on fresh sponges and doesn’t always develop on used sponges. I thought it might be a chemical reaction between the soap and synthetic sponge materials. I tried searching for it online but haven’t found an answer yet.
I know what you mean. Super odd smell.
I know the exact smell you’re talking about! It’s one of the reasons I don’t use sponges.
When food is going to go off, or when an object has developed mildew/black mold, I can tell way before anyone else by smell.
Constant droning Like tinnitus except very low-pitched. Probably caused by intracranial hypertension.
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.
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.
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.
I see certain shades of blue as grey, while my partner can distinguish more shades of blue than the average person, leaving me often feeling like I’m being fucked with
I wear almost exclusively grayscale clothing, except for a pair of pants that are apparently navy blue, and a shirt that’s supposedly slate blue
A friend sent me a casual lecture/talk a few years ago, and I remember that in one section the speaker talks about getting lens surgery and discovering they unknowingly had a similar-sounding condition, which the lenses had fixed.
I can hear the muscles in my eyes when I look from side to side or up and down.
Ooh, sometimes mine sound like trying to wind a motor. What do yours sound like?
I’ve been thinking for hours how to describe it.
It’sa sort of echoing scraping noise. A sheet of plywood lying on the ground, being kicked down the road. Only it’s quite faint, I can only hear it when the room is quiet or when I’m trying to get to sleep.
I don’t know what it is, but I can smell a somewhat metallic type smell on some specific people’s breath. It always smells very similar between different people. They generally aren’t very healthy, but no one seems to know what I’m talking about.
I knew someone with that terrible metalic breath, was stomach ulcers causing it!
