Ask Lemmy

I can speak Finnish.

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?

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 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.

(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ Depression ♥

I can tell when someone is about to run a red light.

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.

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..

I can 'flex' my Eustachian tubes and 'open them' at will, e.g. equalising pressure when ears need 'popping' on planes. I'm sure it isn't that uncommon but no one ever knows what I mean when I say it.

I have super sensitive hearing, so while I can hear the faintest of noises, it also means loud noises are overwhelming and painful.

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. 😂

Remember those "exercise while you sleep" infomercials? I have parasomnia, so sometimes I wake up sore from moving around all night. Turns out, it really is like exercise while you sleep.

I get to be the favorite of pretty much all the family pets. Always been.

Some family and friends joke that I probably could go to an African safari and the lions wouldn't harm me. Not really rushing to find out if it's true tho.

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.

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

I believe I once killed a fly with my mind. I had just read an article about a Japanese kid who could supposedly project images onto camera film mentally. The way he described it was building up a storm of energy in his mind and sort of throwing it at the camera. So I noticed a fly on my window right then. I did the same mental exercise, picturing a cyclone of energy whirring through my brain, building up more and more power, and I visualized unleashing it suddenly in a burst at the fly. Pow! The fly instantly fell off the glass and was dead on the windowsill. Either I killed it or it was ONE HELL of a coincidence.

as a child I had impeccable vision and could easily see the shapes of leaves on tree tops from 1/4 mile. I have some kind of degenerative eye disease and have had glasses since I was about 13.

before covid I could smell things days after they happened. I avoided elevators like a plague. now all I smell is smoke! since I can't smell shit, my taste has also dulled greatly.

I can hear a wasp flying on the other end of my house, about 50 feet away, while the TV is on. I would say it's a fluke if I've done it once or twice. I've done it about 3-5 times a year since 2020. they are the loudest just as they're taking off from a surface or landing. the buzz they make is unmistakable.

I can also hear the frequency changes of electronic components, hear a house fire from a mile away, and have used it to identify broken PC and car parts.

I can eat spoiled food and not feel any ill effects except for stomach pains and diarrhea

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 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 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.

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.

1. 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)
2. 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 make the sound of one hand clapping.

It was a thing that went around my middle school. You keep your hand at about a 90 degree angle to your arm, and then flap back and forth with your fingers loose so it hits your palm. Takes a little practice.

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 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'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.

I can tell if an electric device is properly grounded or not just by touch. I don't mean getting shocked, when I run my fingers on a surface it feels differently from when it is properly grounded.