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?

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.

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)

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 can fall asleep, near instantly, at will.

I call it my time machine function.

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 smell fear. I always thought that was normal, because it’s used idiomatically, but the first time I said something in a group of people, they looked at me like an alien. When someone’s anxious, their sweat smells more metallic to me, like amphetamine/coke sweat (which makes sense).

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'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 have special ability to fall asleep quick if deciding to take a nap during office hours.

Unfortunately, it's not effective going to sleep in the evening

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.

I have abnormally good colour vision.

I have no idea what to do with this.

Found out when studying photography. We did some colour tests that get gradually harder. You are supposed to fail at some point. I kept on passing all of them. My "regular" vision is just normal though.

I can repressurize my ears without yawning, just by flexing a muscle. Even less useful, I can focus my eyes to different distances without using the finger trick, which comes in handy never.

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 just learned from another thread that mine is... fantasizing smells and flavors, and being able to mentally combine them to know what two ingredients will taste like together before I combine them. Apparently not everyone can do this?

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 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.