What's your superpower?

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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. 😂

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)

I can fall asleep, near instantly, at will.

I call it my time machine function.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

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 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 can cut butter to the exact weight each time.

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 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 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

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 can plug in a USB drive/cable on the first time, successfully, without flipflopping the connector (and then USB C had to come along and invalidate my only worthwhile achievement)

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.