What is something you can sense that few-if-any people you know can sense? Literal answers only.
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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.
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.
My friends have called me sensitive to everything. Apparently most people don’t love walking through neighborhoods just to smell other people doing laundry? Hahahaha. I love it.
I’ve wanted some really excellent headphones for a while now, but it’s haven’t yet been at a place/time where I can pull the trigger. It will definitely happen one day
I got some pretty nice headphones a while back. Not the really high end ones or anything, but good enough that I can get lost in the shapes, textures, and sometimes colors of the different instruments. Like someone else said, it’s a bit like being high.
Cheap studio monitors are fun too because they really separate out the sounds. It can make me a little tired, listening to all that detail, but it’s so fun.
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:
I hear bats, absolutely. I can hear electronics as well, and some are just so frustrating. I’ve never heard a dog whistle, as in I’ve literally never seen one in person, but there’s a house near to me that has a warning thing when someone approaches their yard, probably to ward off dogs? But my god, it’s loud and high. I try to avoid that route at all costs.
“I hear bats” - Astounding! 8]
It would be very interesting to get a hearing test done. One which provides you with a chart of frequency against intensity perceivable. I’d check that they are equipped to go over 20kHz first.
Off topic, but I’ve not seen that emoticon before (unusually left-facing too!) and it’s adorable.
It’s my favourite emoticon, the most calm and cartoony.
I also created my own questioning emoticon about10years ago,
what do you think of it "?
Took me a second but I see it now - very cartoony. I like it!
I had this exact experience and tried to ask the technician about it. She didn’t understand what I was asking. I thought I was just explaining it poorly.
Lemmy needs to stop trying to convince me I’m neurodivergent.
Annoyed by the commonly imperceptible sound an ultrasound machine makes? Possibly autistic
Facinated by how and why the machine works while it annoys you? Definitely autistic
I joke but im exactly like this too lol.
Lmao. Yeahhhh, I always get a crick in my neck because I try to watch all the work they’re doing. It’s fascinating
I was entirely confused for a moment- I think you might be getting an echocardiogram, rather than an electrocardiogram. If you could hear an electrocardiogram, there would be something seriously wrong with their machine- It’s meant to be a passive electrical measurement. Echo on the other hand is exactly what you described, an ultrasound of the heart.
I was actually thinking you might have a strong interoception, which is when people have an awareness of their own heartbeat signals- super rare but super cool.
Wah! Yep. My bad, hahaha. Brain toot
That’s awesome! I can’t hear ultrasounds, but I can hear electronics, which gets really annoying
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.
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.
One word for you: DLP projectors
All lights? Also battery-fed DC lights somehow?! I’m no expert but that seems strange
I’ve caught a lot of lights and light-emitting displays flickering with the 980fps camera that’s built into my phone (best thing since sliced bread for a nerd like me), but also quite many lights appear solid. I’d imagine few have such high-frequency electronics that it pulses well beyond 1 kHz. Otherwise the sensor should sometimes capture a frame during a low or a peak
As an example, I was recently looking at car lights in Germany, expecting to see duty cycling in most modern ones, but the majority (2/3rds or so) were actually solid so far as I could tell. A few cars had a mixture of flickering and solid lights in seemingly the same fixture. All flickering ones were high frequency though, not like 50 Hz as grid-fed lights do but much more. I didn’t bother with ffmpeg and counting frames but I estimated on the order of 250 Hz for one of them
Yes all lights flicker. That frequency number is how fast it flickers.
There has been attempts to reduce flicker.
It has to do with how electricity works and the filament in the bulb. I honestly don’t know the details except that some tech has reduced it in LEDs. They say it no longer has flicker but it’s still there. Just reduced.
I’m going to post another image relevant to this.
Illustrates two ways to combat flicker in LEDs. It’s still there. Just less visible to humans.
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I can smell when a woman is pregnant. I’ve shocked several friends by congratulating them before they even took a test.
I‘ve got this one too. It smells like dry hay or straw to me.
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I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just different than their normal smell
i can see very well in the dark, like pitch black night in the arctic circle in a forest i can see the ground enough that i wont trip and can avoid things like snakes
i fucking hate all the bright lights on cars now btw. the sun is genuinely distressing to me i just simply cannot go outside without sunglasses, even when its very cloudy
Found the vampire. Nostrafeu?
Gangrel
I actually play Banu Haqim a lot, and my avatar is marceline from adventure time lol
Nostrafeu? Restecpa.
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.
Coil whine
Mould, I’m always surprised at how few people can smell when food is mouldy. I’ve had people insist the smell is a chemical smell, until we’ve found the offending mouldy item (e.g. When someone’s left a cup of coffee on their desk and gone on holiday) and I reap the glory of being right.
Yeah I feel like i can’t smell a foul old coffee cup better than anyone else, but everyone’s sponges always smell bad to me. I always hate washing a dish at anyone else’s house because the bacteria in their sponge leaves a smell on my hands that doesn’t come off from a normal hand washing or three. Rubber gloves also leave a smell on my hands that will make it difficult for me to sleep that night it smells so strong. Latex ones only, though.
Despite having tinnitus, I can still hear very subtle sounds and identify them.
- For example, a long, deep hum means a garage door is opening/closing.
- I can also hear (and feel) footsteps and movement from people around a building, even very subtle movement.
- I can also pick up on all the little creaks a building makes.
However, despite being able to hear subtle sounds, I cannot hear “no” sound or silence due to the ringing. :/
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.
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.
I got the same thing. In the army I realized that I was the only one in my platoon who was able to read maps clearly at night without lights. And I never needed a flashlight to navigate the woods in the dark.
My night vision started to wane clearly in my early thirties, but being closer to 50 now I can still see a lot better at night than my friends whenever we go camping. Still, I bought my first headlamp a few months ago ;)
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.
Same for me about only hearing it when the room is quiet and I’m trying to fall asleep!! Different noise, but you don’t know how oddly happy this makes me feel ❤️
I can smell iron in the soil from a distance (depending on how much there is), and if there’s a lot of iron I feel very sick, almost like I’m going to vomit, and I want to get away from it. There was one place like that where the closer I got the more sick I felt and the more iron I smelled, I could taste it like there was blood in my mouth, some months later did they start digging there and found a lot of iron.
I do not really like lager (love other types) for the same reason, the taste has a lot of iron in it especially some brands but I seem to be the only one who can taste it. I kind of rank lager as less or more irony taste lol.
Sometimes at some bars does one or multiple beers on tap taste weird and sweet regardless of type or brand. No one else of my friends seem to be able to tell. I where at a bar once where only one beer tap tasted as it should… The rest had the same sweet weird taste.
I also do not like coca-cola or Pepsi so my taste buds may just be weird.
Thats like a super power!
Are you good at telling cardinal directions as well? Maybe you have metal in your brain
I am unsure if I do, because I do not know if it is a knowledge thing or instinct. But in the forest am I pretty good at finding my way back even if I just walk randomly but it could also just be that I remember how I walked there.
I do not feel the irons taste/smell that often in the city so I do not really know what it is that makes me feel that way. It is mostly in the forest.
The bar thing just sounds like they don’t clean their taps very well.
It might also be from oxidation. There are a lot of ways that can happen, even directly through the walls of the tubing between the kegs and faucets if it’s the cheap kind.
That would actually explain why one bar i have gone to many times has one beer (that is always on the same tap) that always tates wrong, I thought it was a batch thing. Thanks for this information!
I can tell where a laser is pointed on me without looking. Like if you blindfold me and got a laser pen and shined it on my arm, I can point to where it feels like it is with pretty good accuracy. It’s easier to detect motion than precise placement, and sensation wise it’s not touch or heat like you’d expect it’s more like raw proprioception.
Also it felt the same regardless of the color of laser we used which seems odd since you’d think higher frequency light would be easier to detect.
Tbf I haven’t done the experiment since I did it with my siblings when I was pretty young. Not sure if I can still do it, but my siblings and cousins couldn’t do it even back then.
