Ask Lemmy

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 play a spontaneous and convincing harmony on my violin to any song I hear. Sometimes I can even do this as I'm hearing a new song for the first time and trying to join in. I also suck at reading sheet music, so this could be a survival adaptation?

It's definitely not 100%, and I'm rarely waking up at 6am, but I can usually just decide when I want to get up, and wake without an alarm. It's like I can tell the time in my sleep.

My sister and I were talking about benign superpowers and decided the X-Men probably have someone like a band director with a superpower like perfect pitch who watches after the school while everyone else is off adventuring.

I can recognize a song with just a snippet playing. My piano teacher was apparently surprised by that.

The catch is I never remember the names, just the melody/bass 😅

I can crack my elbows like knuckles by just extending my arms. My brother can do it too, but I've never met anyone else who can do it.

I can bend the top segment of my second toe backwards, 90 degrees on both feet. It feels comfy. It freaks my husband out when I do it.

I can wiggle my ears.
Both. And each one individually.

Well, not really superpowers since they are common in humans. However, they are pretty interesting abilities nonetheless.

• Advanced speech recognition. I can filter out speech of one person while ignoring other background noise and even other speech.

• Advanced face recognition. I can see faces in clouds, floors, and other inanimate objects. Also helps when looking at real faces of people in a crowd. See also: pareidolia

• Auditory hallucinations during hypnagogia. Look it up. It’s weird and trippy.

• Desensitization and habituation to capsaicin. I can eat spicy foods.

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

Mildly more heat resistant. I can pick up hot food out of a fryer basket with my bare hands or stay in the cold a bit longer without getting frostbite.

Hyposmia (poor sense of smell)

Being deficient in a sense might seem like a downside but I find that people's comments about smells in the world are far more negative than they are positive.

Books. I own probably a thousand physically, have hundreds of thousands of PDFs and epubs between my laptop and NAS.

The superpower is that I have a book “sense.” I know about where each book I own is - my shelves are not organized in any meaningful way, because I’m ADHD and will just pull one out to look at something and reshelve it. I’m not at home right now, but I can imagine my shelves and stacks in my head - can tell you where Palestine and the Palestinians or The Forty Days of Musa Dagh or the beautiful English translation of the 左传 or House Made of Dawn or the book on Scottish coins i thrifted a few days ago all are.

I can look at almost any given strangers bookshelf and recognize/have read at least one of their books. I navigate libraries by feel and don’t need to look up books.

I also read inhumanly fast I think, and have somewhat of an eidectic memory for text. It’s been almost twenty years since I read The Great Gatsby but a student brought it up and I was able to do a 45 minute lecture on it, with quotes from memory.

I’m also prodigious at sex. I’ll read more books in a week than most do over their life, and I’ll also fuck more people in that week than most do over their life.

Knowing a timer is almost ready to go off.

I have this stupid sense to know that any timers I set (for cooking mostly, but other tasks around the house too) are very close to going off. Without watching the time when I set them with Alexa, if I ask how much time is left, it generally is always < 10 sec left. If it happened somewhat often, that'd be over thing, but this happens like 80% of the time.

I've even had 12h timers (slow cooking, etc) where I've checked once the entire time and it was within 10 to 30 sec remaining.

Nothing to do with my time management skills though, because I'm still late to all events. Whoops.

I aquired this superpower trough habits, but i can intuitively find the north.

Apart from that, well, I'm just myself

I can stop hiccups at will. Whenever I get a hiccup, I just stop.

wait i'm a supertaster and i fucking hate ants, if that's the scent i can do it too. well i could if i didn't shitbomb the bathroom so often. but you may have legitimately helped me in my lifelong war against the ants (i'm farsighted i cannot see them until i sit down and they crawl up and bite my jibblies thank you)

I'm really, really good at peeling oranges with my bare hands (or at least I used to be in grade school when all my friends would make me do it for them). The problem is, I hate the taste of oranges so I never use this power.

I can also smell ants but only after I squish them.

My superpower is I can accurately pour one or one half cup of rice by sight and feel without going by the line on the measuring cup.

i can breathe in strong winds