Ask Lemmy

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.

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 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 smoke more weed than you’ve ever seen. Also I have a photographic memory. But I like the weed thing more

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.

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 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.

Same one as everyone else’s., seeing the future.

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.

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 fall asleep, near instantly, at will.

I call it my time machine function.

I can rumble my ears, do the vulcan greet, do Stan Laurel's kneesy earsy nosey and the finger wriggle. I can also measurable lower my heart rate by conscious effort alone, and increase my body temperature by concentrating on it.

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.