What is something you can sense that few-if-any people you know can sense? Literal answers only.
I can smell your fabric softener, no matter how long ago you used it. Artificial perfumes of any kind just murder my sinuses. It suuuucks.
I also can hear electronics, even just the lights, if that’s all that’s on. Maddening, because I can almost never find real silence. It’s why I love camping.
I experience the first set of powers, and I hate it. Every detergent, shampoo, deodorant I use is “sensitive”, “baby formula” or whatever.
And a few years ago some deodorant company started using some I guess artificial compounds that just pushes the air out of my lungs, it’s so bad. I can not only smell it, it digs into my forehead.
I get this with pretty much all perfumes, scented candles, tobacco smoke (oh god the tobacco smoke) and extinguished matches and candles.
With some people I wonder how they can exist with so much perfume poured over themselves that I can’t breathe while walking behind them. I just don’t understand.
An upside of being smell sensitive is that it helps with debugging electronics. Burnt parts smell very obvious, and I can even smell hot stuff like heatsinks.
I can relatively easily reverse engineer recipes I like.
I forgot to mention electronic vapes with, I don’t know, banana strawberry flavoured vape juice 🤮
Every time I say I hear electricity, people think I lie. But it makes noise! I hear my blood too.
I wish you could try stuff beforehand in a quiet place to see if it’s gonna bother you with annoying quiet noises. Unfortunately that’s not really a thing. Luckily electronics has gotten better over time but a lot of stuff still does it, just usually less.
Can you do that thing where you flex some internal muscle and hear a loud rumbling that I assume is rushing blood? It’s hard to explain. I think the muscle is related to the jaw, or maybe ear movement. It’s not externally perceivable, but it’s useful on an airplane.
Is that something like swallow or gently blow through the nose with closing your nose? This is what I’m suppose to do to release pressure on my eardrum, but I have no idea what you mean.
Those things pop your ears, yeah, but they’re not what I mean, and they don’t make the noise. Oh well.
I’ve got one light in a room that makes a quiet whining noise when on, seemingly only after a minute or so (maybe after it warms up a bit). Thankfully I can just keep it off just fine, but occasionally I’ll turn it on for a bit more brightness, and realise it’s still on a while later by the annoying noise.
I’ve never been a big fragrance guy. When I found out about people like you, I decided to just go fragrance free. If it’s not a big deal to me and it gives a few people headaches to be near me, might as well just not do it. There are some tangential benefits. My deodorant irritates my armpits less now. My hair oil used to irritate my skin if it got on my forehead. Now it doesn’t.
I can see lights flicker when others can’t.
The god-awful taste of sugar substitutes.
A lot of people can taste things like saccharine I think? But I can taste any fake sugar, even when there is a mix of real and fake sugar in the same thing.
Aspartame/acesulfane is definitely the worst of them all, but sucralose, stevia… all of them taste like medicine kind of.
I can also taste the difference between cane and beetroot based granulated sugar. Beetroot sugar is sharper.
I thought I was the only one that could not stand aspartame like how is it in so many things and no one says anything haha
Right?! So basically now I drink water when I am out and about because so much stuff has fake sugar now
I can definitely taste the difference between aspartame and sugar but its not unpleasant to me.
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?
Nostrafeu? Restecpa.
Gangrel
I actually play Banu Haqim a lot, and my avatar is marceline from adventure time lol
Not me but my gf has a rare condition called SCDS. Basically, she can hyper hear her own body. Her heart sounds like a loud bass drum. She can hear her eyes when they move. She can hear her bones when they creak.
It is unsettling and can be quite dis-orienting and painful. She has surgery scheduled next year to fix it!
I used to be able to smell ants and hear electricity. My senses aren’t as keen as they used to be though.
Same. If there’s a fair amount of particular types of ants I can smell them still but not which corner of the yard has fire ants anymore.
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.
High pitched noises sometimes. I have an audio spectrum visualizer app installed to confirm these. But they can be pretty weird as they bounce around. You’ll get these heat spots. Unfortunately, I feel like my ears are degrading now.
Anyway, dimmable LED lights are often a problem due to PWM. Only full brightness is quiet.
Smell, I don’t even know what the hell that was. There is or was something in the back of one bus. I wouldn’t say it’s smell, but… something. Just a spicy punch that doesn’t quite let me breathe in. I noted down the license plate if I’ll experience it again to confirm it’s the same vehicle, but this wasn’t the first time, though unfortunately I didn’t copy it that first time. Same line though, so possibly same vehicle as well.
But I am not sure if I was the only one, no one was visibly bothered, but who knows.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.
Maybe everyone already knows this but you can generally see better in your peripheral vision in low light.
Almost all of your color vision / cones are concentrated in a tiny central area of your retina.
The grey scale / rods are dispersed around that.
In some ways I think night vision is a kind of skill that some people might be better at than others, even if the mechanics of their eyes aren’t special.
Based on what I’ve read about senses, I think most of human sensory variance is born in the brain and is trainable to be much more sensitive than we’d generally expect possible given our comparatively weak hardware. Some of us have the supertaster gene, but no one comes out of the womb a sommelier.
It should. Seeing in low light is a very useful thing. And we could dispense some of the light polution we create.
Both my kids got this ability from me. We all wear sunglasses all the tome pretty much. Im approaching 50 now so my eyes aren’t as good as they used tp be, but we all have 20/20 or better still. We are always asking people to turn off their flashlights so we can see.
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’m not very sensitive to bright lights. But I can also see better in low-light conditions than anyone I know. Not sure how that works.
Coil whine
I destroyed an expensive monitor trying to fix that. It drove me insane it was so quiet because it just came from the.monitor but i couldn’t unhear it.
I can feel whether a battery is full or empty based on its weight. I know it doesn’t make sense but I’ve done a blind test and it works. Empty battery is lighter.
Drop a full and an empty battery from the same height onto a flat surface. The empty one will bounce more, the full one will just drop.
There are syringes that come prefilled with saline used to flush IVs. Some people can taste it when it’s injected, others can’t. I’m one of those who can.
I can quickly learn to recognize specific people’s footsteps, so I can hear who’s approaching. Sometimes it doesn’t even depend on what footwear the person is wearing.
Apparently I can hear high pitched sounds too. I’ve heard such sounds several times where people around me weren’t able to hear it, and recently I could hear an ultrasound device too, which kinda make sense since they start at around 20 kHz.
Also, this isn’t about sensing, but I can slow my heart rate temporarily simply by holding my breath.
Oh! I can also slow my heart rate, but I don’t hold my breath, I just beath slowly and… will it.
When food is going to go off, or when an object has developed mildew/black mold, I can tell way before anyone else by smell.
Changes in air pressure(I think). Its like everything goes quiet theres ringing it feels very weird. I always ask to see if anyone else notices.
You how you get up on a winter morning after the rain and everything sounds different and the air is crisp. Yeah sometimes I can feel that a sudden shift and its very jarring like ive been stunned for a few seconds.
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.
Human skin contains photoreceptors, so this makes perfect sense.
