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Those motivational speakers are right: You are capable of amazing things. You wouldn't know it, because 99 percent of the time your body or brain hides these superpowers from you. Sure, they say there's a good reason, but we're not sure we're buying it. Dammit, we want our... #5.
Super Strength
You may have heard urban legends about "the lady who was able to lift a whole car in an emergency" but, believe it or not, it's not just a legend. They're talking about Angela Cavallo, whose son was working on the suspension of a 1964 Impala, when the car slipped off of the jack and trapped him in the wheel well. Angela ran out to find her unconscious son pinned under the car. Rather than saying something passive agressive about how she "told him to get that thing out of her garage," she yelled for a neighbor to go get help, and when help wasn't coming fast enough for her liking, proceeded to lift the fucking car off her son with her bare fucking hands.
OK, maybe she didn't lift the thing over her head like She-Hulk, just the few inches it took to get it off her son for the several minutes he needed to drag his ass to safety. But that's no small feat considering that the vehicle weighed at least 3,340 pounds. Go out to your driveway and try it (The Cracked Legal Department asks that your recreation leave out the unconscious loved-one trapped in the wheel well). Then you've got guys like Sinjin Eberle, who was rock climbing in New Mexico when a 600-pound boulder came lose, smashed into him (crushing his hands in the process) and started pushing him, Wile E. Coyote-style, toward a 150-foot drop and a splattery death. Again the "shit hitting fan" adrenaline mode kicked in and the man tossed the boulder aside, crushed hands and all.
Why Can't We Do This All of the Time? So the evidence suggests that our actual muscle fibers physically have the ability to let us punch through a wall like the Terminator if they really really want to, but our brain arbitrarily limits us. Why? One problem is the tendons and other tissue that hold you together aren't made to take that kind of abuse. It's the same logic that makes steroid users more prone to injuries--the support structures can't keep up with their juiced muscles. Also, when you're in that "lift the boulder or die" mode, the body gets that strength by stopping other bodily functions like digestion and immune response. It's the sort of thing that is only awesome for a few minutes at a time. Still, we're kind of pissed that we can't seem to just summon the super strength at will. Wouldn't that mugger have been surprised if you had thrown him across the street into a plate glass window? But we suppose if science found a way, the muggers would know how to do it, too. Man, that would make for some awesome fights though. #4.
"Seeing" With Your Ears (A.K.A. Echolocation)
This is the superpower that the Daredevil has. He overcomes his blindness with sonar-like sense of hearing that's so sharp it basically replaces his vision. This is a real thing. In the real world we call this echolocation, and guys like Daniel Kish have it. He is completely blind and has been his whole life. Despite this, one of his favorite pastimes is mountain biking.
And as easy as it is to imagine this guy crashing hilariously through your window clutching a Braille map, he's actually pretty good at it. And he does it all by using sound to mentally paint a picture of the world around him, and doing it so fast he can avoid trees, boulders and bears while speeding down the side of a mountain. You may remember that we previously wrote about another guy with this ability, Ben Underwood. This is the guy who trained Ben. Why Can't We Do This All of the Time? For the same reason people who use calculators suck at math. Most people choose the easy way, in this case relying on your vision to tell you where things are, and lose the ability to do it the much harder and far more awesome way.
But any one of you can pick up echolocation even without losing your eyes in some kind of superhero origin story. Tests have found that blindfolded people can learn to judge distances to objects based on the echoes of their own footsteps. Soon they can even judge the shape and texture of unseen objects by echo alone. Try it; close your eyes and slowly walk toward a wall while talking, listening to the change in your own voice as it echoes back to you. Your brain recognizes all of those subtleties in echo (you've been hearing them your whole life, after all) and it's just a matter of training yourself to use them. To fight crime. #3.
Super Memory
Hey, remember that March afternoon when you were eight-years-old? And you were pooping? And nothing remarkable happened? You don't remember that? Why not? After all, just as your muscles technically have the ability to let you twist a dude's head off, your brain technically has the ability to store every single damned thing you've ever seen or heard or experienced. Just ask Jill Price; she has a condition called hyperthymesia which gives her that nearly perfect autobiographical memory we just talked about. Give her a date and she can remember everything that she did that day, what the weather was like and all the other seemingly trivial events that no one else remembers happened.
But even if you don't have a disorder (and only a few cases have been studied), there are tricks to make your memory perform many levels above what you're getting out of it now. In a study on short term memory they tested subjects on their ability to memorize strings of numbers. With a little training one subject went from being able to memorize about seven digits at a time (about average) all the way up to about 80, something that would seem like a pretty damned cool magic trick if you did it at a party. Why Can't We Do This All of the Time? First, it's important to note that what Jill has is not a "photographic memory" like some people have claimed to have (where they can, say, flip through a phone book and remember all the numbers). That is thought to be a myth; science has never been able to verify anyone who actually can do it beyond second-hand stories. You may have noted that Jill doesn't even have a gargantuan noggin in which to store all those memories. She's able to store her entire life in a brain that is roughly the same size and shape as yours. Why? Let's look at the brain like it's a computer. It has a really fast processor and almost unlimited storage space. But it also has a very unique and often inconvenient filing system. It's less like the directories you have on your hard drive and more like the results you get back from a search engine.
Your brain makes memories accessible by creating links to other memories, with all those links to each memory sorted by relevance (based on similarity and how emotional you were when the event happened). So a memory is only accessible by opening one of the other memories that the brain arbitrarily linked to it, or by inputting the same information again (that is, somebody reminds you). Otherwise, it's gone forever. That's why you can forget about an appointment, but when reminded suddenly slap your forehead and say, "Oh, right!" with all the details suddenly spilling back into your mind. The appointment didn't get deleted, the link just got broken. So with somebody like Jill, her perfect memory of decades of personal minutiae is thought to be the result of an obsessive/compulsive dwelling on and refreshing of those memories... at the expense of everything else. Like the people who were trained to remember those strings of digits, she "trained" herself to remember years of unimportant shit. But your brain forgets that unimportant shit for a reason: so it can prioritize the important stuff ahead of it. So brains with hyperthymesia are like a broken search engine that returns porn no matter what you search for. So basically, like Google Image Search, we guess. Oh, and did we mention Jill's depression? Yeah, it turns out it's not all that awesome to remember all the times you peed your pants in front of your friends when you were seven. Honestly, if we could give you a pill that would let you remember every minute of your teenage years, would you take it? |
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kewl stuff. but just a quick mention: science HAS proven photographic memories. In fact, they did it some time ago. Actually, There is one young black artist in europe who can stare at a city (from a distance like on a balcony or whathaveyou so that he can see the whole city), and in about 20 minutes he can redraw the entire city with structures exactly as they are in person (and they actualy compard his memory to pictures taken of what he will draw) and the size, detail and ligthing will be almost exact. (like 99% exact) And he retains the ability to bring that information up with great acuracy for quite a while after he has "fogotten" about it. some brains are wired to be bettr at one capacity of memory then others. Lots of these traits can be trained, although many are genetic or accompanied by OCD or autism. (and really, are those such terrible things? hahahaha)
When I've put something in the oven or microwave, I know when to enter the kitchen exactly 5 seconds before the timer jumps to zero, no matter what I'm doing at that time. I also wake up exacly 5 minutes before I'm supposed to get up that day. I sleep through my alarm when it goes off too early and wake up at the right time. One time I couldn't sleep all night. At 4am I was getting really frustrated and nervous and I stood up, exactly the same time an earthquake started to shake my room. It lasted for 30 seconds and I felt really relaxed and tired when it was over, so I slept really deep the remaining hours of the night. Earthquakes happen only about once every 10 years where I live.
My sister once impaled herself through the bottom of her jaw (that fleshy place where your double chin hangs) when she was standing on a cement block looking over a fence watching a fight during her friend's party. That fence happened to be one of those freaky arrow head fences and at the time my dear little sister was pretty inebriated. She accidently slipped off the block and - from what memory she has of the night - was just dangling there, not quite sure why she couldn't pull away. When she finally managed to pull the arrow head out of her jaw, she went back into the party and only realised that she should get some medical attention when people began gawking, screaming, crying and vomiting when they saw her covered in blood with a hole in her neck!! It'ss weird getting to a hospital at 2am expecting to find a bloody, crying mess and instead finding your little sis joking and having fun with the nurse - all of this while actually having a oval shaped hole in your neck! Was a fun night though, we got lots of pics of the hole and they are displayed proudly whenever people hear the story!
Some of you peeps may be interested in this... http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/i-was-superhuman-3139/Overview#tab-Videos/05303_00
The immunity thing is crazy cool; a few years ago my sister sliced her knee open, exposing the bone, and instead of crying or screaming, she just sort of stood there for a while, then walked to the car so we could get to the hospital. It was insane.
Great article, and very informative... except for that last quip about a car without anti-lock brakes or power steering. Formula One cars lack anti-lock brakes and are plenty fast, and the first generation NSX was without power steering. It wasn't until enough weenies demanded it that it was added, with the side effect of numbing steering feel. Or so I heard.
Cool article I give it an A+
"You may remember that we previously wrote about another guy with this ability, Ben Underwood. This is the guy who trained Ben." FALSE >:O Ben rejected the way Kish handled his condition (for instance by using a cane) and learned to use echolocation at age 5 - and he had never met Kish before. But still - nice work on the article :)
wow, 1 makes it sound like freezing time might actually be possible like in that movie Cashback, naked ladies ahoy!
wow this is cool, Ive always been a big fan of marvel and superheroes and fantasy and its nice that such things might actually happen. Even though I still believe, nothing hurts with believing right?
Man, hyperthymesia sounds cool on the surface but I have a great long term memory. I remember my childhood pretty well but I can't seem to recall what the hell I ate for dinner yesterday! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-Hu3FkAGU
Our brain really makes it look like time passes differently, just yesterday while I was waiting for my girlfried to be done with his f**king painting class time, every minute seemed like a goddamn hour. On the same night we had sex and those 3 hours seemed just like 3 minu...wait...nevermind, those were just 3 minutes.
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The hyperthymesia thing actually sounds pretty good to me since I really can't remember any damn thing that happened more than five minutes ago..... What the hell was I talking about again?
The hyperthymesia thing actually sounds pretty good to me since I really can't remember any damn thing that happened more than five minutes ago..... What the hell was I talking about again?
Wow, very interesting, nice article
Human short-term memory may be trainable, but the fact of the matter is that long-term memory is really bad. Most of the things you remember are wrong... including where you were at 9/11, or JFK's assassination. You may be certain of some things from your past, but there's a good probability that you're wrong. Also, the bullet-time thing is proven bunk. Again, what people remember isn't necessarily what happened. When tests are done DURING extreme situations, they find that the brain functions at a perfectly normal rate. The other three are all true, though.
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people! stop trying to be funny in the comments! you're not funny! give it up! although i must admit thejimshelley made me laugh more than this article.
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