6 Real People With Mind-Blowing Mutant Superpowers: Update

"I figured I'd either die or get superpowers. It was pretty much 50-50."

Even more amazing is that even when touching live wires with hundreds of volts coursing through them (enough to put a horse on its ass), he feels no pain at all. In fact, Xiangang claims it makes him feel energetic, which is almost certainly him just screwing with us. We're also pretty sure he's lying when he claims he can give diathermic massages (deep tissue massages done with an electromagnet) using only his hands.

"In a few seconds you'll feel either an incredible release of tension or a fatal dose of electricity."

So What's Going on Here?

Everybody's reaction to electricity is a little different; it's influenced by everything from how thick you are, to how moist your skin is, to other changes in body chemistry. Xiangang appears to be an outlier on the high end of the scale. According to testing, he has a resistance seven to eight times greater than the average human being, which grants him the ability to handle live wires without safety equipment, though, again, it behooves us to ask why in the hell he'd want to.

And yes, there are supposedly more people out there with abilities similar to Xiangang's. If you watch the first minute or so of this video, you'll see Jose Ayala pass electricity through his body and use it to burn paper. Again, we question the purpose or application of such abilities, and we're curious how many times he's accidentally incinerated his mail because he was holding it when he turned on his porch light.

If he falls asleep using his computer he might burn down the entire house.

"That lake had better back the fuck up, because I ain't stopping."

Back in 2007, Dean attempted to run from New York City to San Francisco, but had to stop in St. Louis, ravaged by disappointment. That is to say, this man has such a level of endurance that running 1,000 miles is disappointing to him. Karnazes has such an impressive list of achievements that when Time magazine listed him as one of their 100 most influential people of 2007, stopping his cross-continental run short was pretty much the only negative thing they could come up with. Then Karnazes completed the very same run in 2010 in 75 days and shut Time right the hell up.

Dean Karnazes, shutting Time magazine the hell up.

Somehow he's managed to stop running long enough to write three books. That, or he hangs a typewriter from his neck and smacks the keys with his chin midstride.

So What's Going on Here?

Everything about Karnazes' body makes him a finely tuned running machine. A medical study was performed on him after he completed his 50-state marathonapalooza. First, they measured his CPK number, which shows the amount of damage your muscles sustain from exercise. So for instance, a normal runner's CPK would be through the roof after a marathon -- around 2,400. Karnazes' was found to be at 447 ... after 25 consecutive marathons.

"Anyone else feel like hitting the gym, maybe doing a little kayaking?"

The study found that his muscles not only damage much less with exercise than the normal person's, they actually get used to continuous exercise and stop being damaged altogether, sort of like if Wolverine were a perpetual motion machine.

The study also found that he has more blood in his circulatory system than the average person, which allows him to stay more hydrated for longer and may or may not indicate that he is a day-walking (day-running?) vampire. But finally (and most impressively), they concluded that as long as he can keep himself properly hydrated and fed, he could potentially run at a seven- to 10-minute-mile pace forever.

Giving Dean the rare ability to go full Gump.

"One time, I sketched a skyscraper in half."

So take Wiltshire's helicopter ride -- most of us would be distracted by things like the noise of the chopper, or by thoughts such as "Why are these buildings spaced like that?" or "Is that a body in the East River?" But Wiltshire's kung-fu-chop brain can focus like a microscope on just the details, carefully recording them all at the expense of all other normal thought. Because of this, he is not only able to notice relationships and properties of the buildings, but can remember them exactly and use them later in his drawings.

His clouds are kinda half-assed, comparatively.

And when it comes to this kind of freakish recall, he's not alone ...

Peek's story was also the inspiration for the film Rain Man. However, when someone asked Peek to read a book on gambling (which would have taken him about 30 minutes), he told them that using his powers for gambling would be "unethical."

In your face, Hoffman.

So What's Going on Here?

Many assumed Peek was, like the guy in the last entry, an autistic savant, because Americans think "autism" means "Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters." This wasn't the case; Peek's incredible ability is believed to have come from a congenital birth defect, which resulted in increased memory capacity. This is another way of saying he memorized everything, including the 12,000 books we mentioned earlier and sports statistics spanning decades. For a given person's hometown, he could tell you all highways leading to it, the county, area code and ZIP code, television stations available in the town, the name of the local telephone provider and any notable local history.

Throughout it all, Peek only wanted to share his gift with the world. His father and caretaker never accepted anything in exchange for Peek's appearances, except for the joy Kim felt when meeting other people. When Dustin Hoffman met him to research his role for Rain Man, he was quoted as saying, "I may be the star, but you are the heavens," presumably before Peek told him his future and levitated out of the room.

And then stole his goddamn car.

His testicles have retracted up behind his eyelids at this point.

He has been dubbed "Iceman," because the Dutch have no imagination. Hof's ability is so great that even when submerged in freezing water that would pretty much kill a normal human in a few minutes, his body temperature barely drops, and when he climbed Everest (in bicycle shorts, we really can't stress that enough), he said it was easy.

So What's Going on Here?

Hof himself claims that his remarkable abilities come from meditation, which sounds like total hackneyed bullshit to us, as no amount of thinking can keep your flaccid penis from fusing to a block of ice.

When he stands up, it's going to sound like baseball cards in bicycle spokes.

Researchers finally got curious and decided to test Hof, and amazingly, they found that he can actually control his autonomic nervous system and immune response through concentration and meditation. In case you're unclear, that means he can totally control his response to cold, just by thinking really hard.

The researchers stressed that Hof is an entirely unique case, and his ability to basically control his body and the way it reacts isn't something other people can learn or do unless accidentally exposed to gamma rays or a radioactive comet.

Awww, cheater! He's wearing sandals.

JAPAAAAAAAAN!

The following video is from a show that is very, very Japanese, but it showcases many of Machii's abilities quite well:

Here's the uncanny thing to consider -- Airsoft pellets travel at roughly 160 feet per second. That's too fast for the human eye to even register, let alone pinpoint in order to bisect with a goddamn sword.

So What's Going on Here?

Machii isn't seeing the pellet with his eyes: He's sensing it in some other way. Here's what clinical psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula has to say about him: "This is about processing at an entirely different sensory level, because he's not visually processing this. This is a different level of anticipatory processing ..."

"It's also a different level of salad preparation."

We can all sort of do this, obviously -- catching a ball when somebody throws it to you requires you to anticipate where it's going. A baseball player, with practice, gets so good at it that he can hit a fastball coming in at 90 mph. But he's still doing it by sight -- years of practice have taught him that the trajectory of the ball can be predicted by how it looks leaving the pitcher's hand. The difference is that Machii's brain is wired so that he can hit things that are moving too fast to see.

According to the expert up there, Machii isn't even sensing the pellet at all. He's anticipating where it will be and when it will be there. That basically makes him a Jedi.

Karl has Facebook and a blog and of course Twitter. Kier also has a blog that you can find right here.

For more superpowers that are all around us, check out 5 Superpowers You Didn't Know Your Body Was Hiding From You and 5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies (According to Science).

And stop by LinkSTORM to discover the power hidden in Brockway's mustache.

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