Something you’re just good at with minimal effort and/or you learned much more quickly than average.
For me, it’s paper snowflakes. My brain just seems to effortlessly figure out what cuts to make to the paper wedge to make it turn out exactly how I want it. Largely useless, but good fun and was a much-needed ego boost when I was a kid :]
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I can cook minute rice is 56 seconds.
God damn it!
I can hear you, listen to you, and forget about what you say all at the same time!
The ADHD superpower.
You forgot the asking for what they said the instant it pops back in your head
No you just say “yes” and move on with your life and then refuse to believe you agreed to be pegged by 56 bearded men in a Toyota Yaris when they insist you did.
The power to read a book page 3-4 times before full comprehension.
As a kid I used to read like 2 books a day, now I have the same problem. Like wtf happened
I have an excellent sense of time and space, i can accurately tell how much time and distance I’ve gone without tools. Im great to bring along for a hike.
Out of interest, do you have a vague ability to tell orientation (magnetic north) with your eyes closed? Research is showing some people have magnetoreception and that it may have been more common in our human ancestors but lost to many over time.
It could explain why you’re so good at telling distance and time.
Maybe, but i live in the mountains so its always easy to tell directions.
If you’re ever bored one night, close your eyes and get a friend to rotate you around (gently and slowly) then get you to turn yourself to point where you feel north is. Do this 10 times, logging how far of you were from north and see how accurate you are from random.
You might have a hidden sense that’s incredibly rare in humans!
Close your eyes and spin around a few times?
Probably get dizzy
Hahaha no, I can assure you, people like me can get lost inside an elevator. It’s easy for you to tell directions, but not everyone. I wish I could!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12460-6
Here’s a pretty recent paper on this. I only skimmed it but boy does this seem wacky. It is in Nature, though, so I guess it’s at least somewhat serious…?
I have the same thing. I’m pretty sure there’s a word for this sense, but it eludes me at the moment.
whatever you and @who8mydamnoreos have, I have the opposite. I’m very good at getting lost multiple times in the same locality.
Pretty sure that’s a skill too - probably confuses attackers who try to pre-empt your movements.
and you have the talent to find the silver lining in every cloud . Bravo!
Being alive. In my whole life I haven’t died even once.
That makes you more talented than Einstein, Newton and Leonardo da Vinci
Reminds me of an obvious/interesting factoid I once saw pointed out:
Every single one of us is at the end of an unbroken line — aaalllll the way back to microorganisms — of folks / critters / etc. that lived long enough to procreate.
Hearty fuckers, every one of us. In a certain sense…
I am a really quick reader compared to most people. Doesn’t sound that amazing and it’s certainly not unique, but it comes really handy. Always helped me with exams, as I got some precious minutes more to actually work instead of reading. I can go through books and articles really fast. Retention is not amazing, I’d say it’s about the same as when most people read in their normal speed.
I really envy the people that can read quickly and retain everything. But I am also content with being relatively quick.
Not that but I can skim quickly and find the vital takeaways! Mostly useful for studies or reading recepies.
If you stop trying to vocalise the words in your head you can really break away from the the time limit and just fly through text.
This is what I do when I’m reading academic papers for writing reports to see if the content is what I need.
Takes a few seconds to scan it, take the understanding and made a decision on if it’s worthwhile or not.
There’s also websites where you can drop text and it will train you to read this way.
Sure you think paper snowflakes are useless but wait for an elementary school play to need set design and they will crawl in their hands and knees to rescue them 😉
I just got a new job at a place where my coworkers are really into seasonal decorations, so I’m low key excited for winter
Have fun schooling those plebs with the decor
I’m great with mechanical puzzles. I apparently have a really good intuition about how things interact.
I only know that I’m unique about it because of a military test my highschool made us take where I scored higher than 99% of people who took the test. I just thought it was the “easy” portion. I’m also pretty good at logic puzzles, but it definitely doesn’t feel as “natural” as mechanical puzzles.
If you’re wondering, no, I didn’t go into engineering because it turns out I’m not really good at math.
With math, is it arithmetic that gives you trouble or the actual symbolic manipulation of mathematics?
I am hot garbage at keeping track of numbers but turn those fuckers into letters and (at least for me) it’s off to the races. Then I just convert everything back to numbers in the last step before jamming it all into a calculator. This method saved my ass in 400-level biochemistry courses. (Annoyed the shit out of the grad students grading my exams, I’m sure…)
You may be better at “math” than you think :]
I assure you, I’m really just not good at math. It just doesn’t click with me the same way physical systems do.
Being bad at math was the short explanation; the long explanation is because pure math is super unintuitive to me, I got low grades in it throughout public school and therefore never pursued a college that would go into it heavily, even though I love the sciences. I ended up just going to my mom’s Alma Mater, which is a liberal art school and therefore didn’t have an engineering department. I actually did end up getting a computational physics degree because I loved my intro to physics class so much. When I could actually relate the formulae to physical systems, I was good. Did great in my upper level calculus classes, too, because I took them in parallel to the physics classes that directly used them. However, the more theoretical classes like linear algebra I barely passed and when it got to really complicated particle/quantum stuff I suffered greatly. Wave functions are a blight upon this world and my electricity and magnetism final made me cry.
Good on you for just casually getting a computational physics degree without inherent math talent… like holy shit that’s impressive!
I have also cried over coursework on linear algebra as well as electricity and magnetism :') Brutal stuff.
Please could you explain a bit more about the process you describe, above? Maybe with some simple examples? I’m woeful at maths but really good with mechanical and physical problems. If there’s a way I can improve upon the former, I’d love to try.
Thanks in advance!
C = BxA
Move A underneath C and swap the equality
B = C/A
A lot of algebra is spatial manipulation.
Mechanical adept here too. I am very good at holding and manipulating 3d objects in my brain, so I can kinda always just tell how something goes together to work.
I lived in Canada for 6 months surviving on nothing but being a medical Guinea pig (I had no working permit and due to anonymity, very little was asked of people participating in medical trials, plus they paid a decent amount especially if pain or discomfort was involved); as part of this I went through a raft of IQ tests (there was always some gambling addiction trial going at UofT for some reason) and found out that, like you, I have exceptional visual intelligence - rotating objects in my head, and figuring out if something would fit together was super skills of mine. In every other way I’m decidedly average.
Wow we’re actually very different there. My visualization skills suck. Like, I’ve tried that thing where you imagine an apple in your head and rotate it, but I can’t even fully visualize a 2d apple. If I’m looking at a system though, I can just understand how it works without visualizing anything about it. Because of that, I did have to draw out some diagrams from the word problems on the aformentioned military test…
Probably a major part to why I’m still not fully convinced I’m actually doing anything out of the ordinary. I’m not using any special skills or anything - the questions on that test felt to me about the same as asking “what would happen if you pushed this wheel from the top of this hill”.
Are you me.?
I have the same situation as you have.
Chess. I’ve been playing since I was a kid, and sometimes I’ll create new accounts on chess websites to see how quickly I’ll get them rated to 2000+. I’m living proof that chess players aren’t that smart though because I’m a dumbass when it comes to literally anything else.
Realising you’re dumb makes you smarter than 80% of humanity 😎
my two special snowflake things:
i can stop my own hiccups at will 100% of the time
i have always lucid dreamed since as far back as i can remember, i genuinely believed that everyone experienced sleep like that until i was in my mid-twenties
Same here on the lucid dreams, I didn’t even know it had a name, and I was surprised when people said that they don’t control their dreams.
But the hiccups… Mate, you’re a wizard.
I have unusual muscle control - I can make my eyebrows and knees dance, plus I am a regurgitator. Not as good as Stevie Starr but enough to have a disgusting party piece. I am disappointed that I never mastered the art of the flatulist.
I can make my balls dance.
Oh yeah, that too. I’ll sometimes do it when standing wait for something, like a lift. Hopefully it isn’t obvious from outside my trousers.
I’m fantastic at volumetric estimation, like when choosing the smallest Tupperware that will fit all the leftovers.
I can do this also but it is always extremely close but still fits
Do you always make the same volume of food or do you just have an insane amount of tupperware of all different sizes to make it just barely fit every time
The second thing we have a big drawer with random sizes of tupperware containers and i just take the one looks like it fits and it is very close every time
just take the one looks like it fits and it is very close every time
“Very close” is easy - it’s the “very close without going over” that’s tricky ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But it’s not something I can do unless it’s accidental…
This is an amazing skill.
I can do this as I’m drinking something - one gulp is roughly one ounce. Was especially handy with water fountains when tracking my hydration, but that hasn’t been relevant since 2019.
I’m good at puzzles, particularly like jigsaw puzzles, but also games like flow where you match the pipes. I can sometimes do it so quickly I don’t understand how I know what I’m doing, it’s more like instinct.
I have the same superpower and I love all the Flow Free games. And you’re right, I can’t even explain to myself how I know what to do. 🤷🏽♀️
I’m the same way with word puzzles/games, but I can’t even split a check without a calculator lol.
IT and self-hatred
I’m really good at getting cats to vocally respond to me. I don’t know if I’m just on their wavelength or what, but almost every time I start a convo with a kitty I get a response. Oddly specific, but also pretty fun. Kids love it lol.
Cats love me as well, I have never seen a cat who didn’t immediately like me.
Very fast reflexes and I can see in the dark far better than most people.
I had never realized that my eyes were different until my compulsory miltary service. I could reasily read maps when others couldn’t see shit and I never stumbled during night training in the forest.
Fast reflexes are generally pretty cool to havel, but it’s not fun when a knife falls off the kitchen table and it is impossible to stop your own hand trying to catch it.
My “learned talent” is fixing mechanical devices. When I was 6 or 7 I took apart and fixed the family VCR so I could finish watching the Smurfs. My mom found me studying the jammed mechanism, with all the parts lying on the living room carpet. She had a fit and wanted to collect the parts away, I started crying and told her that I’ll never get it back together if she messes up their places. She watched as I released the stuck tape wheel and reassembled the device. And it worked.
I’ve fixed countless devices with just visual analysis and pure intuition after that.
