All I know is that we had a chapter in genetics in high school biology. And they talked about certain traits, some of which apparently were dominant and recessive too. Bear with me, it has been over 35 years.
Anyways, I am a tongue roller. And I have a detached earlobe. And there is this one chemical, I forget the name, that apparently I can taste, and not everyone can. (Anyone know what I am talking about ?)
Also, this wasn’t part of the class. But I also have an extra tooth. The dentist tells me that if I didn’t have it, I’d have a space in my teeth.
Anyone else want to regale us with unnecessary information about themselves ?And what is the name of that chemical that not everyone can taste? I just remember that the teacher handed out rectangles of paper. And mine tasted a little bitter. That’s all I can tell you .
I am somewhat double-jointed. Nowhere near as much as a contortionist, but I can rotate my shoulder far enough to apply sunscreen to my entire back without needing help from anyone else.
There are two ways of rolling the tongue. One involves turning it into a tube and that ability is not too uncommon. The other is hard to describe, but it involves undulation and is like one in a thousand. Somewhere the late John Conway has a video illustrating the two. Like Conway, I can do both.
I remember that unit in science class. I thought that tongue thing was debunked though. Anyway, I can roll my tongue, my earlobes are unattached/free, I don’t have the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap, and I’m right-handed but pretty good with my left. (Sometimes if I have a cup or something in my right hand and I have to write something down, I find it easier to write with my left hand than to switch the cup to my left before writing.)
There’s a trait common in my family (including me) that the toenails on our smallest toe grow straight up, instead of forward. I’m pretty sure it’s a dominant; one of these times I’m going to have to survey the family and plot it out.
I’m an asparagus scent smeller, a phenylthiourea (PTC paper) taster, and beeturia is strong in me with fresh beets. Cilantro is vile and smells like stinkbugs. I can roll my tongue and I have Morton’s toe.
Yeah, your teacher said it was phenylthiocarbamide. Probably called filberts hazelnuts and garbanzo beans chickpeas, too.
Carbamide and urea are synonymous. Does that make you wonder why dentists call the stuff that whitens teeth carbamide peroxide instead of urea peroxide?
A couple of things that are unusual but not hugely so. I can roll my tongue upwards, I can wiggle my ears - the result of a residual muscle. It’s very noticeable when I move it, and although it doesn’t help my hearing, it is actually handy for helping to clear blocked ears. I have Han marks on my forearms despite not being anywhere near overweight.
My ears have Darwin’s tubercles, the slight pointy bits on the inside of your upper lobe, but I’m not sure how rare that really is.
I used to think I was one of the people who wasn’t going to grow any wisdom teeth, but they came in suddenly in my mid-forties without me even noticing.
My daughter has an undescended tooth that’s somewhere in her cheekbone, near the middle of her nose. You can feel it if you press on the skin and it looks bizarre on x-rays. It’s not risky, so she basically has a tooth in her cheek forever.
The more annoying trait is that I can’t use opiates as a painkiller. 23andme identified it, but that only confirmed frustrated attempts to use painkillers for a chronic condition. It does have the advantage of not getting addicted to painkillers, I guess.
I can flare my nostrils and cross my toes (first over second, also second over first). I’m not sure if those are unusual abilities.
I have no sense of smell.
Hey, me too. Also, can roll my tongue, can pull the tip of my tongue up while rolling to make a ‘boat’, free earlobe, cilantro tastes like rotting meat, and my second toe is longer than my big toe.
It is. There might be a genetic component, but it can also be learned through practice. I was a non-roller in high-school, but after a few years of teaching the section I became a roller. I also learned that whenever someone has dug deeper into these traits with modern tools they tend to find something more complicated than single gene dominant recessive inheritance. Which is important to mention to students when the text book potentially implies they must be adopted.
The toenails on my small toes are split all the way down near the outer edge, so that there’s kind of a thin sixth toenail adjacent to the main nail. It’s apparently a recessive trait and a mild form of polydactyly. It catches on my socks sometimes but it’s otherwise harmless.
Left handed, can’t make my tongue into the u-shape (if that’s what you’re talking about), cilantro is OK I think. Due to an odd hip joint growth, I can only “cross” one leg (ankle on knee and leg flat). The other way won’t work.
There are some oddities resulting from injury though. I have very little sense of smell, a very limited ability to remember faces*, and some weird memory issues from an old head injury. At least I assume that’s the reason due to when they started.
*If someone familiar changes their hair, or is wearing an unusual hat, I frequently won’t recognize them.
I can roll my tongue into a tube, roll it over fully both right and left, point it back in my mouth both above and below. But I cannot do cloverleaf tongue nor the inverted roll.
My elbows overextend so that when I straighten out my arms as much as I can, they bend backwards a few degrees. It looks pretty freaky if I hold my arms out in front of me, upper arms angled inward but forearms parallel. I’d go up to my Gym teacher in school, do that with my arms, and say " I need to be excused from class today since both my arms are broken". It never worked
Loose joints. I can dislocate either my shoulder or hip (remember Carol Burnette doing that?) at will and pop it back in. Makes me really prone to sports injuries, though.
Ew!
I used to be able to hold my palm upward, then push down on my thumb until the tip touched my arm. I can’t do it now, but maybe if I worked at it for a little while.
I uesd to be able to do that too! I just tried it now, and could only get within a little more than an inch with my dominant hand, and barely 2 inches with my non-dominant hand.
I only ever had three wisdom teeth, two on the right and one on the left, so I was always a bit asymmetric. The right ones were both impacted and were taken out when I was twenty. The one on the left was erupting, and didn’t come out for another ten or twelve years. No idea how common it is to have an odd number of teeth.
I’ve also got a strange ridged ear: my right one is notched like a key at the top for some reason.
Everything else weird about me has a reason. My two front teeth have weird horizontal stripes on them. I’m told that I slipped in the tub as a baby and banged my mouth on the rim, and I guess something happened to the teeth through the upper gum.
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