Now, I know that everyone’s brain does 99% of the same super-cool things every day, but I’m looking for really exceptional functions that no one else seems to have. I’ll start.
I have the amazing ability to ignore any alarm from an alarm clock that is not meant for me. My husband leaves for work before I ever wake up, and even though he uses the annoying buzzer, I don’t stir. However, I do wake up enough to give him a kiss and mumble “I love you” when he leaves for work.
On days when we wake up at the same time, I still don’t hear the alarm - that’s his job, and then he wakes me up. It’s fabulous, because I love my sleep (always have - even before I got pregnant), and I don’t get interrupted by his alarm.
Now, if his alarm goes off and he doesn’t wake up when he’s supposed to, I will wake up and poke him in the back until he gets up. Then I fall back to sleep.
I have a near-perfect internal alarm clock. As long as I’m not unusually tired, I will wake up within five minutse of when I tell myself to. I still set an alarm, just in case, but almost always (at least 95% of the time) wake up a couple minutes before it goes off.
Come up with really indepth answers to a topic in a relatively short period of time! …but then leaving me to have to spend the next hour trying to figure out what the logic was that lead to the answer because no one knows what I mean. :o
I can stare at a list of about 20 integers between one and ten for a couple seconds, and give you an accurate sum.
It helps if the numbers are in a horizontal row, because that’s how the scores we TAs had to add up for exam grades in Astro 101 were arranged.
It’s kinda creepy, because it’s not like I sit there adding in my head, “Okay, lessee, that’s three plus four is seven plus nine is sixteen plus six is twenty-two plus . . .” My brain apprehends the numbers as symbols, nonverbally, and without going through any conscious thought that feels like “addition” to me, I zip through (I have a vague notion of the running total as my eye goes through the list) and when I get to the end I have the answer. If I do go through the list thinking carefully about each addition, I make many more mistakes.
Makes me wonder what my brain’s actually doing when I add things up consciously.
I can BS like <i>nobody’s* business in debates/speech situations. For instance, when someone asks me a question, or hands me a rebuttal. I have all these facts in my head, but no coherent structure. But, somehow, I just get up there, and there’s somehow a direct line from my brain to my mouth that (for the most part) bypasses my conscious mind. It’s a little creepy, because I won’t really remember what I said 10 minutes later (unless I concentrate on remembering it), but <i>boy</i> did that help me out at school.
I also can generally predict the next few notes in a tune I’ve never heard before, even if it’s not something that repeats. I don’t know if this is unusual. I think it might have something to do with being good at math. I know it has nothing to do with learned musical ability, because I can hardly even read music, and don’t play any instruments or sing.
I assume prefect pitch- the ability to identify a pitch by its note- is an uncommon brain function.
I’m also pretty good at guessing the time of day within 10 minutes, although I’ve never tried to go through an entire day without looking at a clock to know about what time it really is.
I can solve word jumble puzzles in my head as well as do math, including multiplying two 2-digit numbers, sometimes even a 3-digit number by a 2-digit number. Likewise, I can perform calculations such as converting Celcius to Fahrenheit (and vice versa) in my head along with doing mental mile/kilometer conversions.
My brain does this, too, but I’m not sure that it’s “super-cool”.
Several years ago Pepper Mill had to physically rouse me from the bed. The Carbon Monoxide detector – which has an alarm that can blister paint and kill animals in the next county – had gone off and she couldn’t get it to stop. It didn’t wake me up. I clambered out of bed (naked) and ran over to the correct detector (she was trying to shut off the wrong one) and killed it.
CO detector probably wouldn’t save my life.
The super-cool thing my brain does is to sometimes work without my conscious direction, performing complex tasks. One time an advisor asked me the value of a definite integral. I said I’d get back to him about it, but during the next couple of seconds I had to interrupt myself and give him the answer – some non-conscious portion of my brain had worked it out, without my conscios brain taking part. (The answer was right, too.) another time, a friend mentioned that there was something about a line in a Woody Allen movie, but didn’t say what it was, or who said it. It was a very obscure reference. Without any conscious searching my memory, my brain managed to produce exactly the line I wanted, and why it was relevant.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work all the time like that. Nowadays it seems to do it mainly with regard to odd threads at the SDMB.
I can ascertain characteristics of a person’s intellect just by looking at his eyes and face for a small amount of time (the longer I take, the more information I get). The sort of things I pick up are: flexibility of thinking, cleverness, ability to concentrate, emotional sensitivity, practicality, well being, mental stability, creativity, and brilliance. Either that or I’m a nut job. Anyway, having a short conversation helps, but I get most of it from the initial read. It’s something about the way the eyes move, and the lines on the face.
My brain has an astonishing capacity for trivia, and I can remember every single book I have ever read, but it can’t remind me that I have a dentist appointment. I think it’s a “space” issue.
When you close your eyes do you notice the light shining through that gives the blackness a red tint? Then do you notice the after images, the little white spots of adrenaline and other chemicals that shoot around sometimes, the striations and patterns like those you can imagine in the snow on your TV screen? Well, maybe seven times in my life I’ve gotten a little further. A little quarter inch area in my vision streams some of those threads together and for just a moment I’ve actually watched an image that my mind is creating.
I’m not actually projecting anything. My mind must be creating a mental image that it’s also letting me sense through my visual cortex, or something like that. At first it was a 1/4 second movie and looking at it made it disappear. Practice let me relax and just watch it. My best experience was about 2 seconds and I could actually pan across the image. It was a stream of consciousness thing where a face smears into a tree and the tree smears into a mountain, etc.
I have what I would call a [very] rough approximation of eidetic memory. I can visualize the words of an entire page of text, and recreate it with about 90% accuracy. I think it stays imprinted for a week or so unless it is something I really studied. It works better on something with a bit more unique formatting than a novel. Faxes work great, because I kind of use the flaws as markers. I can also recite conversations I have been in or witnessed for days afterward. Strangely, if I wasn’t paying attention, I can remember every word, even as I fail to register that someone has asked me to do something.
People have studied this. Google search for FACS (Facial Action Coding System) if you aren’t already familiar with it. I’ve taken a course, and I went from mediocre to above average in recognizing things like truthfulness. The things you mention are a bit more subjective though.
Wow. That sounds like me. Anything that I am not consciously attempting to remember will embed itself in my memory, but the second anyone speaking to me begins a sentence with “Don’t forget” or “Remind me to…” it’s gone inside fifteen seconds.
I don’t have the ability to memorize pages of text or anything quite that complex, however.
Thanks for the reference. Yes, my methods are far more subjective; in fact, I’m having trouble getting my Super-Cool Brain License. I keep getting put into the waiting queue with the psychics and paranoids.
Your eidetic memory sounds awesome. The best I could do (when my mind was young) was hear a quote from a novel I’d just read, and then remember its approximate position on the page. But now at the ripe old age of 30, I’m getting mixed up with even that.
I can force things that would normally go into short-term memory into long-term memory. It’s not an eidetic memory because I can’t remember passages of stuff or pictures, or that sort of thing. It’s just things like number sequences or individual facts that most people remember perfectly for a few minutes and then forget. In sixth grade I did a bunch of tests where I had to memorise meanings of nonsense words. I still remember most of them.