Would you give up completely one of your five “Aristotelian” senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell) so that you could “superpower” one of the remaining four?
“Superpower” = cartoonishly powerful abilities. See light years into space, or individual atoms; hear the full range of frequencies and be able to listen to a concert being played in a far-off galaxy; smell and identify things from really far away; I’m not certain how superpowered taste or touch might work, but it’s still an option. I don’t know, be creative with it.
What would you give up, and what would you “superpower”?
I would give up my sense of smell if I had telescopic/microscopic vision like Superman.
Actually, can I give up my wife’s sense of smell? It doesn’t always work to blame it on the dog.
Ideally, I want to be like Ultra-Boy, and be able to swap around at will - deaf when I want to track someone like a bloodhound, listen to other galaxies except with my eyes closed, etc.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - Daredevil has a superhuman sense of touch. What must sex be like for him?
I already basically don’t have a sense of smell, so can I still give it up? I mean, I can smell some things, like burning sulfur (but only very close, like arm’s reach), but I feel like that would be cheating to use as a trade-in. I’ve also been led to believe my sense of taste is much diminished too.
On a tangentially related note, I remember in some circa 2010 movie there was a mock trailer for a tv show about a nose-deaf detective. It was a scene with the detective overcoming his “disability” and busting a criminal by cunningly using his other senses (sight, in this case), with a line like “while it’s true that I have no sense of smell, you made one mistake: you let me see the evidence.”
I feel like it might have been Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or maybe Get Him to the Greek, but I can’t find anything online, possibly because I don’t have an exact quote.
Having lost the sense of smell, my taste is hanging on by a fingernail. I’d lump smell in with taste as one sense. We also have a sense of balance, and what I’d call a sense of self, the feeling that your limbs are your own and being able to picture their position even if you can’t see them. Also a sense of empathy, where you can tell other peoples emotions before they verbally communicate them, e.g. call you an idiot.
Sherlock Holmes could be said to have no sense of empathy. Or House.
A detective with no sense of self would be interesting, at least I am unaware of an example. That might be a mental condition though, similar to being unable to recognize pictures of loved ones.
Giving up sense of balance seems at first like an easy one, but I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life with the room spinning around me, and unable to walk.
I suppose I could with no sense of touch, but it would be lonely.
I could live without taste or smell; I think I would enhance vision or maybe hearing. My fear with hearing is can I control it? If its just picking things up at a higher volume over a larger range I’m not sure how much use it would be. If I was able to tune it in a sense to a distance or direction maybe I would want that.