We all have some extra senses we didn't know we had, probably because we hardly knew we use them. We didn't include some people's uncanny knowledge of your bank balance in this list, though we know some people seem to have this ability. Below are 5 senses every human being has without knowing it:
#1
Seeing Impossible Colors:
There are lots of colors out there that that we ordinarily don't have the ability to see, because describing them would be like describing sight to a blind person. Science has devised a way to enable us see such colors.
Scientists successfully managed to show some people a "bluish yellow" color. The way our eyes work is that when we see blue, the parts of the eye that detect yellow switch off, and vice versa, therefore we can't really show you what we mean. So it's not supposed to be possible to see a true mix of blue and yellow.
But scientists discovered that we can sense these and other colors that don't show up in the rainbow by fooling our eyes with certain composite patterns. For instance, when you see an image like this ...
... and cross your eyes like it's a Magic Eye puzzle, some people can
see an entirely new color that is neither blue, nor yellow, nor green.
Then again, some people just see a gradient blob of yellow and blue and feel they've been pranked.
There's an example of one such impossible color that most people can perceive without playing complicated tricks on their brain. We call it pink. Pink is an unholy mixture of red and violet that doesn't appear on the rainbow any more than bluish yellow does.
There are the very rare people, called tetrachromats, who are born with the ability to see this world of new colors that the rest of us can't even imagine. They have four cones in their eyes instead of three like the rest of us. Each cone is responsible for seeing about 100 shades, so for us normal folk, that's about a million colors. But for tetrachromats? They see a hundred million colors. Generally, you can say they live a more colorful life than the rest of us.
#2
Women Ovulating Can Sense Gays and Snakes:
During one study researchers showed a bunch of women pictures of snakes hiding in a garden, both in color and black and white. What they found was that those women who were in the most fertile period of the month were also the quickest at spotting the hidden snakes. It appears evolution has given women who are ready to reproduce an added cognitive advantage when it comes to detecting danger.
In another study, when they showed women pictures of men's faces, the women who were on their period were amazingly able to detect gays among the guys in the pictures. And this isn't dumb coincidence -- a woman's ability to pick the gay guy out of a lineup was highest at her most fertile point, and then gradually receded until her next time of the month, and it didn't work at all for detecting lesbians.
Women were able to pick who was gay simply from looking dudes in the eyes. Evolution seems to have given them an ability to not pick a dude who would leave them for their brother!
#3
Men Can Sense Ovulation:
Researchers, trying to find out if men can detect women who are more fertile, were surpsised to discover that, not only were men able to detect ovulation in women, there wer also able to subconciously alter their benahiors instantaneous to adapt to it.
Men can detect subtle changes in voice, scent and skin tone which women have when they're ovulating, and the men don't even realize when they're doing this. To investigate this, they paired 123 male participants with five women over different stages of their menstrual cycle. Each man had a one-on-one session with the woman (not the way yo have in mind). They were prompted with a picture depicting a certain scenario, like a child giving another a toy, and the woman was asked to describe the situation.
The men were then asked to do the same thing. But what they found was that the men were more likely to be lazy when the women were less fertile, and just copy what the woman said. But when the women were ovulating and thus more fertile, the men tended to shake it up a little and put more effort into their part. In other words, they were trying harder to impress them. Because they could smell their ovulation.
Weird!
#4
You Can See Even After Going Blind:
We are not talking about some fancy technological advancement, we're talking about something mother nature has equiped us with.
In one study, they put an old blind man in a maze and told him to find his way out on his own. He completed the maze perfectly. He could "see" the walls and twists and turns, because his retina had figured out how to bypass the broken visual cortex and send the information to the brain. He was still blind, but his eyes and brain had found a workaround.
In another study, researchers put pictures of happy and sad people in front of blind people. And again, they found that the blind people were able to tell most of the time which faces were sad and which were happy. They couldn't see the faces, but their brains knew what was in front of them.
How is this possible?
The answer is that for many blind people, there is really nothing wrong with their eyes. The problem is usually with the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes what the eyes see. But what if somehow your body could find another way to send the information from the retina to the brain? It happens, and it's called blindsight. Some blind people develop it and are able to have complete awareness of their surroundings, even if they believe that they don't.
#1
Seeing Impossible Colors:
There are lots of colors out there that that we ordinarily don't have the ability to see, because describing them would be like describing sight to a blind person. Science has devised a way to enable us see such colors.
Scientists successfully managed to show some people a "bluish yellow" color. The way our eyes work is that when we see blue, the parts of the eye that detect yellow switch off, and vice versa, therefore we can't really show you what we mean. So it's not supposed to be possible to see a true mix of blue and yellow.
But scientists discovered that we can sense these and other colors that don't show up in the rainbow by fooling our eyes with certain composite patterns. For instance, when you see an image like this ...
There's an example of one such impossible color that most people can perceive without playing complicated tricks on their brain. We call it pink. Pink is an unholy mixture of red and violet that doesn't appear on the rainbow any more than bluish yellow does.
There are the very rare people, called tetrachromats, who are born with the ability to see this world of new colors that the rest of us can't even imagine. They have four cones in their eyes instead of three like the rest of us. Each cone is responsible for seeing about 100 shades, so for us normal folk, that's about a million colors. But for tetrachromats? They see a hundred million colors. Generally, you can say they live a more colorful life than the rest of us.
#2
Women Ovulating Can Sense Gays and Snakes:
Every month, women have to go through a cycle or menstruation and ovulation. This cycle has an added function -- it switches on a superhuman ability to sense snakes. And gay dudes.
In another study, when they showed women pictures of men's faces, the women who were on their period were amazingly able to detect gays among the guys in the pictures. And this isn't dumb coincidence -- a woman's ability to pick the gay guy out of a lineup was highest at her most fertile point, and then gradually receded until her next time of the month, and it didn't work at all for detecting lesbians.
Women were able to pick who was gay simply from looking dudes in the eyes. Evolution seems to have given them an ability to not pick a dude who would leave them for their brother!
#3
Men Can Sense Ovulation:
Researchers, trying to find out if men can detect women who are more fertile, were surpsised to discover that, not only were men able to detect ovulation in women, there wer also able to subconciously alter their benahiors instantaneous to adapt to it.
Men can detect subtle changes in voice, scent and skin tone which women have when they're ovulating, and the men don't even realize when they're doing this. To investigate this, they paired 123 male participants with five women over different stages of their menstrual cycle. Each man had a one-on-one session with the woman (not the way yo have in mind). They were prompted with a picture depicting a certain scenario, like a child giving another a toy, and the woman was asked to describe the situation.
The men were then asked to do the same thing. But what they found was that the men were more likely to be lazy when the women were less fertile, and just copy what the woman said. But when the women were ovulating and thus more fertile, the men tended to shake it up a little and put more effort into their part. In other words, they were trying harder to impress them. Because they could smell their ovulation.
Weird!
#4
You Can See Even After Going Blind:
We are not talking about some fancy technological advancement, we're talking about something mother nature has equiped us with.
In one study, they put an old blind man in a maze and told him to find his way out on his own. He completed the maze perfectly. He could "see" the walls and twists and turns, because his retina had figured out how to bypass the broken visual cortex and send the information to the brain. He was still blind, but his eyes and brain had found a workaround.
In another study, researchers put pictures of happy and sad people in front of blind people. And again, they found that the blind people were able to tell most of the time which faces were sad and which were happy. They couldn't see the faces, but their brains knew what was in front of them.
How is this possible?
The answer is that for many blind people, there is really nothing wrong with their eyes. The problem is usually with the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes what the eyes see. But what if somehow your body could find another way to send the information from the retina to the brain? It happens, and it's called blindsight. Some blind people develop it and are able to have complete awareness of their surroundings, even if they believe that they don't.
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