Never forget a face? Can’t stand coffee? You may have Super Senses
HAVING super powers like Clark Kent might sound the stuff of comic books. However, there are people who really do have astonishing super senses that work at a level far beyond normal human abilities.
From intense colour vision to heightened powers of taste or an ability to never forget a face, there are those whose senses are hugely heightened compared with most people’s. Some of these abilities are far more common than you may think — and may have implications for your health.
SUPER RECOGNISERS
ABOUT 1 to 2 per cent of the population are believed to be ‘super recognisers’ — with an uncanny memory for faces. They can recognise the faces of people they have met even briefly and recall them over a considerable period of time.
Ordinary people recognise about 20 per cent of faces they have glimpsed before but the super-recognisers among us can manage 80 per cent. Awareness of super-recognisers goes back centuries. Roman emperors employed them to stand behind them at crowded events so they could learn who was friend or foe.
There are two small specialist regions, on each side of the brain, primarily responsible for recognising faces, known collectively as the fusiform face area (FFA). Super-recognisers have significantly more activity in the FFA when shown pictures of faces.
The Metropolitan Police in Britain has identified more than 100 known super-recognisers within its ranks. In the wake of the 2011 London ri ots the f orce had hundreds of thousands of hours of CCTV to trawl through. One officer, PC Gary Collins, singlehandedly identified 180 rioters.
So incredible is the power of these super-recognisers to see faces in even the most blurred images that they are the subject of a brain study at Greenwich University in London. Dr Josh Davis, a senior lecturer in psychology involved in the research, says the hope is to develop tests to l et the police i dentify super-recognisers and use their talents.
However, Dr Davis adds that super-recognisers don’t remember everything else so well. ‘Their powers seem to be face-specific, he says. ‘When we tested if they could recognise flowers better than normal people, they couldn’t.’
TURBO-CHARGED TASTEBUDS
DO YOU find the flavours of broccoli, kale, coffee or chocolate disgustingly powerful? You might not be a fusspot, you may instead be a super-taster.
The average person has 10,000 taste buds on their tongue that allow us to experience sweet, bitter, sour, salty and savoury (or umami) tastes. However, super-tasters have up to twice as many taste buds, meaning all taste is magnified. One in four of us may be a super-taster, according to health experts.
Scientists are unsure why some of us taste flavours more intensely. It may be an evolutionary trait that helped ensure that, as hunter-gatherers, we weren’t wiped out by eating strange or infected foods. Women are more likely to be super-tasters than men.
Being a super-taster can make you healthier — you may be at l ower risk of heart disease, according to work by the dietitian Valerie Duffy, of the University of Connecticut. Super- t asters also tend to be slimmer. In the Journal of the American Dietetics Association, Duffy suggests this is because they tend not to like sweet and fatty food because they find the flavours overwhelming.
There i s also evidence to s uggest people who are sensitive to bitter flavours drink less alcohol than those who are not.
Having sensitive taste buds can have its health downside, however. The bitter tastes of many green vegetables are more intense for super-tasters, so they may avoid them, putting them at greater risk of colon cancer. When Linda Bartoshuk, an experimental psychologist with the University of Florida, examined 200 older men for signs of precancerous colon polyps, she found that the stronger the aversion to bitter taste, the greater the number of polyps.
RAINBOW VISION
THANKS to a genetic variation, some women have a condition called tetrachromacy, which means they see more vibrant colours and can detect the difference between subtle shades of colour far better than the rest of us.
Most of us have three types of ‘cone’ cells in our retina, the lightsensitive tissue in the eye. The different types of cones respond to different spectrums of light — and therefore different colours.
Colour-blind people have a faulty cone, which means they have reduced sensitivity at certain spectrums, and struggle to tell the difference between colours such as reds and greens. However, some women have an extra type of cone cell in their eyes — meaning they see extra detail in shades of colour that most of us cannot detect. This super trait is solely the preserve of women as the gene responsible for creating the red and green cone types is located on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes, so they could carry two different versions of the gene — one on each X chromosome — and would have four cones i n total, making them a tetrachromat. (Men only have one X chromosome.)
It’s not known how many women have this. Proving that a woman is a true tetrachromat is scientifically difficult as there’s no way to record what a person is seeing.
However, Dr Gabriele Jordan, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University, has developed a test to determine who has this gift. It involves looking at coloured discs showing very subtly different mixtures of pigment.
The differences in the mixtures are far too subtle for normally sighted people to notice: almost all would see the same olive green no matter which disc they saw. But a tetrachromat would spot the tiny differences in colour mix.
The US-based artist Concetta Antico is a known tetrachromat who has been studied extensively by scientists at the University of California. When any normally sighted person looks at a pebble path, they see a dull grey floor. But to Antico: ‘The little stones jump out at me with oranges, yellows, greens, blues and pinks. I’m kind of shocked when I realise what other people aren’t seeing.’
It’s also thought that tetrachromacy may also boost vision in dim lighting.
TOTAL RECALL
MOST of us would be hard pressed to remember what we were doing at precisely this time last week, let alone what we were doing on this day a decade ago.
But some have total recall of their personal lives, thanks to a rare phenomenon called hyperthymesia, or ‘highly superior autobiographical memory’.
Aurelien Hayman, 22, an English literature student at Durham University, can remember in precise details the conversations that he had on any particular day of his life, the clothes he was wearing, the TV programmes he watched and the pop songs he heard.
Professor Giuliana Mazzoni, head of psychology at Hull University, has subjected Aurelien to a battery of tests. She says: ‘ When we checked the factual information relating to the day of the week, the weather or a television series he said he’d watched, the information was accurate.’
Aurelien’s strange ability only emerged when he was aged 11. ‘There is no method or technique to it. I’m not aware that my memories are being coded,’ he says.
‘It’s like being able to access something in a filing cabinet very quickly. It’s like the dates have pictures.’
Brain scans on Aurelien Hayman indicated that he stores memories in more areas of the brain than people with normal powers of recall. His long-term memories appear to be stored in the right frontal lobe of the brain — as is normal — but he also uses the left frontal lobe, which normally deals with language, and occipital areas at the back of the brain, normally used for storing pictures.
This cross-wiring seems to have boosted the vividness and longevity of his memories. But it has not enhanced his memory in other areas, such as his academic work at university.
And his computer-like power of recollection can be a curse as well as a blessing because every trauma and humiliation we would prefer to have blurred by time and forgetfulness is preserved in mercilessly clear detail.