In critical situations, a person turns on superpowers

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

1. Superpower

You may have heard the “urban legends” about the “woman who lifted the car after the accident,” but believe it or not, this is not just a legend. She talks about Angela Cavallo, whose son was fixing a '64 Chevrolet Impala when the car slipped off the jack and he was trapped under the wheels.

Angela ran out of the house, and found the unconscious body of her son, lying under the wheels. Instead of saying something passive-aggressive, like “I told him to throw this thing out of the garage,” she screamed loudly, calling for help from a neighbor. And when help did not appear on time, the woman alone, with her bare hands, lifted the car from her son.

Okay, maybe she didn't lift this thing over her head like the Hulk. It took only a few centimeters for the son to be able to get to safety. But this is no small feat, considering that the weight of the car is at least a couple of tons. Go outside and try if you don't believe.

Sinjin Eberly was climbing in New Mexico when a 240 kg boulder rolled down, crashed into him (breaking his arms in the process), and began to push him, bringing him closer to falling from a height of 600 m and to certain death. And again the "adrenaline regime" turned on and the man threw the boulder aside with his broken hands.

Why can't we do this all the time?

The facts tell us that muscle fibers can actually give us the ability to punch through a wall, like the Terminator, if we really want to, but our brain arbitrarily limits us to this. Why?

One problem is the tendons and other tissues that keep us together and prevent us from abusing this kind.

This is the same logic that makes steroid users more prone to injury: their musculoskeletal system simply cannot keep up with their pumped-up muscles.

So when you are in "raise a boulder or die" mode, the body gains superpower by stopping other bodily functions such as digestion and immunity. This is one of those things that only fires once and only for a few minutes.

2. "Seeing" with the ears (Echolocation)

This is the superpower that Daredevil has. He overcame blindness with sonar-like hearing that is so acute that it has completely replaced his vision.

This is the real thing. In the real world, we call it echolocation, and guys like Daniel Kish have it. Kish is completely blind, and has been blind all his life. Despite this, one of his favorite activities is mountain biking.

With the help of sound, mentally drawing a picture of the world around him, Kish makes it so that he can avoid collisions with trees, boulders and bears at the moment when he rushes down the mountainside.

Why can't we do this all the time?

For the same reason that people who use calculators are weak at math. Most people take the easy way, in this case they rely on their vision to tell them where everything is, but they lose the ability to do it in a more difficult and more surprising way.

However, any of you can try echolocation even without losing your eyes in some superhero story. Tests have shown that blindfolded people gradually learn to estimate distance to objects by listening to the echo of their own footsteps. Before long, they can even judge the shape and texture of invisible objects by relying only on echoes. Try it: close your eyes and walk slowly towards the wall as you speak. Listen to how your own voice changes and how the echoes respond to you.

Your brain is capable of recognizing all the subtleties of echo (after all, you've listened to it all your life), and it's just a matter of training to force yourself to use them.

3. Super memory

Hey, remember that afternoon in March when you were eight years old? Were you tired? Or not? Nothing remarkable happened?

Can't you remember this? Why not? After all, since your muscles are technically capable of allowing you to twist a dude's head off, your brain must technically be able to store every thing you've ever seen, heard, or experienced.

Just ask Jill Price. She has a disease called hyperthymesia. The illness gave her an almost perfect autobiographical memory that we just talked about. Give her a date and she can remember everything she did that day, what the weather was like, and all the other seemingly trivial events that no one will remember.

But even if you do not have such a disorder (science knows only a few such cases), there are several tricks you can do right now that will improve your memory several times.

The study of short-term memory tested the ability of people to memorize sequences of numbers. Starting by memorizing seven numbers, after a little practice the person was able to memorize about eighty. This is something that looks like a magic trick, especially when shown at a party.

Why can't we do this all the time?

First, it's important to note that what Jill has is not "photographic memory" as some people have claimed (when, say, they can flip through the phone book and memorize all the numbers). This is believed to be a myth. Science has never had the opportunity to test everyone who could actually do this, there have always been only second-hand stories. You've probably noticed that Jill doesn't have a giant head that holds all of her memories. It is capable of storing its entire life in a brain about the same size and shape as yours. Why?

Let's look at the brain as a computer. It has a really fast processor and almost unlimited storage space. But it also has a unique and often inconvenient file management system. It's not like folders on your hard drive, it's more like search engine results.

Your brain makes memories available by creating links to other memories, with the help of these links each memory is sorted by relevance (based on similarity and based on how emotional the event was for you).

Thus, memory is available only when some memories are opened with the help of others, to which the brain arbitrarily refers, or after the introduction of some information (for example, someone reminded you of something). Otherwise, the memory will disappear forever.

So with everyone like Jill, her superior memory is believed to be the result of obsessive-compulsive disorder and the renewal of those memories. Like those people who have trained themselves to memorize series of numbers, she "trained" herself to remember years of completely insignificant everyday events. But the normal brain forgets all this: so it can prioritize the really important things.

The brain with hyperthymesia is like a broken search engine that gives you porn whatever you're looking for. Like a Google image search.

4. Insensitivity to pain

The fact that pain is a necessary part of life is one of the hard lessons we learn as we grow up. But then, at some point, you break a bone, or get some other unexpected injury, and you wait a second. It hardly hurts. In moments of shock or injury like this, your brain simply turns off the pain like a switch.

Tell this to Amy Racine, who fell off a cliff, landed six stories below, twisted her knee, and broke her hip. Not feeling too much pain, even with a broken bone sticking out of her skin, she trudged down the street until she found help. The pain only returned when she got to where she was loaded onto the helicopter.

A similar phenomenon is called the "runner phenomenon." At the point where the entire body screams for mercy, a feeling of painless calmness makes the runner run on, it's almost like being on drugs.

Why can't we do this all the time?

Welcome to the wonderful world of endorphins. The very name of this wonderful substance means "morphine, naturally produced by the body." It is a great wellness agent. It is produced by the body during exercise, excitement or orgasm, and it has the ability to dull or completely eliminate pain by blocking synapses (connections between neurons) in the brain.

So why is the body so stingy with endorphins? Why can't you just turn them on and leave them on? Ask someone with congenital pain insensitivity, a genetic disorder that prevents a person from feeling pain all the time. The parents of one such girl saw her in different situations: once she accidentally chewed off part of her own tongue, absentmindedly bit her own finger, or drank a flammable liquid.

Whenever pain bothers you, it saves you from a hundred situations in which you will mutilate yourself.

You are probably wanting to say, “But why doesn't my brain let me decide? Give me control of the endorphin switch! I won't use it to win an argument in a bar by eating glass!”But we're not sure about that.

5. Time management

Simply put, it is a "flying bullet" in reality. Talk to people who have been in combat or other situations between life and death, and they will tell you about the time that stretches like toffee.

There have been a number of studies of US police officers involved in a series of shootings and other creepy moments. One of them said:

“During the shootout, I looked up and was taken aback as I saw beer cans slowly floating past my face. What was even more mysterious was that they had the word 'federal' stamped on the bottom. It turned out to be shell casings flying from the side of the officer who was shooting next to me."

Firefighter Ryan Jordan tells a similar story. The moment a wildfire suddenly blocked their path, and they began to think about what to do so as not to fry, he felt as if someone had paused the game.

Why can't we do this all the time?

Something similar happens in crazy moments, but for different reasons. Experts say this is because your brain has two modes of perception of the world: rational and experimental. The first is the one you are probably in right now, this is calmness and the opportunity to think things over. But if a bomb explodes at the other end of the room, you will suddenly go into experimental mode.

Your brain goes into a kind of "overdrive", bypassing all analytical and rational thought processes in favor of a decision trigger. Most normal thought processes are confused and suddenly you are acting on instinct (or, in the case of a policeman or soldier, through preparation). And because you think faster, the world seems slower.

It makes sense. Neo never had the ability to slow down time. He just could move very quickly.

So why can't you turn it on like Neo?

A better question is: would you like that?

In moments in your life when you have to make decisions in a panic, in a split second - how good will those decisions be? We'd venture to guess that most of your most idiotic decisions were made while in the middle of some kind of panic.

This is the reason the police are forced to go through all this training. You must be able to overcome your natural instinct to start yelling and shooting in all directions. Experimental thinking in your brain is like taking extra weight off your car in order to make it faster. But it's not just a loss of air conditioning and a headrest with DVD player. This is the loss of ABS and power steering.