Heroes

I got a tape with episodes of the new TV series Heroes and am loving it. The theory is that the human race is still evolving and a few select people are discovering abilities that normal humans lack (the same idea as in X-Men but there's no mention of the mutant X-gene just yet). In a freaky coincidence I happened to catch a program on TV tonight about people with super enhanced senses - sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. These people could be the next evolutionary step.

Sight
The Masai tribe in Africa has super-enhanced sight. The men were pointing at zebras and giraffes that the cameramen couldn't see until they used binoculars, and they could see 1cm-sized pictures of animals while standing 35 meters away. Doctors tried testing their eyesight using the standard eyetest and they read the bottom line easily, even when the chart was placed at the opposite end of a basketball court. Not quite as good as x-ray vision, but pretty good if you ask me.

Sound
A blind man named Juan Luis uses echo location (like bats) to see the world around him. He was walking down the street making clicking noises and saying stuff like, "There's a trash can on the left, a parked truck on the right and a yard with a large tree in front." He can tell how high, wide, and hard things are by clicking his tongue. And he's not the only one! A blind American boy does the same thing, and runs around chasing his brothers and sisters without any problems. You'd never know he was deaf by seeing him walk down the street (without a cane of course) swerving around bicycles and people. Watching him spar in karate class was pretty impressive. And chase basketballs while rollerblading.

Then they tested an orchestra conductor who can hear everything at once. The 22-person orchestra played a 30-second piece, then played it again with 5 differences. I couldn't believe it! The two pieces sounded exactly the same to me, but he rattled off all 5 mistakes as soon as they finished playing. The cello played a note that was an octave different from the first time, the oboe skipped a note, the violin played a note in b-flat, the flute played a note softly. . . How could he hear it all??? They also dropped combinations of coins on the floor and asked him how much they dropped - a fun game to try at home. But quite impossible for normal humans.

At this point there was a break where they explained how our ears lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds as we get older. They played sounds at a range of frequencies and what I heard (or actually didn't hear) bothered me. 60-year olds can hear frequencies up to 10,000 hertz, and the annoying, high-pitched squealing sound made me turn the volume down. The frequency that 50-year olds can hear was also loud and irritating, and thank goodness they stopped that one quickly because it was starting to hurt my ears. Then the 14,000 hertz frequency that 40-year olds can hear was white silence. I heard nothing. The previous two were ear-piercing, and then there was silence. I couldn't hear any of the frequencies they played after that. I discovered that I have the ears of a 40-year old. It explains why I'm having a hard time catching conversations in a crowd and have to ask to repeat what people say more and more often. I'm really quite disturbed by this, but apparently there's no way to reverse the process to make your hearing better. Very depressing.

Incidentally one of my students can hear dog whistles. I secretly tested her and she made me stop.

Smell
A normal human can distinguish 8 different scents if you mix them together. There are about 400 people on record that have the ability to smell a mind-boggling 200 scents (they work for perfume companies around the world). The interesting thing is that 25% of these people all come from the same village in France. They interviewed someone from the village, and when he was younger he liked to test himself by taking random mixes of scents and exactly reproducing them. He said that he can't stand going into cities because the flood and intensity of smells are sickening. When we were younger my sister used to complain about the same thing. I think she might be a super-smeller, too.

Touch
They interviewed a guy who has an amazing sense of touch. He can discern how flat a surface is, up to half a micron (5/10,000ths of a millimeter). They gave him a large, flat piece of plastic to run his hands over, and the places where he said were slightly raised matched up with the computer images. I don't exactly see how this could be used as a super-power, though.

The other people were mostly just weird. Like the man who sees colors when he hears sounds. Or the lady who can smell sickness off a person. Or the artist who sees everything in color - including black and white newspapers. The CAT scan pictures were interesting. Their brains were lighting up in places that shouldn't be active.

So I guess our species is still evolving and some of us are already super-human. As for me, I'm still waiting for those latent abilities to take effect. Any day now.