Monday, March 1, 2010

10 Extraordinary People with Weird Superpowers

The Man Who Doesn't Feel Pain

Tim Cridland is an entertainer and a former member of the Jim Rose Circus. Tim specializes in sword swallowing, fire walking, sleeping on beds of nails (once even with a Toyota over him), body skewering and electrocuting himself. Tim says he can do this because he has mastered mind over matter. Researchers on the other hand say it's because Tim was born with a mutation that makes it so he doesn't feel pain the way normal people do.

It's not that Tim and his ilk can't feel anything, because they can feel when they are touched, and they can feel temperature. They simply do not register pain thanks to malfunctioning receptors in the nerve cells that tell your brain.

The Boy who sees without Eyes

Ben Underwood taught himself to use echo location to navigate around the world. He is blind, both of his eyes were removed (cancer) when he was 3, but has managed to do some truly extraordinary feats. Basically he's Daredevil. He can see the world throught sounds like a sonar or a dolphin.

The boy with Ultra-Fast Brain

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it.

In his mind, he says, each number up to 10,000 has its own unique shape and feel, that he can "see" results of calculations as landscapes, and that he can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful He also has linguistic skils. He is capable of learning new languages very quickly. To prove this for a Channel Five documentary, Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic in one week, a language with a popular reputation as one of the world's most difficult languages to learn.

The Man Who moves objects with his Mind

"Remember, there is no spoon". Just like that kid from "The Matrix" movie, Miroslaw Magola –The "Magnetic Man" -- defies laws of gravity with an extraordinary ability -- applying the power of psycho kinesis he can raise anything from metal pans to marble statues, transport them through the air to affix to his body, then creates a force to keep them there -- simply using mind control.

An avid enthusiast of the phenomenon of psychic energy, Miroslaw has developed his skill to manipulate lifeless objects in mid-air to obey his will, even forcing them spin around or shake. His mental powers are so keen that he can jump around while an object is stuck to his head without losing his mental grasp of the item.
Miroslaw explains how he employs psycho kinetics to perform these uncanny feats, "It works because I load myself with energy (I connect myself to it) and at the same time I wish for the object to raise." Miroslaw has undergone numerous tests for his perplexing skill which remains unexplained by conventional science to date.

The Woman Who Can't Forget

The "human calendar". That's what some people call the woman who contacted UC Irvine neurobiologist Jim McGaugh six years ago and said, "I have a problem. I remember too much." That's the story of AJ, an extraordinary 40-year-old married woman who remembers everything.

McGaugh and fellow UCI researchers Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker have been studying the extraordinary case of a person who has "nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic" memory of her personal history and countless public events. If you randomly pick a date from the past 25 years and ask her about it, she'll usually provide elaborate, verifiable details about what happened to her that day and if there were any significant news events on topics that interested her. She usually also recalls what day of the week it was and what the weather was like. [Read more here: The Woman Who Can't Forget Anything]

The Man Who eats Everything

This basically means the guy can eat and even digest metal, glass and even toxic and poisonous material. Michel Lotito's stomach lining is twice as thick as normal, a rare condition that most doctors agree developed in the womb, though nobody is sure how. Lotito does not often suffer from ill-effects due to his diet, even after the consumption of materials usually considered poisonous.

When performing he consumes around a kilogram of material daily, preceding it with mineral oil and drinking considerable quantities of water during the 'meal'. He apparently possesses a stomach and intestine with walls of twice the expected thickness, and his digestive acids are, allegedly, unusually powerful, allowing him to digest a certain portion of his metallic meals.

Lotito even entered the Guinness book of records when he ate an airplane. The airplane took roughly two years to be 'eaten' from 1978 to 1980

Monks generating magical heat energy from their bodies

Experts have been studying Buddhist monks for more than 20 years, trying to figure out just how in the hell they're doing what they do. By using a meditation technique called Tum-mo, these monks can lower their metabolism by 64 percent. To put it in perspective, your metabolism only drops 10 to 15 percent when you sleep. And yes, you should feel bad that there are people who make you look uptight when you're asleep.

But far more awesome than that, the monks can also increase the temperatures of their fingers and toes by 17 degrees. No one knows how.

The woman who can laugh with a peak volume of 110 decibels

This is Jittarat Wongsomboon, a 55 years-old woman from Thailand, who can laugh with a peak volume of 110 decibels! Can you believe this? Sounds strange, but it is true. On July 5, 2008, Jittarat participated in Ripley's International Laughing Contest in the Thai resort town of Pattaya and won the odd competition by continuously laughing for 12 minutes and 26 seconds and hitting a booming volume of 110 decibels.

The man who claps as Loud as a Helicopter

A Chinese man who can clap his hands nearly as loud as a helicopter is hoping to get into the record books. Zhang Quan, 70, of Chongqing city, had his clapping monitored by local environmental protection officials, reports Chongqing Business News. His claps apparently measured 107 decibels - three decibels lower than whirling helicopter blades. Workers from the environmental protection bureau say Zhang could face arrest for noise pollution if he claps too often.

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