Abilities and conditions that very few people have.
Showing 10 oddities.
A rare-ability entry is a skill or trait that only a small number of people have, whether inherited, trained, or simply unexplained. Perfect pitch, HSAM, and congenital insensitivity to pain each belong to a small group, not to most readers of this page.
This kind differs from trick because a trick is something almost anyone can attempt or learn with practice. A rare ability usually cannot be learned at all, or needs a rare starting point most people do not have.
The boundary case is extraordinary breath-holding. Ordinary breath-holding is close to a trick, since most people can improve it with training. It moves into rare-ability territory only at the far end, where the numbers involve years of specialised training or physical traits few people are born with.
Results narrow the list below as you type.
About 1% of people of Northern European descent carry two copies of a broken gene that makes them almost immune to the most common form of HIV. A bone marrow transplant from one such donor produced the first cure of HIV.
A chimera is one person made of two sets of cells with different DNA. It can happen when two embryos fuse in the first days of pregnancy. Most chimeras never find out. A few discovered it when a DNA test said they were not the mother of their own children.
A tiny number of people are born unable to feel pain. Single-gene changes switch off their pain nerves. It is not a superpower. Injuries go unnoticed, and most people with it are badly hurt in childhood.
Some children can keep a detailed picture of an image in view for a short time after it is taken away. The ability fades by the teenage years. A true photographic memory in adults has never been confirmed.
Untrained adults usually stop within a minute or two. The best freedivers manage over 11 minutes, and over 29 minutes after breathing pure oxygen. One group of sea nomads has evolved larger spleens for diving.
Fewer than a hundred people worldwide have been confirmed to recall what happened on almost any date since about age 10, in detail and without effort. Their memory for other things, such as lists or numbers, is ordinary.
Some blind people find their way by making sharp tongue clicks and listening to the echoes. Brain scans show the echoes are processed in the visual cortex. Sighted people can learn a basic version in ten weeks of training.
About 1 in 60 people feel a touch on their own body when they watch someone else being touched. The brain system that mirrors other people's actions appears to be turned up too high.
An often-quoted estimate is that 1 in 10,000 people can name or sing any musical note without hearing a reference note first. It runs in families and is far more common in people who started music lessons very young.
A small number of people need only 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night, wake without an alarm, and feel fine. Several gene variants have been linked to it. Most people who sleep that little are probably sleep-deprived.