Has an active online community.
Showing 14 oddities.
This tag marks entries with an active online community built around the trait or experience. Ear rumbling, tinnitus, and derealization-depersonalization each have forums or subreddits where people compare notes.
The tag exists because an active community is itself informative. It suggests the experience is common enough, or unusual enough, that people want to find others who share it.
This list will tell you that a community exists and roughly what it does, whether that is swapping techniques, offering support, or simply confirming that an experience is real and shared. It will not link you to specific groups or vouch for the advice given inside them. Any community, medical or otherwise, is anecdote, not authority.
Results narrow the list below as you type.
Most people see a picture in their mind when they think of a friend's face. People with aphantasia see only a faint image or none. About 4 in 100 people are like this, and about 1 in 100 see nothing at all. A few people have images almost as vivid as real sight.
A pleasant tingling that starts on the scalp and moves down the neck and spine, set off by whispering, tapping, soft sounds, or gentle personal attention. Not everyone gets it. A large online community is built around it.
Small visible twitches in the eyelid, calf, thumb, or arm that come and go with no weakness. One survey found them in about 70% of healthy clinicians. They are very rarely a sign of nerve disease.
The world suddenly seems flat, distant, or like a film (derealization), or you feel like you are watching yourself from outside (depersonalization). Many people have a brief episode at some point, usually under stress.
Up to about half of all people can make a low roar inside their own head by tensing a tiny muscle in the middle ear.
A wave of chills up the back, sometimes with goosebumps, at a powerful moment in music, a film, or a speech. It is thought to come from the brain's reward system reacting to an expectation being met or broken.
A kind of dream, often during fever in childhood, filled with huge or tiny shapes, infinite space, crushing pressure, and dread. The name comes from an online forum, not a medical text, but each piece of it is well known to neuroscience.
People with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, find it hard to recognise faces, even those of family and friends. Most have had it all their lives. It can also start after brain damage. Estimates run from about 1 in 100 people to about 1 in 40, depending on how it is tested.
You wake up, or start to fall asleep, and cannot move or speak for a few seconds to minutes. Sometimes a threatening presence seems to be in the room. It is the normal paralysis of dreaming sleep running a little late.
In some people, one sense triggers another. Letters have colours, sounds have shapes, or days of the week sit in fixed places in space. The pairings are automatic and stay largely the same over many years.
A ringing, hissing, buzzing, or roaring sound with no source outside your head. Between 10% and 15% of people have it. It is mostly the hearing system filling in for damaged or tired inner-ear cells.
Small white or yellow lumps that form in the folds of the tonsils and sometimes come out when you cough. They smell bad and feel like something is stuck in the throat. They are usually harmless.
Tiny flickering dots across the whole field of vision, like static on an old TV, present with eyes open or closed. About 2% of people have it. The eyes are fine. The visual part of the brain is over-active.
Giving yourself goosebumps on command, without music, cold, or fear. Nobody knows how many people can do it, but it seems rare. The muscles involved are not supposed to take orders.