• If you ever watch one of the hundreds of talent shows on tv, you’ll see an amazing
range of tricks and skills that human beings have learnt.
But are there some things that are more than just a matter of hard work and training?
Are there some skills where you need genetics on your side?
Here’s fifteen things that most humans can’t do.
15 – Separate all shades of colour • You have three types of colour receptor
in your eye, red, green and blue.
However, some women actually have a fourth, between the red and green, that gives them
the ability to see a far more detailed range of colours.
They are called tetrachromats and to them, a simple yellow flower might be a little rainbow
of different hues. 14 – Echo locate
• You know that things that bats do, where they squeak in high frequency and then wait
for the echo so they can navigate.
Well, people can do that too, except the only ones who have dedicated enough time to the
skill are blind people.
Daniel Kish makes a clicking noise and is such a brilliant echolocator that he can ride
a bike, despite having his eyes removed at 13 months.
What is amazing is that test have revealed that the echoing sound activates his visual
cortex, meaning he is actually seeing with his ears.
13 – Feel through other people’s senses • There is a rare neurological disorder
called synaesthesia, that can give rise to an incredible array of abilities.
These include mirrors sensations, where you can watch someone being tapped on the knee
and feel the tap yourself.
Others process their senses in highly unusual way, like tasting words, seeing music and
having superb memories.
12 – Resist HIV • About 1 million people per year die from
AIDS related illnesses, and over 35 million people are currently living with HIV.
But, there is a very small percentage of the planet, less than 1%, that has a natural immunity
to the virus.
The first person ever discovered with this ability was Stephen Crohn, who by a strange
medical coincidence, is the great-nephew of Burrill Crohn, who discovered Crohn’s disease.
Weird, right?
11 – Run without stopping • When you run, or perform any strenuous
exercise, you produce lactate.
At the start, your body can process away the lactate but there is a threshold and once
you pass it, lactate builds in your muscles and forces you to stop -this is what causes
a stitch in your side for example.
• Dean Karnazes doesn’t have this threshold; he never needs to stop running.
The only thing he needs to stop for is sleep 10 – Be a super sprinter
• While Dean’s condition is extremely rare, there are more people who are known
as super-sprinters.
Many power athletes like sprinters and weightlifters are found to have a much higher ratio of a
functioning gene called ACTN3.
About 18% of the world have two copies of it, but they are both defective.
So it seems you need this gene to function to create powerful muscles
9 – Sleep just 4 hours a night • For most of us, if we just slept four
hours a night, we’d be crying into our 6th coffee before we’d even had lunch.
But a small percentage of the world naturally operate on 4 hours, without any negative impact
so we’re hoping to find out exactly how this works.
8 – Take all the drugs and booze • 2016 was famous for being the year where
many music greats died; we lost Prince, Bowie, Leonard Cohen and many others.
But there are some rock stars that seem to survive despite all the odds.
And it’s not just luck.
In 2010, it was found that Ozzy Osborne has a genetic mutation that made it far easier
for his body to process drugs and alcohol, which is probably what has kept him alive
7 – Leave no fingerprints • Our next ability is only really useful
if you’re up to no good but some people are born without any fingerprints.
One Swiss woman discovered that she had this condition when she was going through immigration
at the US border and they couldn’t take a fingerprint sample from her.
6 – Super taste • Let’s be honest, a lot of wine experts
sounds like their making it up.
You’re not getting hints of cinnamon and bacon, it just tastes like wine, mate.
But there are supertasters, who can sense flavour that most of us wouldn’t notice.
It’s especially strong around bitterness so this could be why some children really
hate vegetables.
5 – Perfect pitch • Thanks to auto-tune, you don’t even
need to be able to sing if you want to make it in the music industry but there are human
beings who’ve always had a similar skill.
Perfect pitch doesn’t just help you sing in tune, it allows you to hear the exact pitch
of any note, even for non-musical sounds like car-horns, alarms and Calvin Harris.
4 – Super calculators • Most of us give up on arithmetic at quite
an early age, and rely on an app or a laptop to work out our taxes and bills.
But this is more that we don’t want to try, most people could learn to be a lot better
than they are.
But there are uncanny human calculators out there who can work out huge sums in an instant.
There are about 100 recognised savants in the world, many with the ability to super
calculate.
This can be a genetic mutation or even be caused by a brain injury.
3 – Live at high altitude • Living at high altitude has been shown
to improve people’s ability to run long distances, since you benefit from the higher
oxygen at low altitudes.
But most of us could gain this skill by living up high.
But many Tibetans have genetically altered to have a larger chest capacity, allowing
them to survive in higher altitudes and avoid the sickness that these heights would give
most people.
2 – Give blood to any other human • This ability can only help other people.
There are 40 known people who have Rh-null, a blood time that is absolutely universal.
O-negative is quite universal but it doesn’t match with some other negative forms so this
Rh-null is kept for extreme circumstances.
We only have 9 donors in the world though.
1 – See perfectly underwater • The Moken people, who spend most of their
lives out at sea around the Mergui Archipelago, have adapted to their lifestyle.
In controlled tests, it was found that Moken children can see twice as far as European
kids underwater, with their vision stretching out to over 20 metres.