Lots of things that ultimately come down to hyper-mobility (thanks Ehlers-Danlos!), including:
- Lick my elbow
- Pull my shoulder visibly out of socket (not painful at all, and happens if I carry something heavy if I’m not careful)
- Pop my hip out of socket while standing (sometimes painful, always somewhat unpleasant, so I’ve had to learn how to not do it)
- Hold my hands behind my back and pull them to my front
- Rotate my arm >360°
- Bend my thumb to my forearm
I can
- Bend my fingers back almost to the back of my hand, effortlessly
- Raise/lower my eyebrows by a lot, even independently. I can make waving motions, as well!
- Touch the tip of my nose or chin with my tongue
- Wiggle my ears (though not independently)
- Roll my eyes up so only the whites at the bottom are visible
I used to able to touch my fingers to the back of my hand in middle school, but 10 years later I can only bend them back a little less than 3/4
It was a neat party trick while it lasted, because everyone thought it hurt me to do it lol
I can flex some muscle in my head that causes a roaring sound in my ears. Not sure what that’s for.
Is it the same muscle that lets you wiggle your ears? Because I can do that, and I get a similar roaring.
My ears don’t seem to move when I do that.
Same here. Someone else in the thread said that’s your tensor tympani muscle.
I get mine to make a clicking sound. Audible to someone else if they stick their ear next to mine.
I can rotate one finger at one direction and the other on the opposite direction while pointing one to another, simultaneously. I don’t know how uncommon it is but, back at high school, no one else in my class could do it. Totally unuseful skill.
If I’m understanding your description correctly (the image didn’t come through), I can do this too! I heard once as a kid it was impossible and I refused to accept that, so I practiced until I could do it.
Rephrasing to see if we’re talking about the same thing: I can point my fingers towards each other in front of me, then circle one hand way from myself and the other towards myself, and continue looping them in opposite directions. Most people can do it for 1-2 loops, but then end up moving both fingers in the same direction.
I believe we’re talking about the same thing. Welcome to the club!
Neat! I just tried it and it’s hard (harder one way than the other, for some reason), but doable.
My fingers don’t rotate unless you count wrist involvement, so I’m a little confused by what you’re describing.
Something like this. Sorry for the poor image. The wrists can move too, I think it doesn’t change much.
I can fit the majority of my little finger up my nostrils. My nose might be slightly larger than normal and my hands are about normal. It just fits up there with a little twist.
Sooo I can cause what honestly feels like a small and constant electrical current flow through any part of my body. If I center this feeling on my chest it is easily more prominent than anywhere else with my head being second. Extremities are dead last. If I am hooked up to a heart monitor I can make it freak out at will. Any location I focus it on tends to want to tense up.
I like to tell people this is the result of me grabbing onto a metal item when I was younger that was still hot. Couldn’t let go for a solid 6-10 seconds, can’t say exactly how long. What I am able to do feels very similar.
a metal item when I was younger that was still hot
Still hot as in temperature or electricity?
As in sexy
Electricity. Hand curled around it to grab and got rooted. I still remember the sensation of my repeating mental command to “LET GO” feeling as if it was slowly travelling down my arm. Weird is a word that comes to mind.
Wow that’s wild, my only experience with that tingling feeling is testing 9V batteries with my tongue. I’ve had a healthy fear of electricity and always LOTO at work, so I’m hoping it stays that way.
The wild part is it didn’t hurt. I don’t remember any pain at all. Just an intense knowledge that something was very wrong and I needed to get away as quickly as I could. But like no matter how hard I tried my body would not listen until that signal I mentioned hit my hand and I let go.
I was also surrounded by people and not a single person noticed.
But yeah, Iiii wouldn’t repeat the experience.
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huh. I didn’t know others couldn’t do this
Is that like the sound you get when you yawn? I can do that too!
Congratulations you have voluntary control of your tensor tympani muscle.
Should be a filter on tinder
Exist.
Psssshhhhhh, look at this guy, existing! Not like the rest of us simulated humans! Buy ovaltine! Just sitting around in society. Pretending to exist, so we can slip subtle advertising into daily conversations. Buy ovaltime! Bet you didn’t realize that we’re all in the matrix, and your entire purpose for existance is to be made to be miserable. Currency is worthless outside the matrix. We’re only doing this to make all in the matrix suffer!!!
Mwahahahaha!!! Thats my evil laugh! Do you like it?
Fall asleep standing
The trick is to wake up standing, as well.
Yeah that part is a bit shaky
I can twitch my eyeballs left and right really fast, and not just a little bit - but most of the way.
Completely grosses people out when I do it.
Ey wobbly eye gang here
Samesies! But it makes me feel like I need to sneeze.
There used to be a subreddit for us. It was called /r/eyeshakers.
By the way, the scientific name for the eye shake thing, IIRC, is nystagmus.
This is called Voluntary Nystagmus.
Neat! Thanks for the name/info.
I’m the only person I’ve ever met who can do this. It’s apparently somewhat more common than I thought.
I’m an old man, but I still do it specifically to my sister because she cannot stand it. /sibling rivalry lives on
I think we have the same talent. Does it look like your eyes are vibrating?
I don’t know because I can’t see a thing when I do it ;)
Edit: I suppose I should make a video of myself - just never have. Sounds like I’ve got plans for the evening :)
Oh…then maybe we have different talents. I can see the whole world having an earthquake when I do it.
I just remembered this, I can open my eyelids and look in a direction where only the whites of my eyes are visible. Apparently it’s very creepy
Oh hey, I can do that too!
Do you roll them up or down?
I think upwards, kinda hard to tell though
I can hum and whistle at the same time. Makes me sound kinda like a Theremin
Lol I just tried that to see how it works.
It’s hard because if you close your lips too much to whistle it restricts the airflow and kills the hum.
Hmm I can hum independent of my lips 🤔
Ah yes, multiphonics.
I love doing this because it sounds like you’re charging a laser weapon
Same! I liken it to a knock off version of Mongolian Throat singing.
I can rumble my eardrums. Mostly useless unless i wanna block out some annoying sound but i can only do it for like a minute at a time.
I think I have the same thing. Is yours also kinda connected to blinking? I can do it without blinking, but closing my eyes at the same moment as rumbling the eardrums feels easier and more natural than rumbling with eyes open.
I can also ear rumble, it is not tied to my blinking at all, but if I vibrate my eyes while my ears are rumbling they both move at the same ~60hz frequency.
Mine is activated by blinking hard.
Mine is connected to blinking, but it doesn’t always work.
Same. I hold my eyes shut and I can activate it. I like to think of it as my automatic ear-cleaning mode.
I do this thing where I pop my ears (like when pressure changes from altitude) and then it’s like I’m hearing my breathing inside of my sinuses or something. When I breathe this way, it effectively blocks conversations I don’t want to overhear. Do other people do this, or am I odd?
Came here looking for the tensor tympani rumble cause I know it well; not sure what your thing is! If I notice sounds going quiet on a flight I’ll pinch the nostrils shut and make an exhalation effort till I hear a pop in each ear, then sounds are normal. Almost like the reverse of yours.
I can do this. If I’m in a really quiet area, I like to take in a deeper breath and then exhale as slowly as possible while doing it, which then allows me to hear my heartbeat. Super nifty.
I can also use my soft pallet to block airflow from my throat to my nose. Can you do that too?
I can’t block my nose in that way. I tried when your comment came in, but I can’t conceive of how to do it.
With the ear popping thing, I just hear the rushing of my breath. I can see how you might be able to hear your heart. I might be making this up in my head, but I feel like maybe I could hear it when I was younger.
The trick is that while you hold your ears ‘open’, you have your lungs try to not breath out but you don’t close your mouth. This lets the heart beating against your lungs be what pushes air in and out and then you hear the sounds of the air pulses as it moves past your eustachian tubes in your throat. Making sure your lungs are as full as possible is required so the lungs push against the heart.
I can do this! I forget the name for it but I can rumble my ears, and then I can also ‘pop’ them if I go a little further. I’m so grateful for it if I ever go through a pressure change, I can’t imagine how people cope without being able to do it.
Wait a minute. If I hold my jaw right, I do get a very short rumbling apart from my breath. Is that what you guys mean?
Sounds about right. I would connect this action to my jaw, not anything with my eyes like some others have said. When you say short, do you mean the sound doesn’t last very long? I can keep it going more or less as long as I want.
As long as I tense my jaw, I guess, but it’s kinda awkward for me. I kinda have to pop my jaw down and hold it. I feel I’m making a silly face when I do it, so I’m not holding it long.
I guess there’s multiple ways to hit it. I feel it in my jaw but it’s the same process as wiggling my ears (though I don’t have to do that at the same time if I don’t want to).
Not OP, but mine’s not connected to blinking.
I can do it without closing my eyes but when i was younger, I remember closing my eyes or scrunching my face made it easier to do. If you can wiggle your ears without lifting your eyebrows, it kind of feels like its the same muscle group that causes the rumbles. The rumbling sounds like white noise inside my head. Its caused by constricting Tensor Tympani muscle in the ear voluntarily. From Wikipedia:
Some individuals can voluntarily produce this rumbling sound by contracting the muscle. According to the National Institute of Health, “voluntary control of the tensor tympani muscle is an extremely rare event”,[5] where “rare” seems to refer more to the scarcity of test subjects and/or studies more than the percentage of the general population who have voluntary control. The rumbling sound can also be heard when the neck or jaw muscles are highly tensed as when yawning deeply. This phenomenon has been known since (at least) 1884.[6]
TIL; I always thought it was temporarily spiking your blood pressure that made that rumble. Now I’m no longer scared to do it
Mine feels more connected to my jaw, I kind of tense my jaw right near the joint to activate the rumbling.
Yep. I can rumble, and I can click.
Gee, I can do this too! I’ve tried explaining it to others before but only one person ever got it
I can move my fingertip joints without moving the rest of my finger.
You know that feeling you get when you listen to really awesome music and your hair stands on end and your skin has like an electric tingle all the way up and down? I can do that feeling at will. It’s called ‘voluntary frisson’, normally an autonomic response. Makes music a real.trip.
That’s actually pretty cool, I haven’t felt that in a pretty long time so I’m pretty jealous of you there
I think that’s the weirdest one I’ve seen yet
I can do this too.
It’s fun to watch people freak out when one can raise his body hair up on command. And since I have an abundance of body hair, the effect is pretty profound.
