In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like. Curves and lines, and strokes of different lengths and directions against the grain of the paper, have different frequency profiles; lifting and setting the pencil back down generates a tapping sound…that sort of thing.
People often don’t believe me when I tell them this, because they figure that human hearing just isn’t that sensitive, or that the sound of handwriting doesn’t convey that much information—but it does! You’ve simply never noticed or paid attention to it because you had no desire or reason to. Another animal might, for various reasons.
Once, my dad picked up my Magna-Doodle board as we stood outside my room, and started writing a message to me. I listened closely and said “…Clean your room?”—he had written “Cʟᴇᴀɴ Yᴏᴜʀ Rᴏᴏᴍ”—and I’ll never forget his perplexed look, first at me, then turning the board around to see if any light could be shining through. He still didn’t quite believe that I could do what I had just done in front of him!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kish
https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...
When I learned to play guitar I was perplexed that my playing sounded bad, even when playing right. Later I started to listen better and heared stuff that wasn't encoded in the tabs, but still mattered.
Also, I could smell different foods like cereals. When I was a floor above in my room I smelled people eating even uncooked stuff, and I knew exactl what. Couldn't do this anymore today
I share your strong sense of smell too. I could tell you if someone was cutting cucumbers two rooms away. Dunno how long that’ll last, although my mom still has quite a nose in her early 60s, so there’s hope.
Similarly, I will often turn off all the lights and navigate around my house/room by pure touch and sound, which is surprisingly easy given how much credence we give to sight as the paramount sense.
I should add though, that "clean your room" would be a pretty safe bet in most parent/child relationships.
One weird memory is that I remember detecting objects in silent and dark room at home if they were like 10cm from my head. Even with eyes closed. I'm not sure if it's real or kids magical thinking. But it could have been very high pitched/ambient noise echoing from surfaces.
I think that's something that is common, but I have no idea what it's called.
If you hold something (especially if it's sharp) up to someone's forehead but not close enough for it to make contact with them, they will get this weird sensation building up in their forehead. Or at least I and a lot of the people I've tried it with have. It wasn't in a completely dark room so I bet you could see the shadow through your eyelids but it's still pretty weird.
Simply learning drumming made my sense of touch, balance, and a ton of other parts of my brain extremely more acute and potent. Not dissimilar to when you grok induction on trees, all of a sudden a lot of things become clearer. Well similarly with a lot of focused attention to your senses you'll start to notice patterns and relationships that are invisible otherwise.
And of course there are similar issues with mice. You have all the different strains which are genetically different, but they'll also be genetically changing over time through drift & selection & mutations, so your Wistar-XXX may not be the Wistar-XXX from 50 years ago. Or mice chow - sure, the label may say it's the same but when was the last time you checked? (Think about that paper about how all sorts of lab animals, supposedly fed constant diets and under constant controlled environments, keep getting fatter over the past century. Something is changing; what? Genetics? Food composition? Micronutrients? Lab infections? Microbiomes? Measurement tools themselves?)
"This kind of mouse we raised under these conditions, and we changed nothing, but they varied in these ways over time"
I often wonder whether the variables we check against are actually as independent and subject to the central limit theorem as we assume.
Unsurprisingly, there's a ton of heterogeneity which means it's easy to violate your statistical assumptions (i.i.d. being more important than normality here, I think) and so you get a lot of false positives. It's similar to the brain imaging issue: the assumption of spatial locality and Gaussianness is not really true and drives a lot of false-positive _p_-value inflation. There are really quite a lot of problems with animal studies, so it's not a surprise that they wipe out spectacularly when transferring to human.
I keep a list of systematic reviews & meta-analyses I run across at https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ#fn95 One of the most impressive ones, I think, are sepsis treatments: ~150 sepsis treatment experiments in humans based on mouse/rat experiments, and all of them failed: "Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory diseases", Seok et al 2013 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/9/3507.full.html
Also for the mice getting fatter over time? That's fascinating!
Well worth reading through the archives, IMO, even if you're not a chemist or biologist (I'm not). Quite aside from the methodological issues and the realities of working in the pharmacorp industry, Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" series about dangerous chemical compounds is... a blast.
But what Young discovered, according to Feynman was infinitely more vital.
"In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats."