5 superpowers you didnt know your body was hiding from you

#1.

Super Strength

You may have heard urban legends about "the lady who was able to lift a whole car in an emergency" but, believe it or not, it's not just a legend. They're talking about Angela Cavallo, whose son was working on the suspension of a 1964 Impala, when the car slipped off of the jack and trapped him in the wheel well.
Angela ran out to find her unconscious son pinned under the car. Rather than saying something passive agressive about how she "told him to get that thing out of her garage," she yelled for a neighbor to go get help, and when help wasn't coming fast enough for her liking, proceeded to lift the fucking car off her son with her bare fucking hands.

Artist's rendering.

OK, maybe she didn't lift the thing over her head like She-Hulk, just the few inches it took to get it off her son for the several minutes he needed to drag his ass to safety. But that's no small feat considering that the vehicle weighed at least 3,340 pounds. Go out to your driveway and try it (The Cracked Legal Department asks that your recreation leave out the unconscious loved-one trapped in the wheel well).
Then you've got guys like Sinjin Eberle, who was rock climbing in New Mexico when a 600-pound boulder came lose, smashed into him (crushing his hands in the process) and started pushing him, Wile E. Coyote-style, toward a 150-foot drop and a splattery death. Again the "shit hitting fan" adrenaline mode kicked in and the man tossed the boulder aside, crushed hands and all.

"Next time I get panic muscles, I'm tossing boulders with my dick."

Why Can't We Do This All of the Time?
So the evidence suggests that our actual muscle fibers physically have the ability to let us punch through a wall like the Terminator if they really really want to, but our brain arbitrarily limits us. Why? One problem is the tendons and other tissue that hold you together aren't made to take that kind of abuse. It's the same logic that makes steroid users more prone to injuries--the support structures can't keep up with their juiced muscles.
Also, when you're in that "lift the boulder or die" mode, the body gets that strength by stopping other bodily functions like digestion and immune response. It's the sort of thing that is only awesome for a few minutes at a time.
Still, we're kind of pissed that we can't seem to just summon the super strength at will. Wouldn't that mugger have been surprised if you had thrown him across the street into a plate glass window? But we suppose if science found a way, the muggers would know how to do it, too. Man, that would make for some awesome fights though.

 

#2.

"Seeing" With Your Ears (A.K.A. Echolocation)

This is the superpower that the Daredevil has. He overcomes his blindness with sonar-like sense of hearing that's so sharp it basically replaces his vision.
This is a real thing. In the real world we call this echolocation, and guys like Daniel Kish have it. He is completely blind and has been his whole life. Despite this, one of his favorite pastimes is mountain biking.

And as easy as it is to imagine this guy crashing hilariously through your window clutching a Braille map, he's actually pretty good at it. And he does it all by using sound to mentally paint a picture of the world around him, and doing it so fast he can avoid trees, boulders and bears while speeding down the side of a mountain.
You may remember that we previously wrote about another guy with this ability, Ben Underwood. This is the guy who trained Ben.
Why Can't We Do This All of the Time?
For the same reason people who use calculators suck at math. Most people choose the easy way, in this case relying on your vision to tell you where things are, and lose the ability to do it the much harder and far more awesome way.

But any one of you can pick up echolocation even without losing your eyes in some kind of superhero origin story. Tests have found that blindfolded people can learn to judge distances to objects based on the echoes of their own footsteps. Soon they can even judge the shape and texture of unseen objects by echo alone. Try it; close your eyes and slowly walk toward a wall while talking, listening to the change in your own voice as it echoes back to you.
Your brain recognizes all of those subtleties in echo (you've been hearing them your whole life, after all) and it's just a matter of training yourself to use them.
To fight crime.

 

#3.

Super Memory

Hey, remember that March afternoon when you were eight-years-old? And you were pooping? And nothing remarkable happened?
You don't remember that? Why not? After all, just as your muscles technically have the ability to let you twist a dude's head off, your brain technically has the ability to store every single damned thing you've ever seen or heard or experienced.
Just ask Jill Price; she has a condition called hyperthymesia which gives her that nearly perfect autobiographical memory we just talked about. Give her a date and she can remember everything that she did that day, what the weather was like and all the other seemingly trivial events that no one else remembers happened.

But even if you don't have a disorder (and only a few cases have been studied), there are tricks to make your memory perform many levels above what you're getting out of it now. In a study on short term memory they tested subjects on their ability to memorize strings of numbers. With a little training one subject went from being able to memorize about seven digits at a time (about average) all the way up to about 80, something that would seem like a pretty damned cool magic trick if you did it at a party.
Why Can't We Do This All of the Time?
First, it's important to note that what Jill has is not a "photographic memory" like some people have claimed to have (where they can, say, flip through a phone book and remember all the numbers). That is thought to be a myth; science has never been able to verify anyone who actually can do it beyond second-hand stories. You may have noted that Jill doesn't even have a gargantuan noggin in which to store all those memories. She's able to store her entire life in a brain that is roughly the same size and shape as yours. Why?
Let's look at the brain like it's a computer. It has a really fast processor and almost unlimited storage space. But it also has a very unique and often inconvenient filing system. It's less like the directories you have on your hard drive and more like the results you get back from a search engine.

Your brain makes memories accessible by creating links to other memories, with all those links to each memory sorted by relevance (based on similarity and how emotional you were when the event happened).
So a memory is only accessible by opening one of the other memories that the brain arbitrarily linked to it, or by inputting the same information again (that is, somebody reminds you). Otherwise, it's gone forever. That's why you can forget about an appointment, but when reminded suddenly slap your forehead and say, "Oh, right!" with all the details suddenly spilling back into your mind. The appointment didn't get deleted, the link just got broken.
So with somebody like Jill, her perfect memory of decades of personal minutiae is thought to be the result of an obsessive/compulsive dwelling on and refreshing of those memories... at the expense of everything else. Like the people who were trained to remember those strings of digits, she "trained" herself to remember years of unimportant shit. But your brain forgets that unimportant shit for a reason: so it can prioritize the important stuff ahead of it.
So brains with hyperthymesia are like a broken search engine that returns porn no matter what you search for. So basically, like Google Image Search, we guess.
Oh, and did we mention Jill's depression? Yeah, it turns out it's not all that awesome to remember all the times you peed your pants in front of your friends when you were seven. Honestly, if we could give you a pill that would let you remember every minute of your teenage years, would you take it?

 

#4.

Immunity to Pain

The fact that pain is a necessary part of life is one of those hard lessons we all learn growing up. But then, at some point, you break a bone or have some other sudden injury and realize, wait a second. This barely hurts. In those moments of shock and trauma your brain flips off pain like a switch.
Ask somebody like Amy Racina, who fell off a cliff, landing six stories below, shattering her knee and breaking her hip. Not feeling more than minor pain, even with broken bone jutting out from her skin, she dragged herself until she found help. It was only at the point when she was being loaded safely into a helicopter that the pain returned.

The phenomenon called runner's high is similar. At the point where exertion should have your whole body screaming for mercy, a sense of painless calm washes over the runner, it's almost like being drugged.
Why Can't We Do This All of the Time?
Welcome to the wonderful world of endorphins. The very name of this miracle substance means "morphine produced naturally in the body." It's the ultimate feel-good substance. It's released into the body during exercise, excitement and orgasm, and it has the power to dull or completely eliminate pain by coating the receiving end of the synapses in the brain that would otherwise receive pain signals from the rest of your body.

Yep. That's what it feels like.

So why is your body so stingy with the endorphins? Why can't you just flip this on and leave it on? Well ask anybody with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, a genetic disorder that leaves them in this painless state all the time. The parents of one such girl saw her on different occasions accidentally chew off part of her own tongue, absent-mindedly bite through her finger and drink scalding liquids.
For every one time pain annoys you, there are about a hundred times it saves you from disfiguring yourself.
You're probably tempted to say, "But why doesn't my brain let me decide? Give me control of the endorphin switch! I won't use it to try to win a bar bet by eating glass!" but deep down, you know damned well you would.

 

#5.

Time Manipulation

Quite simply, "bullet time" is real. Talk to people who have been in combat, or other life-or-death situations and they'll talk about time stretching out like taffy.
There was a study of police officers involved in shootouts and other "holy shit" moments. One guy was quoted as saying, "During a violent shoot-out I looked over, drawn to the sudden mayhem, and was puzzled to see beer cans slowly floating through the air past my face. What was even more puzzling was they had the word 'Federal' printed on the bottom. They turned out to be the shell casings ejected by the officer who was firing next to me."

Fire fighter Ryan Jordan tells a similar story. The moment when a forest fire suddenly came racing their way and they had to think fast to avoid getting flame broiled, the crucial moment felt like somebody had paused the game.
Why Can't We Do This All of the Time?
How fast time moves for you is literally all in your head. But you know that, you've been in the waiting room at the dentist, or in the chair while they put that huge tattoo of a bald eagle and American flag on your forehead. Talk about bullet time. Seconds become hours.
Something similar happens during moments of frantic mayhem, but for different reasons. Experts say it's because your brain has two modes of experiencing the world, rational and experiential. The first one is what you're probably in now, calm and able to think things through. But if a bomb goes off on the other side of the room, you'll suddenly be in the experiential mode.

Legal note: Please don't test this just so you can call us liars when you blow up your office building.

Your brain goes into a kind of overdrive, bypassing all sorts of analytical and rational thinking processes in favor of hair trigger decision-making. Most normal thinking processes are scrapped, and suddenly you're operating on instinct (or in the case of a cop or soldier, your training). And because you're thinking faster, the world seems to be moving slower. It makes sense; Neo never had the ability to slow down time. He could just move really fast.
So why can't you just turn it on like Neo? A better question is, would you want to? In those times of your life when you've had to make panicked, split-second decisions, how good were those decisions? We're going to hazard a guess that most of the most idiotic (non-drunken) decisions you've made have been in the middle of some kind of panic.
This is why they make police go through all that training. You have to overcome your natural instinct to start crying and shooting in random directions. Experiential thinking is to your brain like stripping all the weight off your car to make it faster. It's not just losing the air conditioning and headrest DVD players; it's losing the antilock brakes and power steering as well.
Now that we think of it, it's kind of like instead of turning you into Neo, it turns you into Keanu Reeves.

7 People From Around the World With Real Mutant Superpowers

#1.

Das Uberboy

Real Name: Unknown
Uberboy's name is being kept secret, presumably to protect the lives of his loved ones once Uberboy dons a mask and begins patrolling the streets of the world righting wrongs.
Superpower: Bona fide Super-Strength.
One day in 1999 a little boy was born in Germany, at first glance no different from any other. But, the nurses noticed that the baby's muscles were twitching and called the doctors to check him out. We can only assume Uberbaby was showing off his guns to the ladies since when doctors examined the kid, they reached a unanimous conclusion: he was ripped as hell.
But how did this happen? Was there a fully equipped gym inside his mom's uterus? No, as it turns out that's an extraordinarily stupid idea. It's actually a real X-Men-style genetic mutation that changes the way his body controls muscle growth. Cattle farmers have been intentionally using it for years to breed huge, muscular cows.

It's not clear what will happen as Uberboy grows up. All we have is this quote that is from The Washington Post despite sounding like it's from a Marvel origin: "But inasmuch as no one has ever encountered a child such as this boy or studied animals with defective myostatin genes into old age, his health--and eventual strength--remains unknown."

What we do know is that at 4-years-old, Uberboy could lift six times more weight than an average kid. If in a few years you see a guy clubbing a bank robber in the head with a minivan, you'll know what the hell is going on.
Scientists, instead of building giant laser shooting robots to hunt him down, decided to study him and try to find ways to use this new knowledge to help people with muscle dystrophy. And by that we assume they mean turn regular people into muscle-bound supermen to populate their Army of Doom.

 

#2.

Captain Sonar

Real Name: Ben Underwood
Superpower: Super Echolocation
That's a fancy way of saying he can "see" with sounds. Basically he's Daredevil, minus the girlfriends who become porn stars in Mexico, getting killed by ninjas and being Ben Affleck. So much, much better when you think about it.
Human echolocation is not really new. You can ask James "the traveler" Holman all about it, assuming you have access to a working Ouija board since the guy has been dead for a century and a half. There is even an organization called World Access for the blind that teaches people how to use echolocation. But, few people have been able to take echolocation as far as Ben underwood.

Ben was diagnosed with retinal cancer at the age of two and had his eyes removed at three. While this can easily go into our upcoming article "Top 7 Most Horrible Things God Can do to Children," Ben's story takes a different turn when at five, he learns he can detect things around him by making quick clicking noises with his tongue.
He's gotten so good at it that he's now capable of Rollerblading, skateboarding, playing basketball, foosball and even video games.

Wait, video games? How's he doing that? Actually, we don't want to know. All we know is that if you get this kid and a bunch of bad guys in a completely dark room, only one of them is walking out.

 

#3.

Mister Eat Everything (aka The Human Goat)

Real Name: Michel Lotito
Superpower: Super-Eating
This basically means the guy can eat and even digest metal, glass and even toxic, poisonous material without going "Oh, shit! What was I thinking!" before puking blood and dying, which is what normally happens when other people try.
Michel Lotito's stomach lining is twice as thick as normal, a rare condition that most doctors agree developed in the womb, though nobody is sure how. Was a pregnant Mrs. Lotito bitten by a radioactive billy goat giving goat genes to Le Fetus Mangetout? We're forced to assume so until prove otherwise.
Lotito knew that fate had endowed him with special powers, so he answered the call and when he was 9-years-old, he started eating a television set. In the years since, Lotito got himself a career in entertainment eating bicycles, supermarket trolleys and even a coffin (there was no body inside ... or so he claims).

Lotito even entered the Guinness book of records when he ate a goddamn airplane. Sure, it took him two years to do it, but he ate two pounds of metal per day during the whole thing. Recent X-rays show he still has pieces of metal in his stomach and even a chain still stuck in there.
As journalists, we feel compelled to draw your attention to the fact that his special power wasn't eating an airplane, so much as it was shitting an airplane. Anybody can swallow a foreign object. The other side of the equation is where it gets hard, and on our team of real-life superheroes, we're thinking the plane-shitting would actually be more useful than anything the Das Uberboy does (hey, we have some specific goals in mind).

 

#4.

MONKFORCE!

Real Names: Numerous Buddhist monks
Superpower: Generating magical heat energy from their bodies.
Experts have been studying Buddhist monks for more than 20 years, trying to figure out just how in the hell they're doing what they do. By using a meditation technique called Tum-mo, these monks can lower their metabolism by 64 percent. To put it in perspective, your metabolism only drops 10 to 15 percent when you sleep. And yes, you should feel bad that there are people who make you look uptight when you're asleep.
But far more awesome than that, the monks can also increase the temperatures of their fingers and toes by 17 degrees. No one knows how.

After hovering there for a few seconds, the ball burst into flames

This control over their body temperature allows the monk to comfortably survive in temperatures experts call "scrotum-negating, penguin-urine cold." Not only that, in an experiment that sounds more like outright torture, a group of monks were put in a cold room with cold, wet sheets draped around them. We're not sure if some asshole scientists simply yelled "Hey, I found Nirvana inside this room," and then slammed the door shut after the curious monks went in to check. But using their body-temperature-controlling meditation the monks managed to avoid becoming very holy popsicles.

It's believed the monks' techniques can one day be taught to astronauts to be used during space travel, since during their meditation they consume far less resources. And once the astronauts arrive on another planet, they'll likely find a group of Buddhist monks waiting, having effortlessly teleported themselves there with their minds.

#5

Jet-Man

Real Name: Yves Rossi
Superpower: Flight, via a rocket pack strapped to his back.
Yves Rossi is a Swiss professional pilot and aeronautical engineer (we hope, since he designed his own jet pack) who, claiming to be inspired by his hero Batman, realized the first jet-pack-powered flight.
At this point someone should write the man a nice letter explaining to him that Batman doesn't really fly at all. We'd do it ourselves, but we don't like to argue about comics with a man who jumps out of a plane wearing nothing but a flammable death trap strapped to his ass. For all we care he can say Superman talks to fish, as long as he keeps flying homemade jet packs while he's saying it.

As you see, he doesn't just run along the ground and wait for his jet pack to lift him into the air. He throws himself out of a fucking plane, knowing either his invention will work or men in hazmat suits will be raking him into a trash bag in a few minutes. If you're still wondering where the mutant part of this guy's super power comes in, than you obviously haven't considered the size of the balls it takes to do what he does.
Jet-Man's jet pack is capable of flying at a speed of 160 mph for up to six minutes. After those six minutes, Yves has to activate his secondary power, the Go-go-gadget-oh-please-God-don't-let-it-fail-parachute since there is no way to land the jet pack without becoming a red and chrome stain on the ground.

There's no word on his plans to add a laser-shooting suit of armor to the jet pack, but of course you wouldn't let that information get out until it was time to use it. That time is coming soon, Mr. Rossi. We'll be calling.

 

#6.

Zamora the Torture King

Real Name: Tim Cridland
Superpower: Super Pain Tolerance
Tim Cridland is an entertainer and a former member of the Jim Rose Circus, which you may remember as that really creepy circus from that episode of The X-Files with the murderous conjoined twin fetus thing.
Anyway, Tim specializes in sword swallowing, fire walking, sleeping on beds of nails (once even with a Toyota over him), body skewering and electrocuting himself. Tim says he can do this because he has mastered mind over matter. Researchers on the other hand call bullshit and say it's because Tim was born with a mutation that makes it so he doesn't feel pain the way normal people do.
It's not that Tim and his ilk can't feel anything, because they can feel when they are touched, and they can feel temperature. They simply do not register pain thanks to malfunctioning receptors in the nerve cells that tell your brain "Ow-f*ck-get-the-hand-off-the-stove!"

We assume this also turns off the "you just got punched by a supervillain" receptors that make most men shy away from a life of superheroism.

 

#7.

The Godhand

Real Name: Choi Yeong-eui, later changed to Masutatsu Oyama
Superpower: Super-Karate!
Masutatsu Oyama was born in Korea in 1927 and later moved to Japan, where he studied karate. Unlike most famous martial artists, Oyama is not famous for his movie roles, where stunt men and clever editing can make anyone look like a badass.
No, Oyama preferred a different sort of theater. He used to have live public demonstrations where he would fight and kill a bull with his bare hands. Just because it bears repeating, let's write that again: He could kill a bull with his hands. If you want to know how idiotically hard that is, we cordially invite you to go out and punch a bull in the face. Go on, we'll wait here. OK, we're not really waiting since whoever just went out to try that isn't coming back.

All in all, Oyama fought and killed 52 bulls, three of which were killed instantly with one blow. Forty-nine had their horns chopped off with karate blows. He gained the nickname of The Godhand and was considered the living manifestation of the Japanese warrior's maxim "One strike, certain death."
If you're thinking his skills only worked against livestock, you should know that Oyama once tested himself in a kumite, a series of two-minute fights against different opponents, each of which you must win to continue. Oyama took on 300 men over the course of three days. According to some, the only reason it didn't reach 400 was because opponents started to get tired of getting punched in the face.

There have been three movies made based on his life: Champion of Death, Karate Bearfighter, and Karate for Life. That's right, there exists in the world a movie based on an actual man's life that wound up with the title Karate Bearfighter. Why? Because it's probable Oyama actually fought a goddamn bear once, and that bear is buried in a shallow grave covered in dirt and the tears of his relatives as we speak.
Thus we introduce our superhero squad: Super-strong babies flying in jet packs, navigating with surgical precision through the darkest and coldest of nights, tearing your tanks apart with super strength karate blows and eating them, only to fly back up into the air and shit your own weapons back on top of you.