5 Superpowers You Didn’t Know You Have

1. You will live forever.
You are made of 7 octillion atoms (that is 7 followed by 27 zeroes) and every one of those atoms is billions of years old. You are imbued with the knowledge and technology of billions of years, and when your body dies, those atoms live on and on and on.

2. You have amazing powers of visualization.
X-ray vision is out, but you do have other visual powers you might not realize. You can, for instance, see through time itself. If you peer into the night sky and see Andromeda, your eyes are powerful enough to see 2.5 million light years away. You can distinguish 10 million different colors, and if your eye was a digital camera, it would have 576 megapixels. For context, most digital cameras max out around 80 megapixels. So look around – you see more than you think you do.

3. You can change the past – and the future.
Your brain’s long-term memory can hold as many as 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) separate bits of information, but you are not remembering the things you think you remember. You are remembering the last time you remembered it. So the memories you are have are not actually perfect recordings of the past. They are the result of you changing the past, with omissions and some completely new imaginings. Another thing to remember about memories: they are transferable. Phobias, for instance, are thought to be memories of ancestors passed down through genes. So be careful what you fear.

4. You are the world’s best runner.
You are built to run long distances. Our bodies are uniquely adapted for it – we can even outrun horses. We have the best cooling equipment in all of Christendom: sweatglands all over our body. We have no fur so heat dissipates off us incredibly efficiently – and in fact, the hotter it is, the better we run. We also have short toes and large glutes to help with balance and stability. That Achilles tendon and other springs in our feet and legs are unique to humans (chimps and apes don’t have them) and they help to propel us forward. Most people have about 20 miles worth of glycogen in their muscles, which means you might not be able to run around the world in one go, but you can definitely make it across town.

5. You can read minds.
Scientists say we have something called a “theory of mind” that allows us to understand other people’s beliefs and viewpoints different from our own, and that it is a useful tool for understand other people’s minds. For example: Sally and Kendra are at the pub. Sally goes to the bathroom, and while in there Kendra sees Sally’s phone is on the bar. To protect it from being stolen, Kendra puts it in her purse. When Sally returns, where does she expect the phone to be? If you said the bar, you’ve got the superpower to predict other people’s actions. What will Sally do now? If you just answered, “Ask Kendra where her phone is,” congratulate yourself – you are using a superpower you didn’t know you had. The ability allows us to predict other people’s behaviour, tell lies, and spot deceit in others. Your power to predict what other people will think (and therefore do) is the social lubricant of culture and connections. And even better news: you can sharpen this skill. Just use it for good, not for evil.