Here's Why

Hyperacuity references

I’ve decided to write an article on hyperacuity, after a comment posted by one of my readers about the lack of information about the subject.

Here’s some links and quotes about hyperacuity in the mean time:

Zebra References: The Tell-Tale Heart
“The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them…”
“Differential Diagnosis: adrenal cortical insufficiency”

“The senses are rendered morbidly acute [in rabies], the surface of the body irritatable and readily acted upon by the slightest gust of air, even the feeling of the pulse, inducing an accession of the convulsive paroxysm.”
- The Nature and Treatment of Rabies or Hydrophobia. 2nd ed.
Dolan TM. London: Ballière, Tindall, and Cox, 1879: 136.

” Contains sections the menstrual cycle and other endocrine influences on olfactory sensitivity. Notes that epileptic individuals are reported to exhibit greater olfactory sensitivity than nonepileptic individuals.”
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SOCIAL LEARNING
“One report illustrates the “wisdom” of the body regarding specific hungers: a child (later diagnosed after death as suffering from adrenal cortical insufficiency) who had exhibited a profound preference for salt from the time of weaning. The child was hopitalised but the hospital diet did not provide enough salt and he died after a week due to an inability to maintain electrolyte balance.”

A Natural History of Extraordinary Human Functioning

“All living creatures have vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Each of these has all sorts of supernormal expressions. What I have discovered in my research is that there is a whole bunch of this stuff, particularly in sport and high adventure, that is kind of in-between—you don’t know whether it’s a hyperacuity of the senses or clairvoyance. Another set is kinesthesis—the ability to read our own insides. There’s an immense lore of supernormal kinesthesis in the yogic traditions.”

I saw kinesthesis as something I developed because I went through cycles of being sick and well so many times a year every year of my life. Also because I’ve consciously tried to develop it, to monitor my health and choose the best way to help myself.

The fact that I was able to self-diagnose my bronchitis infection before the symptoms were manifest to the doctors was just practice. When I could feel all the seperate little hairs and dander in the house in my throat it was making use of the extra information from my toxin-induced hyperacuity. I was ready for the extra information.

THE MIND’S EYE, What the blind see

“Alvaro Pascual-Leone and his colleagues in Boston have recently shown that, even in adult sighted volunteers, as little as five days of being blindfolded produces marked shifts to nonvisual forms of behavior and cognition, and they have demonstrated the physiological changes in the brain that go along with this. And only last month, Italian researchers published a study showing that sighted volunteers kept in the dark for as little as ninety minutes may show a striking enhancement of tactile-spatial sensitivity.”

Superheroes can tune hyper-senses in and out at will, sufferers of hyperacuity have no such luck.
More later.

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Physics, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, Cisco CCNA tutor, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to professional writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Discovery science show on radio 2SER 107.3Fm Mondays at 9am in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Discovery sound archives.