What Doesn't Kill Us

by Scott Carney

While supertasting does not have much of a profound effect on most people’s daily lives, the existence of supertasters offers a peek into to the strange world of sensory perception. Indeed, PTC sensitivity is far from the only recently discovered sense. There are people who can see more than 100 million colors (the normal human can distinguish about 2.4 million), an ability called tetrachromacy. There are people who have the ability of absolute pitch and are able to listen to a note on a piano and instantly recognize its frequency without needing another tone for reference. There are blind people who can navigate through the world by clicking their tongues and listening to the echoes—an ability that they share with bats and dolphins. Some people’s sensory hardware scrambles the inputs between senses so that they can taste colors and hear smells, a condition called synesthesia. The neurological jumble usually doesn’t interfere with synesthetes’ daily lives, and indeed many go on to be extraordinarily successful and creative—from the author Vladimir Nabokov to the scientist Richard Feynman.