I can wiggle my ears. I used to use it to entertain children, but today’s children are jaded and cynical.
I found I can wiggle my ears enough to walk my glasses back up my nose when they’ve slipped down.
now that’s useful!
I’ve just tried that and you’ve changed my life
Oh yeah, I didn’t even realise until you said it but I absolutely do that all the time
Child me would’ve loved to see that.
Adult me would love to see that
I can do it too! it was like discovering a new muscle! I can’t do either independently though
I can rumble my eardrums. Mostly useless unless i wanna block out some annoying sound but i can only do it for like a minute at a time.
I think I have the same thing. Is yours also kinda connected to blinking? I can do it without blinking, but closing my eyes at the same moment as rumbling the eardrums feels easier and more natural than rumbling with eyes open.
Mine feels more connected to my jaw, I kind of tense my jaw right near the joint to activate the rumbling.
I can do it without closing my eyes but when i was younger, I remember closing my eyes or scrunching my face made it easier to do. If you can wiggle your ears without lifting your eyebrows, it kind of feels like its the same muscle group that causes the rumbles. The rumbling sounds like white noise inside my head. Its caused by constricting Tensor Tympani muscle in the ear voluntarily. From Wikipedia:
Some individuals can voluntarily produce this rumbling sound by contracting the muscle. According to the National Institute of Health, “voluntary control of the tensor tympani muscle is an extremely rare event”,[5] where “rare” seems to refer more to the scarcity of test subjects and/or studies more than the percentage of the general population who have voluntary control. The rumbling sound can also be heard when the neck or jaw muscles are highly tensed as when yawning deeply. This phenomenon has been known since (at least) 1884.[6]
TIL; I always thought it was temporarily spiking your blood pressure that made that rumble. Now I’m no longer scared to do it
I do this thing where I pop my ears (like when pressure changes from altitude) and then it’s like I’m hearing my breathing inside of my sinuses or something. When I breathe this way, it effectively blocks conversations I don’t want to overhear. Do other people do this, or am I odd?
I can do this. If I’m in a really quiet area, I like to take in a deeper breath and then exhale as slowly as possible while doing it, which then allows me to hear my heartbeat. Super nifty.
I can also use my soft pallet to block airflow from my throat to my nose. Can you do that too?
I can’t block my nose in that way. I tried when your comment came in, but I can’t conceive of how to do it.
With the ear popping thing, I just hear the rushing of my breath. I can see how you might be able to hear your heart. I might be making this up in my head, but I feel like maybe I could hear it when I was younger.
The trick is that while you hold your ears ‘open’, you have your lungs try to not breath out but you don’t close your mouth. This lets the heart beating against your lungs be what pushes air in and out and then you hear the sounds of the air pulses as it moves past your eustachian tubes in your throat. Making sure your lungs are as full as possible is required so the lungs push against the heart.
I can do this! I forget the name for it but I can rumble my ears, and then I can also ‘pop’ them if I go a little further. I’m so grateful for it if I ever go through a pressure change, I can’t imagine how people cope without being able to do it.
Wait a minute. If I hold my jaw right, I do get a very short rumbling apart from my breath. Is that what you guys mean?
Sounds about right. I would connect this action to my jaw, not anything with my eyes like some others have said. When you say short, do you mean the sound doesn’t last very long? I can keep it going more or less as long as I want.
As long as I tense my jaw, I guess, but it’s kinda awkward for me. I kinda have to pop my jaw down and hold it. I feel I’m making a silly face when I do it, so I’m not holding it long.
I guess there’s multiple ways to hit it. I feel it in my jaw but it’s the same process as wiggling my ears (though I don’t have to do that at the same time if I don’t want to).
Came here looking for the tensor tympani rumble cause I know it well; not sure what your thing is! If I notice sounds going quiet on a flight I’ll pinch the nostrils shut and make an exhalation effort till I hear a pop in each ear, then sounds are normal. Almost like the reverse of yours.
Not OP, but mine’s not connected to blinking.
Same. I hold my eyes shut and I can activate it. I like to think of it as my automatic ear-cleaning mode.
I can also ear rumble, it is not tied to my blinking at all, but if I vibrate my eyes while my ears are rumbling they both move at the same ~60hz frequency.
Mine is activated by blinking hard.
Mine is connected to blinking, but it doesn’t always work.
Yep. I can rumble, and I can click.
Gee, I can do this too! I’ve tried explaining it to others before but only one person ever got it
This is my time to shine, my body is full of useless, I can:
- gleek intentionally (saving people a search: it’s causing the salivary glands under your tongue to shoot saliva, people often do it unintentionally when yawning)
- open my jaw wide enough that it goes out of socket, and twofer I can then move it side to side and produce a loud popping noise
- bend my thumb down to my wrist
- cause my heart rate to spike for short periods even when at rest
- make a three leaf clover with my tongue
- click my tongue extremely loudly
I remember when I was a kid we were all trying to gleek and some of us could do it easily. I never could, so anytime as an adult I accidentally do it, I can’t help but laugh.
A friend taught me how to gleek in 7th grade. I never stopped doing it lmao
click my tongue extremely loudly
Learn Xhosa.
By shoot, does it have force or do you mean it just comes out?
It has “force”, but it’s not very impressive, I can shoot saliva in approximately a 1ft / 30cm arch.
Tongue clicks are absurdly useful. In my family we use then to communicate over long distances and to find each other in big crowds
oh my god, so that’s what I’m doing when I yawn! It started happening a few years ago…
I can also gleek but it’s nowhere near what my grade 11 English teacher could do. I don’t know how it came up in class, but, in front of the class, she turned sideways and made the biggest arc I’d ever seen: maybe 6 feet long
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that sounds so satisfying
I can hum and whistle at the same time. Makes me sound kinda like a Theremin
Same! I liken it to a knock off version of Mongolian Throat singing.
Ah yes, multiphonics.
I love doing this because it sounds like you’re charging a laser weapon
Lol I just tried that to see how it works.
It’s hard because if you close your lips too much to whistle it restricts the airflow and kills the hum.
Hmm I can hum independent of my lips 🤔
You know that feeling you get when you listen to really awesome music and your hair stands on end and your skin has like an electric tingle all the way up and down? I can do that feeling at will. It’s called ‘voluntary frisson’, normally an autonomic response. Makes music a real.trip.
I can do this too.
It’s fun to watch people freak out when one can raise his body hair up on command. And since I have an abundance of body hair, the effect is pretty profound.
I think that’s the weirdest one I’ve seen yet
That’s actually pretty cool, I haven’t felt that in a pretty long time so I’m pretty jealous of you there
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Congratulations you have voluntary control of your tensor tympani muscle.
Should be a filter on tinder
huh. I didn’t know others couldn’t do this
Is that like the sound you get when you yawn? I can do that too!
I can make my left elbow sound like biting down on dry cornflakes, just by doing a push-up.
That doesn’t sound healthy
They really aren’t, despite what Kelloggs claims.
They weren’t made to be healthy. They were made to keep you from masturbating.
Those sons of bitches… my childhood could’ve been very… different.
I live in West Michigan where the anti-masturbatory quaker started it all. It’s so weirdly mixed between religious zealots and the rest of us in the cities lmao
Username checks out.
And it’s working. I’m still unable to masturbate to Cornflakes.
Rookie. I hit puberty with nothing but a 56k modem, and SEARS catalogs. I could jerk off to the curved surface of two basketballs placed next to each other under a bedsheet.
I had a complex fracture in the elbow twice, 34 and 30 years ago. There’s no pain, no loss of function, and it didn’t get worse in all that time.
Nothing I can really do but hope it will stay like that for the next 30.Damn. I hope so too then. I guess there are loose pieces still in there?
Or the cartilage got damaged/destroyed and it’s bone rubbing on bone
truly
I just remembered this, I can open my eyelids and look in a direction where only the whites of my eyes are visible. Apparently it’s very creepy
Oh hey, I can do that too!
Do you roll your eyes up or down?
That always used to give the heeby-jeebies to watch.
I think upwards, kinda hard to tell though
I can twitch my eyeballs left and right really fast, and not just a little bit - but most of the way.
Completely grosses people out when I do it.
Edit: I can even do circles, but not as fast as left and right.
This is called Voluntary Nystagmus.
Neat! Thanks for the name/info.
I’m the only person I’ve ever met who can do this. It’s apparently somewhat more common than I thought.
I’m an old man, but I still do it specifically to my sister because she cannot stand it. /sibling rivalry lives on
I think we have the same talent. Does it look like your eyes are vibrating?
I don’t know because I can’t see a thing when I do it ;)
Edit: I suppose I should make a video of myself - just never have. Sounds like I’ve got plans for the evening :)
Oh…then maybe we have different talents. I can see the whole world having an earthquake when I do it.
Ey wobbly eye gang here
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There used to be a subreddit for us. It was called /r/eyeshakers.
By the way, the scientific name for the eye shake thing, IIRC, is nystagmus.
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I can do this but only a couple mm
I can voluntarily open my eustachian tubes and hold them open, without needing to yawn or swallow. Makes it much easier to clear the pressure in my ears when changing elevation (like when flying in a plane).
Huh I think I can do the same. I always thought it was one of those things that everyone could do.
Same. Sometimes I can’t, such as when congested, and it’s super annoying and unbalanced.
yep, I have the same issue when congested.
Feels like a super power when you’re scuba diving and you see all the other divers holding their noses!
Weirdly, I can only do this with my right ear. Definitely helps on airplanes.
Apparently there’s a thing called lucid dreaming that many people try very hard to achieve.
Most of my dreams are “lucid”.
I can also, using only my facial muscles, pull my eyelids back extra far so it looks like my eyeballs are popping out.
cries in has chronically useless dreams that can’t even go in a dream journal
I have a hypothesis that there is no such thing as lucid dreaming (before you get the wrong idea, I’ve done it before. My meaning is that it’s misunderstood, not that people are lying about having done it).
That feeling that you’re in control? You’re just dreaming that you’re in control. You’re just dreaming that you have the experience of choice-movement-feedback.
How is the feeling of being in control any more real than other sensations you experience in a dream?
When you experience the sensation of enlightenment in a dream, do you say you were really enlightened, or were you just dreaming that you were enlightened?
When you experience the sensation of blue in a dream, do you say there was actually blue, or were you just dreaming there was blue?
Your brain telling you you’re in control is just as suspect as your brain telling you there’s blue. They are both creations of your brain for the purpose of the dream.
Whatever action you’re taking in an attempt to demonstrate control is just as easily explained as something your brain created as dream decoration.
Remember, this is just a hypothesis.
The question is, is there a practical difference between lucid dreaming and dreaming about being lucid? I like to think it’s the memory afterwards that counts.
Lots of things that ultimately come down to hyper-mobility (thanks Ehlers-Danlos!), including:
- Lick my elbow
- Pull my shoulder visibly out of socket (not painful at all, and happens if I carry something heavy if I’m not careful)
- Pop my hip out of socket while standing (sometimes painful, always somewhat unpleasant, so I’ve had to learn how to not do it)
- Hold my hands behind my back and pull them to my front
- Rotate my arm >360°
- Bend my thumb to my forearm
I can dislocate my shoulder to the music of Billy Joel. The Pawnee Journal once called it, "Why would anyone do this?”
Why especially the music of Joel?
It’s a quote from Parks and Recreation.
I see. Ty!
I can flex some muscle in my head that causes a roaring sound in my ears. Not sure what that’s for.
Is it the same muscle that lets you wiggle your ears? Because I can do that, and I get a similar roaring.
My ears don’t seem to move when I do that.
Same here. Someone else in the thread said that’s your tensor tympani muscle.
I get mine to make a clicking sound. Audible to someone else if they stick their ear next to mine.
