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Question Heightened senses

4 years 2 weeks ago #1 by Cryptic
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    • I'm trying to figure out how to write a character who's senses are kicked up a few notches. And I'm ending up not liking how it's coming out. We're not talking 'hear the entire city' levels, but more that 'whispered conversation across the room can sound like it's right next to you'.
    I am a caffeine heathen; I prefer the waters of the mountain over the juice of the bean. Keep the Dews coming and no one will be hurt.
    4 years 2 weeks ago #2 by Bek D Corbin
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    • I can sum up this character in Four Words: "TURN DOWN THE VOLUME!'
    4 years 2 weeks ago #3 by Softdreams
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    • As a person whose sense of hearing gets overloaded VERY easily, I second what Bek just said.
    4 years 2 weeks ago #4 by Valentine
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    • While a few characters have been mentioned with heightened senses, one had to wear a mask and avoid strong odors, Aquerna has all of her senses mildly increased. You might want to check her stories, and the Ayla stories she is in.
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    4 years 2 weeks ago #5 by null0trooper
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    • Kodiak once mentioned that he never had to guess what was on the menu in the Crystal Hall, he could identify the dishes by scent, if he chose to, from his dorm room, on the 8th floor of Melville, with the windows closed.
    Forum-posted ideas are freely adoptable.

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    4 years 2 weeks ago #6 by Sir Lee
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    • Animal-level heightened senses are no problem -- I mean, dogs deal with their better hearing and ridiculously-better sense of smell, don't they? Eagles deal with their heightened acuity, owls and bats deal with their night vision, snakes deal with their thermal sense, sharks deal with their electromagnetic sense. When you go way above that into Daredevil-level and above is where you have to start worrying about the implications.
    Don't call me "Shirley." You will surely make me surly.
    4 years 1 week ago #7 by Cryptic
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    • Thanks guys, I'm redoing the scenes I was having issues with, taking them from Smallville power eruptions to 'Who turned up the radio?'
    I am a caffeine heathen; I prefer the waters of the mountain over the juice of the bean. Keep the Dews coming and no one will be hurt.
    4 years 1 week ago - 4 years 1 week ago #8 by Commander_Knight35
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    • Imagine if somebody used a flashbang grenade on someone with heightened senses. Oof.
    Last Edit: 4 years 1 week ago by Commander_Knight35.
    4 years 1 week ago #9 by Bek D Corbin
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    • Heck, I've always wondered why no one ever used pepper spray on Wolverine
    4 years 1 week ago - 4 years 1 week ago #10 by Sir Lee
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    • Wolverine is a Regen 6+ with Plot Immunity to allergic reactions, regen cancer, autoimmune diseases and such. Pepper spray would work... for about half a second, before his body got rid of the irritants.
    Don't call me "Shirley." You will surely make me surly.
    Last Edit: 4 years 1 week ago by Sir Lee.
    4 years 1 week ago #11 by null0trooper
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    • Getting close enough to use the pepper spray without getting sliced and diced might also be a concern.
    Forum-posted ideas are freely adoptable.

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    4 years 1 week ago - 4 years 1 week ago #12 by Kristin Darken
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    • Just a point of biology / perceptual science... human hearing is adaptive. Its why you're capable of hearing loud sounds at a concert... and soft sounds on a quiet night or in an isolation chamber. And yet, a hand clap or bell ring that is painfully loud on that quiet night will barely register above 'background' at the concert. That's purely biology. From the perceptual side of things, there are lots of aspects of sound that our brain discards as unnecessary data... or processes 'behind the scenes' for spatial positioning, awareness, etc... but that doesn't come out in our conscious listening.

    Someone with enhanced hearing could evolve in either one (or both) of these ways. Being able to hear really quiet things could be a matter of stepping up that normal adaptive ability, biologically (even just having regen or stronger tissue would do this to some extent... because your ear would not undergo the strain and damage that a regular human's ear would, and thus would be able to stay at 'quiet mode' without damage and would be able to sustain much louder concussive forces at 'loud'. And that's without even adding more 'range' to the ends of the normal adaptation... which could conceivably happen.

    From the perceptual / brain processing of senses side of things, the brain could simply be more capable of mapping useful sound and 'removing' unnecessary 'noise' from conscious awareness in the same way it already removes any bounced sound that comes in within 150 msec of that same sound (ie you only hear the first, direct line pressure wave from a sound source... the slightly slower arriving version that got to you after bouncing off the table, the wall, the ceiling, or went past you and returned from the wall behind you... are used for processing where the sound came from originally and what the 'room' looks like around you... but you don't 'hear' it).

    A mutant hearing whispers from across a busy room has to be a mix of these things. Because you're hearing quieter sounds while the ear should otherwise be adapted to the louder background of the room... but at the same time, you're hearing just what you're focused on... not the room AND the whisper.

    Other evolutions/adaptation would be a more specific departure from human hearing - changing the shape of the ear to be a better receptor, etc.
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    Last Edit: 4 years 1 week ago by Kristin Darken.
    4 years 1 week ago #13 by Sir Lee
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    • There might be some physical limitations here. Take hearing, for instance. Not in the bio sciences, but if I remember my high school bio and pop-science articles well, there's a muscle in the ear that "holds in place" the little bones in the middle ear in order to dampen loud noises. So when you are in a rock concert (yes, I'm from the rock era; yes, I'm getting old; can we move on?) the muscle is at max tension, and the more subtle sounds like a pin dropping simply don't make it through to the inner ear. If we are talking about a wider adaptative range, this limitation would still apply.

    OTOH, if a character is super-tough, maybe they don't *have* to resort to these adaptative range things at all -- or not for ordinary things. Maybe Clark Kent's middle-ear muscle stays fully relaxed for anything short of a jet engine at hair-clipping range, because ordinary levels of noise like, say, construction sites won't be able to *hurt* his inner-ear cells (even tough they are also super-sensitive), so he can still discern that pin drop amid your average New York Metropolis thoroughfare.
    Don't call me "Shirley." You will surely make me surly.
    4 years 1 day ago #14 by Cryptic
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    • Figured out most of the ranges of my character's senses. I found a fan fic that quantified Slayer sight and hearing, and I appropriated that as it was what I was after. Low end of the hearing is cat range (what eer that means) upper is dog range. sight is 20/10 and her eyes dilate 20% more in the dark, and a little into the uv/ir ranges.
    I am a caffeine heathen; I prefer the waters of the mountain over the juice of the bean. Keep the Dews coming and no one will be hurt.
    4 years 17 hours ago #15 by Sir Lee
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    • OK. You might be interested in a couple ideas:
    1. Apparently a small percentage of people have not three kinds of cone cells in the eye, but four (I think the fourth kind is a slight variant of one of the other three), which gives them finer color discrimination. Not a huge difference, but supposedly measurable. You might posit that your character is also a tetrachrom (or even a pentachrom), but the altered cone cells have a sensitivity range going somewhat beyond regular human range.
    2. Dark adaptation comes in two parts. The more obvious one is the pupil dilating to let more light in, which is pretty much instantaneous. The other part, is an increase in the production of a chemical in the retina, which increases sensitivity. Thing is, it takes a while for the amount of this substance to catch on with the current darkness level; that's why driving at twilight is *more* dangerous than driving at night -- the light is dimming fast, faster than your eye can adapt.Also, even a quick exposition to shorter-wavelength light destroys this chemical rapidly; that's why astronomy equipment use red lights in their instruments (ans astronomy software has a "night mode" showing only red-on-black), in order not to ruin the user's night vision. Maximum night vision can take as much as two hours to be established. You might want your character to have improvements in this.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye)#Dark_adaptation
    3. Many animals (like cats and dogs) have another adaptation to low light: a reflecting layer (tapetum lucidum right behind the light-sensitive cells in the eye (that's what gives the "cat's eye" effect). It works because not all photons will be caught by the retinal cells in the way in; reflecting them back gives the retina a "second chance" to catch those photons. However, there's a tradeoff: focus is not as sharp, because of the slight difference in path length between direct hits and reflected hits. You might or might not want to give your character a tapetum lucidum; besides the focus tradeoff, it would make her eyes look more inhuman.
    Don't call me "Shirley." You will surely make me surly.
    3 years 11 months ago #16 by Cryptic
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    • Ok, might save option 3 for another character, maybe toss some on 1 into the mix to explain things away. I'm still not sure how much techno babble from her testing I want to add.
    I am a caffeine heathen; I prefer the waters of the mountain over the juice of the bean. Keep the Dews coming and no one will be hurt.
    3 years 11 months ago - 3 years 11 months ago #17 by Mister D
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    • Another thought that occurred to me.

    The main reason that Superman has the heightened senses but doesn't suffer from hearing loss ( for example ) is that he has way-more-than-baseline-human toughness.

    His hearing won't be damaged by going to LOUD gigs. :D

    This extension of his senses would also mean that his brain also has to have more processing power applied to the sensory part of the brain.

    This crops up in baseline humans. Look at the MRI scans of taxi drivers, and how the parts of the cerebral cortex related to spatial awareness is more developed than the average person.

    This crops up in every field of perception. Musicians and hearing. Dancers/martial-artists and body awareness. Artists and visual perception.

    If this is for baseline humans, then how much more so for Exemplars.

    There's a great example of this in Loophole, and how her brain adapts to the increase in her sense of smell. :D
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    Last Edit: 3 years 11 months ago by Mister D. Reason: L'Esprit D'Escalier.
    3 years 11 months ago #18 by Cryptic
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    • Mister D wrote: Another thought that occurred to me.

    The main reason that Superman has the heightened senses but doesn't suffer from hearing loss ( for example ) is that he has way-more-than-baseline-human toughness.

    His hearing won't be damaged by going to LOUD gigs. :D

    This extension of his senses would also mean that his brain also has to have more processing power applied to the sensory part of the brain.

    This crops up in baseline humans. Look at the MRI scans of taxi drivers, and how the parts of the cerebral cortex related to spatial awareness is more developed than the average person.

    This crops up in every field of perception. Musicians and hearing. Dancers/martial-artists and body awareness. Artists and visual perception.

    If this is for baseline humans, then how much more so for Exemplars.

    There's a great example of this in Loophole, and how her brain adapts to the increase in her sense of smell. :D


    As she's a mixed energizer, this may end up a factor.
    I am a caffeine heathen; I prefer the waters of the mountain over the juice of the bean. Keep the Dews coming and no one will be hurt.
    3 years 11 months ago #19 by Kristin Darken
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    • Mister D wrote: This crops up in every field of perception.


    It does. Perceptual psychology (I'm most studied/experienced with psychoacoustics) is a really interesting area of study. I took a couple courses in 'sensation and perception' and 'psychoacoustics' as cross-discipline topics while in grad school. Very useful for anyone engaged in the arts and probably valuable for authors as well.
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