Real People With Mind-Blowing Mutant Superpowers
If the insane, explosive popularity if superhero movies is any indication, we are fascinated by people who are insanely better than us at any given thing. Probably because, in real life, we're all such a bunch of incompetent boobs that we've been enslaved by blue paint, flashing lights and crying French babies.
But it turns out, superpowers are real. And not just the secret ones that everyone has, or even the ones everyone thinks they have -- this Cracked Classic is about a group of people that, in a sane world, would already have multi-colored leather jumpsuits, delightfully mismatched personality traits and a skyscraper shaped like whatever they decide to call themselves.
We've all dreamed of having superpowers at some point (today), but the majority of us have to accept the sobering reality that preternatural abilities simply aren't possible. That is, except for some rare cases of real, actual people with bona fide powers that defy explanation (and in some cases practical application).
For instance ...
#1. Ma Xiangang Is Impervious to Electric Shock
Ma Xiangang is a man capable of something not many others are or would have a practical reason to be -- he can touch live wires filled with scrotum-popcorning electricity and feel no pain whatsoever.
As with most superpower discoveries, Xiangang found his by acting like a braying jackass. One day when his television quit working, he went to go monkey with the fuse box to try to get it to come back on, accidentally touching a live wire in the process. Normally this story would end with people standing around a pine box and telling their favorite Ma Xiangang stories, but instead of white hot electric death, Xiangang felt nothing at all. Rather than praise his good fortune and call an electrician, he decided to touch the wires again. You know, just to check.
Even more amazing is that even when touching live wires with hundreds of volts coursing through them (enough to put a horse on its ass), he feels no pain at all. In fact, Xiangang claims it makes him feel energetic, which is almost certainly him just screwing with us. We're also pretty sure he's lying when he claims he can givediathermic massages (deep tissue massages done with an electromagnet) using only his hands.
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So What's Going on Here?
Everybody's reaction to electricity is a little different; it's influenced by everything from how thick you are, to how moist your skin is, to other changes in body chemistry. Xiangang appears to be an outlier on the high end of the scale. According to testing, he has a resistance seven to eight times greater than the average human being, which grants him the ability to handle live wires without safety equipment, though, again, it behooves us to ask why in the hell he'd want to.
And yes, there are supposedly more people out there with abilities similar to Xiangang's. If you watch the first minute or so of this video, you'll see Jose Ayala pass electricity through his body and use it to burn paper. Again, we question the purpose or application of such abilities, and we're curious how many times he's accidentally incinerated his mail because he was holding it when he turned on his porch light.
#2. Dean Karnazes Can Run Forever
Dean Karnazes is an American long-distance runner capable of inhuman feats of endurance, such running 50 marathons in each of the 50 states ... in 50 consecutive days. Which he totally goddamned did. He's run a marathon on every continent twice over and run 350 miles nonstop over three sleepless nights.
Back in 2007, Dean attempted to run from New York City to San Francisco, but had to stop in St. Louis, ravaged by disappointment. That is to say, this man has such a level of endurance that running 1,000 miles is disappointing to him. Karnazes has such an impressive list of achievements that when Time magazine listed him as one of their 100 most influential people of 2007, stopping his cross-continental run short was pretty much the only negative thing they could come up with. Then Karnazes completed the very same run in 2010 in 75 days and shut Time right the hell up.
Somehow he's managed to stop running long enough to write three books. That, or he hangs a typewriter from his neck and smacks the keys with his chin midstride.
So What's Going on Here?
Everything about Karnazes' body makes him a finely tuned running machine. A medical study was performed on him after he completed his 50-state marathonapalooza. First, they measured his CPK number, which shows the amount of damage your muscles sustain from exercise. So for instance, a normal runner's CPK would be through the roof after a marathon -- around 2,400. Karnazes' was found to be at 447 ... after 25 consecutive marathons.
The study found that his muscles not only damage much less with exercise than the normal person's, they actually get used to continuous exercise and stop being damaged altogether, sort of like if Wolverine were a perpetual motion machine.
The study also found that he has more blood in his circulatory system than the average person, which allows him to stay more hydrated for longer and may or may not indicate that he is a day-walking (day-running?) vampire. But finally (and most impressively), they concluded that as long as he can keep himself properly hydrated and fed, he could potentially run at a seven- to 10-minute-mile pace forever.
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#3. Stephen Wiltshire Has a Perfect Visual Memory
Stephen Wiltshire can look at a city once and draw it from memory. So can we, big deal. The thing is, Wiltshire's drawing will actually look like the city, with every single building in its exact place and perfectly sized in proportion to real life. Buildings, windows, arches, doorways -- almost every detail is precisely correct in size and placement. Once again, he does this from memory. We, on the other hand, searched the Internet Movie Database five times in one hour because we kept forgetting Ray Winstone's name.
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Wiltshire has been drawing his entire life. His first words were "paper" and "pen" (which really throws his folks' parenting skills into question, if you think about it), and he's been traveling the world for 25 years on a continuing quest to draw different cities and landmarks, like if Caine fromKung Fu and Bob Ross collided in a time tunnel.
For instance, Wiltshire took a brief helicopter ride around New York City and produced this drawing afterward, purely from memory:
And he doesn't just remember these landscapes long enough to do the drawing. He retainsthem, possibly forever.
So What's Going on Here?
Wiltshire is an autistic savant (yes, like Rain Man). Autism hinders certain parts of the brain from communicating with one another, which can lead to difficulties with learning and processing information. But, this lack of communication between parts of the brain actually helps give Wiltshire his ability. It'd be sort of like if you had some kind of defect in the muscles of your arm that allowed it to only perform a perfect kung fu chop to the neck. It'd suck for everyday tasks like eating or working, but over the course of your life you'd get so good at kung fu neck chops that you could behead a man.
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So take Wiltshire's helicopter ride -- most of us would be distracted by things like the noise of the chopper, or by thoughts such as "Why are these buildings spaced like that?" or "Is that a body in the East River?" But Wiltshire's kung-fu-chop brain can focus like a microscope on just the details, carefully recording them all at the expense of all other normal thought. Because of this, he is not only able to notice relationships and properties of the buildings, but can remember them exactly and use them later in his drawings.
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