7. Tetrachromacy
Tetrachromacy is the ability of perceiving colors that come from four different sources of light. An example from the animal world is the zebra fish or Danio rerio – this fish can capture the light from the red, green, blue and ultraviolet channels in the light spectrum.
The true tetrachromacy is very rare in people and only two possible cases have been identified so far since the beginning of history. Normally, people are trichromatic, as they have three types of eye cones and each of them receives light from the red, green and blue areas of the light spectrum.Each cone can distinguish about 100 gradations of color and the brain combines these colors and shades, so that another 1 million of distinctive shades can get to “color” our world.
A true tetracrom with an extra type of cone, between red and green (orange frequency) could, theoretically, distinguish 100 million different colors. Like the super taste, tetrachromacy is considered more common among women than men. Interestingly, the inability to detect colors in men (more than women), can be inherited from tetracrom mothers.
6. Echolocation
Echolocation is what bats and dolphins use to find their way through darkness, under the water. They produce a sound, wait for its echo to return and use it to decipher, depending on direction and duration, the position, size and distance at which an object is situated. Surprisingly, people can use echolocation too. It is accessible to the blind, especially because it takes so long to master and sharpen one’s sensitivity to reflected sounds.
This is a technique that can only be learned, not inherited. In order to navigate using echolocation, one deliberately creates sounds (by hitting with a stick or with his tongue) and thus determine, based on the echo created, where objects are positioned around him. The initiated ones can often say where an object is situated, its size and density. Perhaps the most remarkable and well documented case of an individual who uses echolocation is his everyday life is that of Ben Underwood, USA, who died last year at the age of 17, and had previously lost both eyes due to retinal cancer at the age of three years.
5. Genetic chimerism
In the Iliad, Homer describes the chimera as a fabulous creature, whose external organs came from different animals, a mythological monster whose name also describes its genetic equivalent – chimerism. The genetic chimerism or the tetra gametism, in humans and other animals, happens when two fertilized eggs or two embryos fuse in the first stage of pregnancy. It is basically a condition in which two twins grow embryos in the womb of a mother, but one of them absorbs the other one, resulting in an embryo that contains two types of DNA, in different parts of the body.
In humans, the chimerism is very rare, and there are only 40 confirmed cases in history. In such cases, any DNA tests done on persons related biologically – or even parents-children – may indicate a genetic mismatch between the sides, as if they don’t share the same blood. And that is true, as the blood genetic profile differ from the parent to the child, through a DNA mix.
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