Everyone likes to think that their kid is extraordinary.

Some parents, like those who brought nine-year-old math prodigy Laurent Simmons, and seven-year-old ‘preschool Picasso’ Mikail Akar, into the world, have genuine bragging rights.

While Laurent and Mikail are impressive, there are those out there with unique gifts and talents that seem to prove the existence of superhumans.

Over to The Guardian for three tales of real people with mind-blowing powers.

Scott Flansburg, 55, from Scottsdale, Arizona, is a human calculator.

Pick a date, any day in your life, and I can tell you what day of the week it was. Say a number, any number, and I can multiply it all day. I’m a Guinness World Record holder – the fastest human calculator. I’ve held the title for more than 20 years.

Flansburg was just nine years old when his teacher wrote a list of two-digit numbers on the chalkboard for the class to add together. He did the math pretty quickly and stopped paying attention.

My teacher could tell I wasn’t paying attention as she explained how numbers are carried over, so she decided to make an example of me by picking me out and sending me up to the board.

The standard way to find the total of lots of numbers is to line them up and work downwards right to left, if you can remember. But I assumed that you could do it in the same way you read a sentence – from left to right – and found I could.

That must have been awkward for the teacher.

I’ve had an MRI scan. The doctor said he’d never seen a brain like mine. It’s almost as if it has a different set of wires. There’s a part of the brain called Brodmann area 44, or BA44, and mine is naturally four times the normal size. I’ve met a few other people with similar abilities at competitions: Yusnier Viera, Gerald Newport and Lee Jeonghee.

Here he is doing his thing on Guinness World Records TV back in 2012:

I get a headache just thinking about doing maths.

Derek Paravicini, 40, from London, only needs to hear a piece of music once, and he can play it:

Like most children, I spent my early years surrounded by music. I’ve always been blind. I was born extremely prematurely, so it is through sound that I experience the world. I had a nanny who looked after me and she tried everything she could think of to interest me. Then one day, when I was 18 months old, she had a brainwave, and retrieved a toy organ from the loft that someone had once bought in Woolworths.

Of course, I don’t remember, but what my family found I could do with it was amazing. Without any help from anyone, I could play the music I’d heard, from Cockles and Mussels to the hymns that my family sang in church. Being blind, I’d never even seen anyone play the piano, but I could copy these tunes – and their accompaniments – note for note.

He now does performances where he asks the audience for requests, and if he’s heard the song before, he can play it perfectly.

Channel 4 made a documentary about Paravicini in 2009 which explains his ability. Here’s a snippet from it:

Rebecca Sharrock, 30, from Brisbane, Australia, has no capacity to forget. She remembers everything.

I can remember every minute of every day in the finest of detail, and each time I experience the emotions I felt afresh. That’s what life with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or HSAM, is like. It means, in short, that I have this ability to remember everything, but that also means my brain has no capacity to forget.

At 15, I was diagnosed with autism. When that happened it was no great surprise. A year later I was told I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, but my parents and I knew there was something more. And then we saw a segment on a TV news show about HSAM. My mum recognised it in me instantly. From a very young age I would talk to her about things that had happened years before, right down to the back-and-forth of specific conversations. She always said: “Rebecca, live in the present,” while I’d always focus on the past.

Rebecca is a huge fan of Harry Potter and can remember not only every day of her life, but every word of the novels:

If I could have one superpower, I would want a memory like that. It would have made studying for exams so much easier.

For more tales of superhuman abilities, read the full article.

And if this all made you feel a little too ordinary, don’t stress.

I’m sure you’re special in your own way – just ask your parents.

[source:guardian]