Apparently “kids these days” are using ring tones that adults generally can’t hear while in school for their text messaging alerts.

Which, naturally, I care not a whit about.

I do find the biology aspect rather interesting though, and I’m not alone. There’s a blogger that has put up a series of test audio files for you to check your own hearing.

With headphones on, AIWA brand, I was able to hear up to 22,000 Hz. I picked that particular set of headphones out because they had such a wide range of frequency, and since I listen to a fair amount of classical music, I figured that was a pretty important thing to have.

He has now put up test files that go to 25,000 Hz so I’ll see if I can pick that up on my headphones later.

Given my age (26) I suppose I should be thankful that I can pick up anything above 16,000 Hz.

I have no idea why I can hear such high pitches noises. I often pick up on squeals from CRT monitors that nobody else in my office can detect. My ears are sensitive enough that when it happens I’ve found it is proportional to the amount of white on the screen. I can actually resize a big white window and hear the differences. Go figure.

If a television is on, but totally black, and the room is quiet, I’ll hear it.

This is probably related to my ability to see things too.

I have horrible vision. I’m 20/50 in my bad eye even with corrective lenses on. My left eye does not function in accordance with my right eye naturally, and because they’re so far out of whack my depth perception is akin to somebody watching a scene on the television screen. This makes doing simple things like catching a ball rather difficult. The portions of my brain that would naturally figure out how far away something is are useless, and it becomes a higher brain function for me.

It made gauging distances from a stop sign rather difficult when learning to drive. I’ve compensated, but I’m nearly constantly reminded that I have that difficulty. Just watch me try and parallel park.

Still, as bad as my eyes are I can occasionally catch a bullet flying. It only happens with .45 ACP — a big slow moving slug. If the light is right I can sometimes spot the slug moving away from me after I fire.

The other odd one, and I’m really surprised I don’t see more people notice this, is a computer monitor set to refresh at a rate of 60 Hz. I can see it blink! It makes me sick to my stomach in short order. So quick that as soon as I spot it I immediately fix it, even if I’m only going to be working on the machine for a matter of minutes.

You see, in the USA our AC electrical currents “pulse” at a rate of 60 Hz. When you have fluorescent lighting around you, and your monitor refreshes at the same rate, there’s a period where the light and monitor aren’t both emitting the same level of light.

I see a monitor that’s changing brightness with a regular rhythm on me. Nobody else in any of the offices I’ve worked in have noticed this. Thankfully they’re also entirely unable to tell the difference between a monitor at 60 Hz and 75 Hz so it doesn’t bother them when I immediately change their refresh rate.

Makes you wonder why, doesn’t it?

An IQ test I took about 9 years ago gave a couple if different metrics. It was heavily biased toward people with a good comand of the English language and it was also scoring you based on speed. Apparently my ability to think quick is twice that of the average person according to said test. My ability to swallow a complex problem is far less above normal, but apparently my brain can do a bunch of simple tasks twice as fast as average.

I’m basically a RISC brainded human being it seems.

You think this is all related? Seems to make sense to me.

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