Rachelle's Reading List, Monday February 6th, 2012

6 Real People With Mind-Blowing Mutant Superpowers [Cracked] Dontcha wish you had one of these hot superpowers?

Ma Xiangang: Impervious to Electric Shock

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. 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. 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.

Stephen Wiltshire Has a Perfect Visual Memory

Stephen Wiltshire can look at a city once and draw it from memory. 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. Wiltshire is an autistic savant. 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. 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.

Kim Peek Remembers Everything

By the time Kim Peek passed away in 2009, he had perfectly memorized 12,000 books and sports statistics spanning decades. One reason he was able to put away so many books is that he could read them two pages at once, one page with each eye, because apparently that's something you can do. It is claimed Peek had an eidetic memory, or photographic memory, something that people aren't even sure actually exists. Peek's story was also the inspiration for the film Rain Man. However, when someone asked Peek to read a book on gambling (which would have taken him about 30 minutes), he told them that using his powers for gambling would be "unethical." Peek's incredible ability is believed to have come from a congenital birth defect, which resulted in increased memory capacity. Throughout it all, Peek only wanted to share his gift with the world. His father and caretaker never accepted anything in exchange for Peek's appearances, except for the joy Kim felt when meeting other people. When Dustin Hoffman met him to research his role for Rain Man, he was quoted as saying, "I may be the star, but you are the heavens," presumably before Peek told him his future and levitated out of the room.