Welcome to Digest Super Week!

Think of super powers and most of us are influenced by the comic book super-heroes - the strength and flight of Superman or the web-slinging skills of Peter Parker. But super powers don't exist only in fiction. Back in reality, there are people with super abilities who walk among us, albeit that their skills tend to be more subtle than in the comics. What's more, increasingly these individuals are catching the interest of psychologists. Each day this week, we'll be posting a contribution from a person with a super ability or a researcher investigating an ability. The Digest's Super Week accompanies this month's "Super!" special issue of The Psychologist. First up, welcome to Marc Umile - a calendar calculator who, with astonishing speed, is able to name the day of the week for any given date. Tomorrow we'll meet a super-recogniser. I Am a Calendar Calculator I have always possessed the gift of eidetic memory for recalling huge amounts of information and a knack for finding structured patterns in seemingly chaotic data.  But such abilities have been instrumental in helping me to discover yet another talent I never knew I had until about three years ago – calendar calculating. Not too many people on the globe can take any date, regardless of how far back in the past or in the future the date is, and immediately know what day of the week the particular date fell on or would fall on.  But through an extensive period of experimentation, I had soon discovere...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs