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Have you ever wanted the super sense like say X-ray vision?
Discover that some animals already have super powers of perception, as we
count down the top 10 super senses in the animal kingdom.
You don't have to be a psychic to know what happens when the senses are taken
to the most extreme.
Earth is a planet of extremes, extreme places╔ and extreme animals.
But some animals are more extreme than others.
Join us as we count down to find the most unusual, the most extraordinary,
the most extreme.
About three quarters of our perceptions of the world around us
come through our eyes.
So when the sun goes down and we lose input from our primary sense, our
imagination can run wild.
It takes a super sense to be at home in the darkness and that's why the
tarsier is number 10 in the countdown.
This pocket size primate lives on islands in Southeast Asia and its
amazing eyes give it a truly super sense.
When you want to see in the dark, size is everything, because the bigger your
eyes the more photons of light you can let in.
The tarsier has the biggest eyes in the world in proportion to its body
size.
It's the only animal in the world that literally has eyes bigger than its
stomach.
On the darkest nights when you can't see your hand in front of your face, a
tarsier can pinpoint an insect 6 meters away.
And it can even accurately judge the distance between itself and its prey.
Tarsiers see so well in the dark that they can leap more than 20 times their
body length and land with pinpoint accuracy.
That would be like a human jumping across a tennis court in complete
darkness and landing on a dime.
Of course we'd look a little different if our eyes were proportionally the
same size as the tarsiers.
Imagine how much better we could see in the dark if we had eyes the size of
melons.
Fortunately our normal size eyes do help us see in the dark.
In low light levels our pupils open wide to let in the maximum amount of
light just like a tarsier.
But as any photographer knows big pupils can cause big problems.
We've all seen photographs of people with spooky red eyes.
That's because the camera flash has reflected off the red blood vessels
feeding the back of the eyeball.
So some cameras have a red eye reduction feature where the flash goes
off twice.
The first flash causes the pupils to contract.
The actual photograph is taken on the second flash when the pupils are
small, so there's no red eye reflection in the picture.
There are other ways of fooling your senses.
Here at the Oasis Day Spa in New York City people like Mardi Sykes can step
out of their senses by stepping into a flotation tank.
Hey, Mardi, is this your first time floating with us?
No, I floated with you guys before.
You can lose your sense of sight, sound, touch and even gravity by
stepping into a bath containing 300 kilograms of Epsom salts dissolved in
water heated to skin temperature.
Enjoy your experience.
Thank you.
The super saline solution in the flotation tank has such a high density
that your body floats like a cork on the surface.
Freed from gravity in a soundproof and lightproof tank, it feels like you're
floating in space.
And since your brain no longer has to process input from your senses, it's
free to expand in other areas.
My mind feels like it moves really, really fast when I'm floating in the
tank.
I get all sorts of thoughts like, oh, I forgot to feed the cat today and
then breath, breath, breath that kind of thing.
It could fire from anywhere.
I almost feel like with the loss of some senses like I gain others.
In my head my heartbeat sounds so much louder than it does, that's almost all
that I can hear.
A tarsier wouldn't see the sense in a floatation tank.
With its incredible night vision just turning out the lights isn't going to
stop it from being one jump ahead of the rest of the jungle.
When it comes to the sense of touch, our next contender is a cut above the
rest.
Even though it lives beneath our feet.
Burrowing in to number nine in the countdown is the mole.
In these dark tunnels it has a super sense of touch, thanks to its
incredible nose.
The mole snout is covered in more than 2000 touch receptors that can detect
the tiny vibrations in the soil made by its slimy prey.
Recently scientist discovered that moles actually have erectile noses.
Underneath those touch receptors is an extensive system of blood vessels.
When the mole gets excited, the vessels fill with blood pushing up the
touch receptors to get a better feel of its surroundings.
Human also have erectile tissue in the nose, but it's another organ that has
most of our touch receptors.
The skin is our largest sense organ and is covered with about five million
touch receptors spread all over the body.
Touch can even be therapeutic.
Doctors from the Touch Research Institute in Miami working with
premature babies discovered that infants massaged three times a day
grew 47% faster than those that didn't get touched.
Because we rely on our eyes for most of our sensory input, we often forget
just how important the sense of touch can be.
The touch receptors in our skin can provide information about things like
pressure, heat, cold and pain.
Touch receptors collect information and fire it along nerves up to the
sensory cortex of the brain.
Scientists have been able to map which areas of the brain receive information
from the body.
Because our touch receptors are concentrated in some areas more than
others, different amounts of the brain are devoted to our body's sense of
touch.
We'd look very different if you made a model of our body in proportion to the
amount of brain power dedicated to the touch receptors.
We'd have enormous lips, tongue and fingertips because these are some of
the most touch sensitive parts of the body.
If you think that human looked weird, just wait until you see the mole with
the most extreme sense of touch on the planet.
This is the star nosed mole.
Those strange tentacles on its nose are covered in touch receptors.
It has six times the sensitivity of the entire human hand concentrated
into that tiny pink snout.
There are an incredible 100,000 nerve fibers running into that star shaped
nose, which is why some researchers believe that this mole has the best
sense of touch of any animal on the planet.
So far we've been touched by two really good looking contenders.
But still to come, there's an animal that can see things invisible to the
human eye.
And what animal bathes in mud, but still has better taste than most
humans?
Find out next on The Most Extreme.
The next contender in our next countdown of super senses has
something of an image problem.
Don't go thinking that pigs are just dirty swine.
Their names been dragged through the mud because people see them as
examples of humanities deadliest sins.
Pigs are said to be filthy, lazy and of course greedy.
But don't let their table manners fool you.
Pigs are number eight in the countdown because they have a super sense of
taste.
In one study pigs rejected 171 out of 200 vegetables offered to them because
they're actually extremely fussy eaters.
A pig's tongue is covered with about 20,000 taste buds that can be three
times the number found on a human tongue.
But not all tongues are the same.
It seems that some people really do have better taste than others.
Scientists at Yale University use blue food coloring to help see the number
of taste buds on the tongue.
They discovered that 25% of humans are actually super tasters.
They have tongues packed with more of the pinhead like structures that house
the taste buds.
The difference between a super taster and a normal tongue is obvious.
Being a super taster is like living in a taste world of neon colors instead
of pastel.
While sweets are twice as sweet, some foods like broccoli can taste very
bitter.
That's why super tasters and pigs have a lot in common.
Thanks to their super sense, they're both very fussy eaters.
So next time you meet a child who refuses to eat broccoli, remember that
it's probably just being a little pigheaded.
So far we've tasted with pigs, touched on moles and looked over tarsiers.
But coming up to have a sense of smell as powerful as our next contender, you
need a really big nose.
That's next on The Most Extreme.
In the fight against crime, the next contender in our countdown of super
senses is ahead by a nose.
Dogs are number seven in the countdown because of their extreme sense of
smell.
They're perhaps 100,000 times better at picking up odors than we are.
Compared to dogs, our noses really are pathetic.
That's because when it comes to smell.
In the back of our nose there are about 40 million smell receptors,
covering an area of about 13 square centimeters.
If we wanted to smell things as well as a dog, we need a much bigger nose.
The dog's huge snout has much more room for the receptor cells.
A German shepherd can have 2 billion smell receptors covering an area 10
times larger than our nose.
Dogs are number seven in the countdown because they build up a sense of the
world around them using an olfactory bulb in their brain four times larger
than found in humans.
No wonder we've used their incredible noses to sniff out drugs and smell gas
leaks in pipelines buried far below the ground.
And now there's even a dog that can sniff out cancer.
Doctors usually rely on visual identification of skin cancers.
It's a tricky business and one in five melanomas are not discovered in time
to successfully treat the patient.
But now there's another way. This is George the schnauzer.
He was trained to retrieve melanoma samples hidden in test tubes.
Then it was time to meet real patients at the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.
Using a special examining table, George correctly identified melanomas
on six of seven patients.
In one case George pointed out a mole that had previously been ignored by
three different doctors.
When the lesion was sent to the pathology lab, the results showed that
it was in fact a melanoma.
Doctors believed that if the mole had remained undetected the patient could
have very well died from skin cancer.
George may have a truly miraculous nose.
But there is another animal with such a super sense of smell that it's leapt
in to number six in the countdown.
When humans go looking for love, our senses can sometimes lead us astray.
Some animals are much better at tracking true love.
Our next contender can use a super sense to sniff out a mate 10
kilometers away through the thickest forest.
Coming in at number six in the countdown is the moth.
This fertile female moon moth is looking for love in the forests of the
eastern United States, that's why she's releasing a stream of chemicals
into the night air.
These pheromones are a chemical come hither for any male in the
neighborhood.
A male moth needs a truly super sense to pick up the trail because the
female only produces a fraction of a milligram of pheromone.
By the time her perfume has drifted down wind, the scent concentrations
are incredibly small.
And that's why male moths are number six in the countdown.
Their antennae are covered with up to 40,000 scent detectors cells and these
cells detect only one chemical, the molecules of the female's perfume.
Male moths are so sensitive that in one experiment a caged female
attracted 127 males from up to three kilometers away in just three hours.
It's a happy ending for the moths, but for some humans life is not always a
bed of roses.
Meet Jill Murray.
Thanks to damage caused by a bout of influenza, she completely lost her
sense of smell and that's why she went to the taste and smell clinic in
Washington D.C.
Miss Murray? You wanna come?
For more than 30 years Dr. Robert Henkin has been interviewing patients
with similar problems.
I had a question. Have you ever had a problem with your smells at present
now and how long has it been there?
And we found out that 7% of people had some problem with smell, particularly
loss.
And if we extrapolate that to the population of the United States that
means about 90 million people have this problem.╙
And it's a problem with serious side effects.
Tasting food, smelling flowers, that's a quality of life, enjoyment of life
issue.
But when you talk about not being able to smell smoke or gasoline or fumes
then it's-- that's actually dangerous.
With the help of Dr. Henkin, drug therapy and electro physiological
techniques, people like Jill can once again start waking up to smell the
coffee.
If a male moon moth lost his super sense of smell, he'd become a bachelor
for life.
Love may be blind, but for these animals, love can also really stink.
The moth's super sense of smell is certainly nothing to sniff at, but
it's still only number six in the countdown.
Because coming up, the planes of Africa are buzzing about an animal
that can detect sound waves through its feet.
That's next on The Most Extreme!
It's not surprising that the next contender in the countdown has a super
sense of hearing.
After all the biggest ears in the world belong to, the elephant.
We all know that elephants are noisy. It's hard to miss their trumpets and
growls.
But elephants are number five in the countdown, because they make three
times as many calls as we think.
It's just that we can't hear them.
When we listen to the calls of an elephant, we can only pick up a
limited range of sound frequencies.
Elephants can communicate using low frequency vibrations formed when air
is passed through their nasal cavities.
Sounds below human hearing are called infrasound.
We can only listen to the calls when the recording is played back at 10
times normal speed.
Being able to use infrasound has a huge advantage.
When elephants call using frequencies we can hear, the sound waves are
quickly scattered by anything that gets in the way.
But infra sound waves bend around objects with very little scattering.
That's why in good conditions, elephants using infrasound can be
heard up to 10 kilometers away.
Recent research has also found that elephants can pick up good vibrations
through their feet.
It seems that low frequency rumbling and foot stomping generates seismic
waves in the ground that can travel up to 30 kilometers along the surface of
the earth.
Elephants can sense these vibrations through nerve endings in their sponge
like feet.
Elephants are not the only animals that feel sounds.
Some humans can feel sounds, smell colors or see a taste.
About one in every 25,000 people in the world suffer from some form of
synesthesia, a condition where the senses fuse together into strange
combinations.
Suffers can feel a smell. Others can smell a sound.
Some scientists believe that this condition may be caused by a
malfunction in the processing centers of the brain.
The five senses are jumbled together.
Some musicians have the most common form of synesthesia. They hear musical
notes as colors.
Mozart often described D major as a sunny yellow key. B minor was black
and A was red.
Like Mozart, elephants also have good control over their wind instruments.
And when these guys get together for a concert, it's just a shame that our
humble senses mean that we'll never get to hear the elephant's wonderful
bass line.
Swimming in to number four in the countdown is the dolphin.
Dolphins have a super sense of hearing. They can detect sounds far
beyond our audible range.
Dolphins can make a complex series of clicks and whistles in the air sacs
below the blowhole.
But the vast majority of these sounds are too high pitched for us to hear.
If you swim in front of a dolphin, you can sometimes feel intense vibrations
through your body.
That's because each dolphin is hitting you with high frequency pulses of
ultrasound.
By listening to the echoes of these sound waves, dolphins can build up a
picture of the world around them.
A dolphin uses a large fatty organ in its forehead to transmit a beam of the
ultrasonic pulses much like a submarine use a sonar.
Like sonar pings, the sound waves will bounce back off the diver.
The beauty of ultrasound is that some of the ultrasonic waves can pass right
through the skin.
The beam may then reflect back off the bones or internal organs resulting in
a number of different echoes.
Some scientists believe that these echoes are processed in the dolphin's
brain to form a 3D image of the diver.
We've been able to eavesdrop on the dolphin's ultrasonic communication for
some time now, thanks to specialized auditory equipment.
But recently at the Holosonic Research Labs in Massachusetts one man has
found a way to use ultrasonics to steer sound.
Get ready to throw away your headphones once you hear Joe Pompei's
audio spotlight.
The audio spotlight makes a very directive beam of sound that acts much
like a beam of light.
This device has laser point in the center to allow you to see where the
sound is going.
As I move the spotlight across the camera it gets very loud, and then
quiet again.
And if I go back you only hear the sound when the spotlight is aimed
right at you.
Pompei's disc is actually a high frequency loudspeaker.
It fires carefully selected wavelengths of ultrasound into the air
like a searchlight.
The column of air particles actually works to convert the high frequency
waves into sounds we can hear.
Focus the spotlight on someone's head and you can beam them their own
personal music.
Dolphins have another use for their ultrasonic beams.
Their sonar is capable of detecting fish buried a meter deep in sand.
That's a super sensory ability that not even the most sophisticated human
sonar system can match.
So far we've been counting down the animals that have taken our five
senses to the extreme.
But coming up is a no nonsense predator that uses infrared imaging to
hunt down its prey.
That's next on The Most Extreme.
Our countdown of super senses continues in Egypt, home of one of the
deadliest animals in the world.
It's said music soothes the savage beast, so it's a real shame that our
next contender is deaf.
The snake can't hear sounds in the air. It can only feel vibrations in
the ground.
So when a snake dances it's not moving to the music but following the
movements of the snake charmer's flute.
Being tone deaf is no handicap for snakes.
Who needs ears when you hunt with very different super senses?
In some parts of the U.S you can find a snake that makes its own music.
The rattlesnake only uses its rattle to scare away intruders because when
it's out hunting, it's a silent killer.
It may not be able to hear the mouse, but it can certainly taste its
presence.
That forked tongue is actually tasting the air.
It's transferring tiny particles of mouse scent to a special sense organ
on the roof of its mouth.
The fork design allows the snake to detect which side the smell is
strongest, so it can home in on its prey.
But snakes are number three in the countdown because they also have a
sixth sense.
This green tree python can sense wavelengths of light that are
invisible to us.
The snake is equipped with built-in infrared sensors tucked into pits
along its lips.
These let it see wavelengths of light that we can only feel as heat.
This means the snake can track its prey using the animal's body heat.
It targets using both a visual and thermal image.
How would you like a super sense that lets you see in the dark?
Visit the Counter Spy shop in New York City and you'll find enough high tech
sensory equipment to make a snake jealous.
In these times of heightened security, clients seeking discreet surveillance
can bring the world of James Bond into their own home.
Cameras can be disguised as office or home equipment. How would you like a
video briefcase?
And now you can see like a snake. Night vision goggles capture the same
infrared light seen by snakes.
Hot objects like warm bodies emit more infrared light than cool objects like
buildings or trees.
Having night vision goggles built into their lips, means snakes are well
equipped to hunt both above and below ground.
Snakes may have a truly frightening array of sensory equipments.
But our next contender can see things no one else can.
The next contender can be found in tropical waters around the world.
Meet the mantis shrimp.
It's number two in the countdown because it has the most amazing eyes
on the planet as Dr. Shane Ahyong from the Australian Museum explains.
Vision in the mantis shrimp is extraordinarily developed.
Each eye is constructed in such a way that it has binocular vision.
So if it loses an eye, it can still see with binocular vision.
It's so good that they seem to be able to recognize individuals.
They seem to recognize the person who feeds them and the person who they've
never seen before.
The mantis shrimp is number two in the countdown because its eyes have 16
visual pigments compared to our three.
And that's how it can scan for all colors including ultraviolet and
polarized light invisible to us.
And when it detects something edible, it lines up those scanning lines like
the crosshairs of a gun sight.
So why does the shrimp need such extreme vision?
When we watch the shrimp hunting, our massive brains are processing the
information and building up our mental picture of the scene.
In the mantis shrimp however, all that processing of visual information
occurs inside the eye itself because the shrimp's brain is just too small
to cope.
Imagine if you could see like a mantis shrimp.
Today you don't need eye drops to see the unbelievable.
All it takes is a visit to Guy Coggins at San Francisco's Aura Imaging
Systems.
Guy has developed an optical electrical system that he claims lets
you see your own aura, the radiance from the energy field that supposedly
emanates from all living things.
They'll show you the center box which actually measures the electrical field
from many different acupuncture points simultaneously plus temperature and
few other things.
So you can just go ahead and place your hand in the box and these colors
will be reflected around you as light and color.
In just a second you sort of stabilize and you've got your greens here.
Your green seemed to be your resonant color.
And green would be the color that you would be almost all the time unless
you went through some tremendous change.
Green is persistence, self assertion, self esteem, healing, stick to it is
as hard working.
And you have some yellow coming up here for intellectual capacity.
And you got the blue on this side which is clear communication.
And that part of you which is being expressed at this point.
Your red people tend to be incredibly active sports minded.
Your yellower people tend to be a little bit more intellectual.
Green is where the hard working, the pillars of society.
Your blue regions, they are little bit more etherical.
The purples tend to be sort of out on the edge, a little spacey.
Comet, come here.
Okay, now we're going to take Comets aura photo.
So just put Comet over there and have his paws on the special doggy sensor
and we'll take his picture in just a second.
Okay. Comet, we'll take your picture, hold it, hold it.
Okay. Here's Comet's photo, okay.
Now that is a laidback dog, which is great.
You don't see many blues and greens and whites.
Who knows if we had eyes like the mantis shrimp maybe we could all see
our auras.
But not even the mantis shrimp could see the solution of our final puzzle.
Just what is the animal with the most extreme senses in the countdown?
We've seen the nine contenders.
They are the best of the best.
Only one animal is a more extreme super sensing machine.
It's number one and it's coming up next on The Most Extreme.
About 70% of our planet is covered in water.
This is home to the animal with the most extreme senses in the countdown.
To find food in this vast expanse of ocean, you need a super set of senses
especially if you're the most feared killer in the sea.
Launching in to number one in the countdown is the shark.
The shark may be the perfect killer, but what's the use of being armed with
the teeth if you can't locate your prey?
That's why the shark has such an array of super senses.
Imagine if we had the senses of a shark, we'd have incredible hearing.
How would you like to be able to hear your food cooking 1500 meters away?
Your super sense of smell will let you track your food from nearly a
kilometer.
Your eyes would be ten times more sensitive to light and you would have
an unbelievably keen sense of touch.
From a distance of three meters, you'd be able to detect enough vibrations to
build up a three dimensional picture of your lunch.
Sharks have taken senses we know so well to the extreme.
But that's not enough to make them number one in the countdown.
After all lots of animals have extraordinary senses of smell and
sight.
Sharks are special because they have a sixth sense.
They can detect the tiny electrical fields generated by all living
creatures every time they move a muscle.
Sharks are so sensitive they can detect half a billionth of a volt.
That's like detecting the electricity created by a flashlight battery from a
distance of 1500 kilometers.
The sixth sense of the shark is thanks to a network of tiny volt meters
tucked into pits around its mouth.
These cells give the shark the ability to locate prey in complete darkness or
even when it's buried under sand.
But could it be that sharks are not the only one's born with a sixth
sense?
Sonya Fitzpatrick seems to have one.
She says she communicates with animals using the energy fields that surround
every creature.
There we go sweetheart.
She's traveled to Florida's Gatorland because Tim Williams contacted the pet
psychic to help solve the mystery.
This is my favorite alligator in the whole world.
Come here, Pop. Here he comes. That's my boy.╙
He's beautiful.
Isn't he wonderful?
The alligator called Pop used to be Tim's friend, but recently some things
happened to their relationship.
Oh, he likes you a lot. You're a good old chap he's telling me. He says
you're a good chap.
He says you're always happy, but he says you've been a bit sad recently.
I just went through a breakup in my relationship.
He said you still get sadness now.
Well, I do now because he doesn't come over and work.
When did you give him some sort of food that you're not giving him so
often now?
I used to feed him a lot of red meat, then we went to chickens.
Why have you cut back red meat out he wants to know.
Just the availability.
He is annoyed with you for that and he wants more red meat.
And he says he'll be working again like crazy if you give him plenty of
red meat.
Tim tried the new diet and only four days later Pop was back to his old
self.
But thanks to Sonya, things have changed between Tim and Pop.
The thing that really got me, I went through some personal family situation
couple of years ago and I used to come out here and sit on the bank and talk
to Pop.
I think he was the only one that understood me.
As she goes, he-- he's telling me there was some sadness and some things
in your life.
I'm going whoa, wait a minute, this is, this is going a little too far.
Plus I asked Pop not to tell anybody.
So now I know I can't trust him anymore.
Perhaps only a shark could understand how a human sixth sense could work.
Could it be that this extraordinary predator is so sensitive that it can
detect more than just the electrical impulses generated every time we move
a muscle?
Our very thoughts are no more than electrochemical impulses.
Perhaps that's why this shark knows that the diver means it no harm and
why it doesn't bite the hand that feeds it.
After all, the shark possesses so many extraordinary senses that it's almost
impossible for us to imagine how it perceives the world.
Which is why there can be no doubt that when it comes to super senses,
the shark really is The Most Extreme.