Real Cases Of People Born With Abilities Scientists Can't Explain

One man claims he hasn't slept since 1962. Another, born blind, trained himself to see with sound by clicking his tongue. And then there's the guy who can fly over a city one time and draw it perfectly from memory, down to the number of windows on a building. These are real cases of people born with abilities scientists can't explain. How'd you sleep last night? How about over the last few weeks? I'm gonna guess you've gotten more sleep than this first guy. Thai Ngoc is a Vietnamese farmer in his 80s who says he hasn't had a full night of sleep since 1962, ever since he got a sudden fever in his 20s. He describes his condition as, quote, frustrating and exasperating. Seeing others sleep, I envy them. Instead of resting, he weeds his fields under moonlight and brews rice wine in the evenings. And even some of that rice wine, well, it only gives him one or two hours of drowsiness. Doctors have checked him out, tested his memory, even ran psychiatric reviews and found nothing wrong. But the insomnia just won't go away. His family thinks his condition might be the result of a kind of PTSD from the war. Despite everything, though, he still works hard. He can carry 50 kilograms of fertilizer for four kilometers, and he's completely fine doing it. Most of us would crash and burn or just straight up die without sleep. But I mean, this guy is still going strong after six decades, only getting maybe an hour or two of actual sleep a night, if that. Daniel Kish has been blind since he was a baby, but that hasn't stopped him from seeing the world in his own way. He uses echolocation like a bat. He clicks his tongue, listens for the echoes and can actually navigate streets, ride a bike, even hike in the wilderness just from the sound bouncing back to him. It sounds impossible, but he's mastered it. And even crazier, he actually trained himself to do this. And now he teaches other blind people how to do it, too, through his nonprofit World Access for the Blind. He's helped hundreds of people learn to essentially see using sound. Now, they did brain scans of Daniel, which show that the part of the brain most people use for sight, well, his actually lights up when he's echolocating, as in the visual cortex is literally processing sound. Scientists studying him said his brain repurposed itself, turning sound into a kind of visual map. Stephen Wiltshire has an incredible photographic memory. So incredible, in fact, the man can draw entire cities just from memory. He got famous young by age eight. He'd already landed a commission to sketch Salisbury Cathedral for former UK Prime Minister Edward Heath. He can fly over a city once, then draw it from memory. Four square miles of London after a helicopter ride, a 19 foot long panorama of 305 square miles of New York after just 20 minutes in the air. When he did Rome, he nailed the exact number of columns in the Pantheon down to each one. Stephen was nonverbal and diagnosed with autism at age three, but his ability to capture landscapes from memory, it's just insane. Instead of being overwhelmed by details, his brain remembers every window, street and building, and then he just puts it on paper. Stephen draws exactly what he sees. No more, no less, neurologist Hugh Kaysen once said. Scientists still can't explain exactly how this works. Natasha Demkina from Syrinsk, Russia has been baffling people ever since she was a kid, claiming she can see inside people's bodies like an x-ray. When she was just 10, she told her mom she could see inside people. By 17, she was on the British TV morning show This Morning, pointing to a presenter's injured ankle and diagnosing it correctly on live TV. That clip went viral and got scientists pretty curious. In 2004, the Discovery Channel put her to the test in New York. Controlled by skeptical researchers from the CSI, not Crime Scene Investigation, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, they asked her to find six specific conditions from six volunteers. Demkina got four right. Some people think she's just picking up subtle visual hints, maybe like scars or breathing patterns, but Natasha still gets attention from parapsychology groups. She insists she sees details at a cellular level. How long have you gone without eating or drinking? Probably not as long as Prahlad Jani, an elderly Indian man who was observed not eating or drinking for 15 straight days. He also claimed at the time that he'd gone 70 years without eating or drinking. I'm gonna call total BS on that, but 15 days is still really impressive. And concerning. In 2003, and again in 2010, doctors locked him in a hospital room under constant CCTV for 15 days. Voluntarily. I said locked. He did this voluntarily. They watched him not eat or drink. And famously, he didn't pee or poop either, which makes sense. After 10 days, Dr. Sadeer Shah said they couldn't find any obvious medical issues. His bladder had urine, but it was absorbed and maybe recycled in the body, the doctor explained. Something that'd normally kill a person, if untreated, by the way. In the 2010 test, Jani lost a few kilos, then surprisingly gained a kilo back without having consumed anything. Some thought that was a little sketchy, but the team said it showed, quote, extreme adaptation to starvation and water restriction. He credited his survival to a hole in his palate through which a goddess supposedly dripped water into him. Jani died in 2020 at age 90, still holding on to his claims. Wim Hof takes ice baths to a whole new level. He'll stand in freezing water for hours or run in the snow with bare skin. He's traveled to the South Pole, run a half marathon above the Arctic Circle in shorts, climb Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts, all also with minimal gear. He explains he's learned to control his body temperature and immune response with breathing techniques and meditation. In one study, researchers injected Hof with E. coli endotoxin, a dose guaranteed to make people fever, ache and nauseous. But he barely showed any symptoms. His inflammatory markers were way lower than anyone else's. Another study measured his B.L.O.O.D adrenaline and immune cell activity when exposed to the cold, and they found his hormone levels spiked and his white cells became more active, meaning he might be able to dial his nervous and immune systems up and down at will. Hof's methods involve cycles of hyperventilation followed by breath holding plus cold exposure, and he claims it rewires how his body responds to stress. Kim Peak was born with no cerebellum and abnormal brain wiring. What he also had was mind-blowing memory. He could read two pages at once, one page per eye. And that alone is incredible, but he would also memorize every single word. Over his lifetime, he memorized more than 12,000 books. Those were phone books, maps, historical dates, music, literally entire encyclopedias. He once told researchers his head felt like a hard drive packed with data. Scientists studied his brain and found parts of his brain were missing or just not functioning properly. Yet his hippocampus, where memories are stored, was twice the normal size. He couldn't tie shoelaces or understand sarcasm, but he could recall the population of any U.S. city or every line from a book he read only one time. Researchers like Dr. Daryl Treford called him one of the most remarkable memory cases ever documented. Kim's memory wasn't photographic, it was more structural. He could group info into categories that allowed lightning-fast recall. He once drew a detailed map of the continental U.S. from memory, including state names, borders, major highways. While no one can fully explain how his brain worked, neuroimaging showed his unusual brain wiring let him store massive amounts of information without the interference that the rest of us experience. He passed away in 2009, but his brain is still being studied. They're hoping that learning more about his brain could help one day repair memory in diseases like Alzheimer's. Akiyana Kramarink was basically born painting. By the time she was six, she was doing portraits that looked like they came from a trained adult. But she'd never had a single lesson. Her most famous piece, Prince of Peace, looks like a renaissance painting, and she made it when she was just eight years old. It's a painting of Jesus, and clearly the detail is nuts, down to the light in his eyes, the texture of the beard. She says she saw him in a vision and just painted what she remembered. Akiyana kept having these vivid dreams of places she said were too beautiful to describe, so she would just wake up and start painting them. By age 10, she was doing massive canvases that looked like they came from someone who'd been studying art for decades. People thought there had to be some kind of trickery going on here. Maybe her parents were helping. But no, videos do show her doing this all herself. A neuroscientist once said her brain is just wired in a way we don't understand. The Utho Lin, a man from Malaysia, became known as the Magnetic Man after he realized that metal objects like spoons, tools, or even big heavy bars would just stick to his skin. Not because he's actually magnetic, scientists tested that, but because his skin has some weirdly high level of friction. He first noticed it when tools started clinging to him during work, and it turned into a full-blown phenomenon where he found out he could carry almost 80 pounds of metal just stuck to his body. And not just his chest, he could make metal stick to his back, arms, his face. He'd been tested by researchers and has done live demonstrations on TV, and no one's found anything fake about it. His skin just has this natural, extra grippy texture that somehow keeps heavy objects from falling off. Derek Amato was just your average guy until he hit his head diving in a shallow pool in 2006. He woke up with a severe headache, but also with an extraordinary new ability. He could suddenly play the piano. He had zero prior lessons or even interest in music, but Derek sat down at a keyboard and started playing Beethoven-level improvisations, and he could hear new, original compositions in his head as well. He'd been accused of faking it, but clinics screened him. Brain scans showed small hippocampal damage from the accident, plus changes in his temporal lobe, the part of the brain linked to hearing and musical interpretation. Since then, Derek's been touring. He's been performing classical and jazz pieces and composing himself. Scientists think he might be a rare example of Acquired Savant Syndrome, when brain injury unlocks unexpected talents. Don't go around hitting your head on walls, though. You may not be so lucky. With all that said, though, I've been your host, James, and I'll catch you, yes, you specifically, in the next video.