Could humans be missing out on an ability they haven't recognized yet or forgotten?

Of course its possible.

But, I would doubt it. People tend to be crazy. They will and have tried to do anything to live longer or what have you. If it turned out to be something as silly as drinking urine, I guarantee that we would know about it already.

Babies have very soft skin, and they are always smearing their snot on their face. Maybe we could harvest and sell baby snot for soft, young looking skin.

Drinking 8oz of urine a day maight make you live 10 times longer but would you really want to spend the next 800 years drinking piss.

lmao… @Lightlyseared If that was true, would need a LOT of whiskey mixed with it.

Indigenous scholar and philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. stated that the primary difference between Western and indigenous environmental speech is that for the former, talking to nature is a metaphor but for the latter it is real communication.

As for whether or not it would be obvious that many miss this part of themselves, I can only point to just how much of a role enculturation and experience play in our cognition. If you’ve never seen a platypus, why would you wonder why there were none around? Would someone with no nose notice their lack of nose if everyone they ever saw was likewise afflicted? Frame of reference is everything, and we live in a culture that encourages selective deafness, particularly to non-humans (and certain humans).

Ability, maybe, but habits definitely. If martial arts or military training are any indication, we certainly can hone what abilities we do have quite impressively. In a sense, that might mean bringing our bodies closer to where they were when we hunted, gathered, any migrated. Counterintuitively, our web usage and literacy might mean our memories aren’t as good as our illiterate ancestors’.

There are mostly useless things we can do too, like slow our heart rate down. You can teach yourself pretty easily if you’re hooked up to a heart rate meter (on a treadmill, for instance). Even this has practical application though (diving?).

Humans can be incredibly dense, so I would not be surprised if we are missing out on a lot of simple things.

@Lightlyseared That beats drinking Coors, though some may argue that they are the same thing.

@jerv It is the same thing just at a different point on it’s time line.

@Lightlyseared I still think that they are at the same point on that timeline :/ Life is too short for bad beer!

If you spent your whole life practising you might learn to move things using the power of thought alone.

There’s increasing evidence that a very low calorie diet later in life will lead to significant gains in life expectancy. I think it’s virtually guaranteed that there are many things we haven’t hit upon yet.

On average, most living things live for about one billion heartbeats. Smaller animals have higher pulse rates and thus generally shorter lifespans. It may just be a coincidence though.

Humans are unique in that we can use science to circumvent some things, so we are somewhat of an exception. Still, notice that in low-tech areas humans still live around 30–40 years, or about as long as it takes for the heart to beat a billion times?

@crazyivan Calorie restriction slows down the metabolism, so I can see that.

Yeah. That tricky metabolism is slowly metabolizing me to death right now…

Are you aware that a popular medication to help women avoid menopause symptoms is made from horse urine?

@YARNLADY, I DID NOT need to know that. @jerv, I’m not sure I needed to know that either, because my heart beats more quickly now because I sometimes stress so much now that my heart bears the brunt. I’m already trying to slow down my metabolism now. I think that I will try harder…

…yeah, I forced myself to develop multiple personalities by staying up later than my body could handle, now I have a strange advanced tolerance for… pretty much any form of stress or insult (I don’t even blink if someone randomly calls me out and calls my mom a whore in the middle of the street full of people).