What do you see that (most) other people don't see?

I used to be able to identify many fragrances. Probably close to 50. I was a fragrance buyer at Bloomingdale’s at the time. I can’t do it anymore. Maybe just 20 now. I’ve forgotten some of them, and new fragrances are on the market.

I notice poorly sewn garments. Not just because I worked in retail, but because my mom always noticed. So many off-the-rack, moderately priced, garments pull badly and don’t lay flat, because of how they are sewn. Especially trousers; my mom fixated on trousers. Much of the public doesn’t care. Many people wear I’ll fitting garments even when they are seen well. They wear things too tight, or made for a different body type.

I notice when something is off by very little in measurement. If a picture is supposed to be centered on a wall and it is one centimeter off I can notice it.

I see other people’s thyroid lump in their throat. A lot of people see this. My girlfriend is a news anchor and people write in telling her to get her thyroid checked. Also the reality show husband on Flip or Flop followed the advice of a viewer and had his thyroid checked and it was cancer. I don’t think he was a thyroid patient at the time, it was out of left field for him I think.

My mom, husband, and sister, notice nose jobs, I’m usually oblivious. I do notice face lift scars. Probably, a lot of people notice those things too.

I notice women stuffed into undergarments like they are sausages. On TV some of them can barely sit down. It reminds me of the I Love Lucy episode where she couldn’t sit her dress was so tight.

I notice fake hair.

Technical problems with things. I do it all day at work so it follows me wherever I go. My wife says she is tired of it, yet thankful lol.

I really don’t know what I can see, but sometimes people are surprised that I can see things that many fail to see, mostly related to human nature. I am told that I’m perceptive and have good observation skill. I don’t know if I should take it seriously, most of the time I just say what I see.

The big picture and any undercurrents that are in a situation.

The ability came from being a military brat who moved every couple of years. As a child, being different is deadly. I had to assess and understand a new place and situation quickly and accurately so that I could take on protective coloration.

In later life, it helped me in my career as a marketing and management consultant. But it is not something that I would have chosen if given a vote.

Cement splices in films. Just a few MM of a single frame on 35MM print but I can spot them ever single time and they drive me fucking nuts since I would get a tongue lashing for not removing them when I would build prints.

Normal splices that weren’t properly made. Hard to describe so I will fire up Photoshop. If you don’t stagger the tape the splice goes through the gate with a thud that is annoying as hell.

I could go on and on.

A few days into being trained to be a projectionist I was asked if I liked going to the theater to watch movies and I said “not really” and he said “perfect”. He said from here on out I would only be able to watch the film. The actual film. He was totally right. I can’t enjoy projected movies anymore.

Measurements and object relationships. It started long before I was a graphic designer too.

As a kid, I always had items on a shelf (for example) lined up perfectly in a grid. I liked the order of it all.

At the vocational high school I went to, my freshman drafting teacher made us draw horizontal (then vertical), parallel lines exactly 1” apart (then ½”, 3/8”, and so on) — first by pre-measuring, then by eye, then in the dark. We did this over and over again for days on end. All semester.

Later, I was an architectural model builder. Then an archival picture framer. Then an illustrator, graphic designer, and web designer.

Lots of space layout and lots of measurements.

Now, as a design teacher I drive my students nuts with, “that’s off by 1/8 of an inch” from ten feet away.

Shit (literally and figuratively) on the ground.

@cookieman That’s so cool.

I can see the underlying reasons why people ask questions or behave in various ways. I can hear the mistakes in most trumpet music, and I can also tell how musicians like Miles Davis turn mistakes into not-mistakes. I can also hear when he is tired. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing that.

I can usually tell the ingredients in a dish just by tasting it.

Too many things to list. Often things that normal people cannot see even when pointed out.

Then again, I think you’ve seen me around enough over the years to have at least some idea of how I see things normal people don’t/can’t perceive.

I see spelling, punctuation, word usage errors – and occasional brilliance – in nothing flat. I recognize ambiguity in sentence structure beyond the merely playful and into the downright “WTF did they really mean by that?”

I recognize (surely to a far lower degree than either @jerv or @LuckyGuy) mechanical errors, inconsistencies and mal-formations. (I have often laughed and commented on the symbolic representation of three interlocked gear wheels – that is, each interlocked to the other two – as a physical representation of gears that will never turn, but the symbol is supposed to represent some kind of “mechanical help” avatar or icon. @jerv will get it.)

Because of recent training in Environment, Health and Safety issues (and an unwanted “promotion” to that position in my firm), I notice health and safety issues from a mile away, and when I hear reports of “accidents and incidents” my mind is now tuned to ask questions about “missing information”: when did it happen? what happened just before and just afterward? what were the precursors? who saw it? what else was happening at the time? etc. And always “What are you not telling me?” (but I don’t usually ask that one).

Finally, I am often thrown completely out of most television and movie dramas that attempt to show, for example, someone (or a team of crackerjack agents, for example) who is able to drive across a medium-sized city in five minutes to foil a kidnapping, murder or other awful crime “in the nick of time”. Do any of these writers ever actually drive a car, I wonder?

Oh, and I see jokes in everything. Everything, always. The surprising thing to me is that I have learned not to say them all out loud as soon as I notice them. Sometimes that’s completely inappropriate.

dead people

Modern materials used in historical themed film. It goes beyond “spot the zipper” (which is a great drinking game, by the way).

I can become distracted by noticing, say, that a burning doll’s hair is made of acrylic or nylon threads instead of real hair, based on how the fiber melts.

Inaccurate historical garments bug me way more than is strictly reasonable. Yards and yards of sofa fabric in The Tudors, leather bikinis in King Arthur, woad and kilts and claymores all together in Braveheart….

My husband notices when a TV show or movie is edited poorly. He’ll notice a character had their sweater buttoned with the last two open, and one second later the last three are unbuttoned. He spots all sorts of inconsistencies.

Sexual images in subliminal advertising.
It’s much more prevalent than you might expect.

I often see what dogs are trying to say. Still not nearly often enough.

I can predict what people are going to say. Not all the time but if they are describing something and get stuck on a word, I will supply the word. It freaks people out – ‘how did you know I was going to say that?’ To me it’s obvious.

I have a horrible keen sense of smell. Excruciatingly so because I am doomed to ride public transport. When I walk home at dinner time, I can tell what two of my neighbours are making for dinner. (This past Friday, one of them was making risgrøt, the other hadn’t started dinner yet.) These are houses I walk by, not apartments in my building. It makes me a prized and valuable member of staff at daycare because I’m usually the first to smell the diaper jobs, and we have a saying, The Finder is the Winner.

The other thing that bothers me that I notice is science fails in movies. The whole concept of that storm on Mars had me yelling at the screen,... on the inside. They kept showing storms outside the window as well. Why oh why did they get that so wrong when they had such an excellent, more plausible option to cause an emergency evacuation? And don’t get me started on the movie ‘Gravity’. If you’re going to use that as your title, the least you could do was honour the actual idea of Newton’s laws. GAH! There is real danger in space. You don’t have to break known laws of the Universe to create dangers. Often times, learning about what can really go wrong is much more exciting. Hollywood is lazy and thinks we’re all dumb. But to be honest, I also do it with animated movies, like in Wall-E when the space ship ‘tilts’ and everyone slides down, as if they are on a boat in the ocean. GRRRR!!!! It was so enjoyable up to that point. My son has a saying now when we are watching a cartoon and I complain about the science being wrong. It started when Sponge Bob’s house burned down. I couldn’t hold it in, so he said to me, ‘Mom, he’s a talking sponge.’ Now, that’s his reply every time I point out science fails.

Details. It’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I notice the tiniest of details in nature that others often miss. Many see a rose and I revel in the intricate structure of the petals of the flower. Others will see a prairie and I will see the spider web covered with glistening droplets of dew in the morning sun.

The curse is when most will see a charming old grandpa and I am being grossed out by eyebrows and ear hair 3” long.

I watch people’s movements. I’m fully aware of my surroundings and pay close attention to other’s emotions. From the first frustrated exhaling of air I begin watching them. I know what my weapons of choice will be and where my exits are at all times. This is what I concentrate on normally.

For my career, I have an extreme sense of attention to detail. I quickly take note of a familiar face to check for signs of exhaustion, happiness, depression, and anxiety.

Often – not always – what people are feeling and also what they are really saying when they ask a question. I can often gauge how people are perceiving something I’m saying. This can be very helpful to me as a reference librarian.

I see (and am astounded others don’t) that a HUGE number of televisions and broadcasts have the aspect ratio screwed up.

Almost every day I see both standard 4:3 pictures stretched out to widescreen, and wide HD images squashed into a 4:3 box.

It makes me crazy.

@jaykay Me too! I also realized my mr ice and nephew think people stretched wide across a screen out if proportion looks completely normal to them. They grew up when wide screen was just entering the market and most if the TV they watched was not HD, but was set to fill the wide screen even though it should have been on a square box. They cannot see the distortion. Drives me crazy too! I watch shows in their proper size and I don’t care if there is blank black at the too and bottom of the screens or wherever. I still have one square TV in my house, and now the other two are widescreen.

I see fun & adventure in almost any & everything.
Seriously, being this immature is fanbloodytastical & that.

In one job incarnation, I worked on the staff of a company who made the inner monthly magazine covers and ad spaces of over two hundred different local advertisements for a nationwide publication magazine. They were like the mags you used to get in the seat pocket of airlines, only for individual city needs.
This was before computers, so my job involved everything from graphic design, to lay out and paste-up of each advertisement, joined together to create camera-ready printing boards. It was tough and hectic getting the business ad info from the ad salespeople in each city across the country to the finished product of the boards by deadline.
The last step was for me to scan the boards to make sure of the adverts total overall ‘look’. I could quickly scan and find where an ad balance might be off, or a paste-up placement needed manually reworked or shifted, or replaced within each ad. Did we have the proper illustration or photo or graphic each client had chosen. Was that sizing in proper alignment with the print. If not, we went back and hurriedly fixed the re-do’s. I loved it.
To this day, I automatically scan to check such things in similar publications or magazines, although the computer has outmoded the former business workings altogether. I’ve also noticed that it taught me to buzz through somthing, and then go back for changes in wording, balance, etc. Thank heavens there’s no deadlines anymore!

I am excellent at re-writing people’s documents and editing for punctuation and grammar.

I can stand at someone’s desk and read what they have in front of them (reading upside down).

When I go to people’s homes, I’ll redecorate in my mind, moving furniture around, thinking about what kind of curtains, furniture, etc. would look good there. I’ve had people ask me for suggestions, and I will tell them “move this here, move that there” and they’ll say “let’s do it.” We’ll move things around and they’re usually pretty happy with the result. The good thing is, if they don’t like it, we can move it all back.