Stan Lee’s Superhumans

I had the luck of catching a rather amazing program late this evening on the Discovery Channel. Stan Lee‘s Superhumans is a program that looks at some pretty amazing people from around the world, with some truly bizarre and fantastic abilities.

For example one guy was blind but able to play piano note perfect completely from hearing a tune once. The amazing ability was proved when they played Derek Paravacini a jazz tune written especially for the program, that had never been heard before by anyone other than the composer, and along came this blind guy, who not only played the piece with perfection, but got it spot on in terms of the time too. They then took him to a jazz club and an audience of jazz fans came up with a multitude of requests which were played in what ever style or tempo requested simply from memory.

Talk about amazing!

I still think that the most amazing was when Daniel Browning Smith went to New York to meet a guy that had apparently developed an ability to block all forms of pain. In his video demonstration he takes a surgical steel needle and presses it right through his arm without bleeding. Now this is something that I have witnessed once before. I recall once in Africa when I was a student at Prince Edward High School seeing an African Native travelling circus. Two of the guys did similar alarming displays of pain resistance as they went into a trance and stuck skewers through their arms, tongues and ears. The difference in this case was that the person in New York was certainly not in any form of trance and seemed in a completely normal physiological state of mind.

From men with incredible stomach muscles getting run over by trucks, to guys who shimmy up the side of a building like a monkey it certainly looks like this is going to be an interesting series to enjoy watching. I’m not sure that I believe in super human abilities, but I am willing to accept that there are people that are with some really amazing abilities. Even though the program tries to give us answers how people are able to perform these acts of superhuman ability through science, however again I am not convinced that there is any real reason or explanation for these abilities. If there were, then we’d all be able to perform similar superhuman feats, and the idea of superhuman would become pure and simply human nature.

Its good to have mystery, it keeps us all guessing. We have all read the stories of the weird and wonderful or seen programs of similar people with other forms of freaky abilities to make us gawk. Its all part of our rich mixture of diversity and intrigue that makes being human really really exciting.