Homer: Wait, I can smell cake... cake that says "Farewell"... and... [gasps] "BEST WISHES!"
Nelson: Your old man has an awesome nose.
Bart: Oh, that's nothing — he can hear pudding.
Nelson: Your old man has an awesome nose.
Bart: Oh, that's nothing — he can hear pudding.
Senses keener than those of a human. Origins can be genetic, natural, training, supernatural, or cybernetic.
The classic five manifestations are:
- Sight: Also known as Telescopic and Microscopic Vision, these enhancements let you see things far away and of minuscule size. Less often, it's also "snapshot" precise, letting you see in slow motion or in "Bullet Time". Also has "Night Vision" and "Infra Red" flavors, allowing the hero to see in low light or by heat signatures.
- Smell: This lets you smell as well as or better than a dog (not that difficult if you're a Beast Man). It's useful for lots of things: tracking, finding poisons, telling impostors, and reading emotions. A favorite phrase for tough guys with super smell is "I can smell your fear."
- Hearing: Lets you hear things both far away and soft, as well as widening audible range to such degrees you can hear in the ultrasonic and tectonic ranges. Expect this to be the most headache-inducing power of the set. Possibly useable for sonar in a pinch.
- Taste: Perhaps the most hedonistic of the super sense powers, conferring less noticeable benefits than the others. Nonetheless, Super Taste lets heroes notice everything from chemical and genetic composition, toxicity (better hope you got super immunity, too!), origin (both geographical and biological), to age.
- Touch: This can be the most sensual of the super sense powers, bordering on the clairvoyant. It lets supers notice intricate details of whatever they touch, including reading words from print through touch alone.
The less well-known human senses, of body position (proprioception) and orientation, are generally not addressed by this trope, but may be subsumed into Super-Reflexes and other agility-related powers (which they're Required Secondary Powers for, probably).
In most cases, they completely ignore the drawbacks of super senses. The characters are rarely overloaded by too much sensory information (a crowd of people all talking at once when you have super hearing is really overwhelming) or by experiencing some unpleasant stimuli much more intensely (e.g., if you have super smell, how do you react to a skunk?). And when it comes to pain... yikes! This may be explained by Required Secondary Powers of sensory fine-tuning, where (for example) a super-hearer can either consciously or reflexively tune out certain amplitudes or frequencies of noise — but don't expect this to be treated as anything more than a Hand Wave. However, some works will explicitly lean into this as a way of providing an Achilles' Heel for these characters, and will portray intense or negative stimulations of their super-powerful senses as significant weaknesses for individuals with these abilities.
See also Animal Eyes, Being Watched, Spider-Sense, Vein-o-Vision, X-Ray Vision, Blindfolded Vision, The Nose Knows, Fluorescent Footprints, Bizarre Alien Senses and Mysterious Animal Senses. This trope is key to a certain gag. Beware of Sensory Overload. If the super sense is lost, expect the character to feel Sense Loss Sadness. This often overlaps with Sense-Impaired Monster, as these creatures' remaining senses will often be extremely perceptive in order to make up for the missing ones.
Truth in Television with certain conditions such as hyperacusis
(unusually acute hearing) and supertasting. In addition, many animals are better at sensing certain things than humans, especially smells (however, humans have better color vision than the majority of mammals).
For extrasensory perception, see Spider-Sense, Supernatural Sensitivity, and Psychic Powers. Compare The Dead Have Eyes. Sometimes overlaps with Hyper-Awareness. See Bizarre Alien Senses when this applies to other species.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The Big O: It would seem that Roger can hear pedestrians talking and shouting to him from the midst of a Megadeus battle, because Big O can hear that well.
- Black Butler: Sebastian's hearing, sight, and sense of smell are far better than a human's. He also has a different sense of taste than a human's, so sometimes has a learning curve when trying out new recipes.
- Claymore: Miata's special ability comes from her extremely developed senses. Her five basic senses, vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch, are all so finely honed that she's able to fight an opponent in an almost entirely instinctive manner without the filter of conscious thought, an ability the men of the Organization call "the Sixth Sense".
- Cyborg 009: Francoise (aka 003) had ultra-augmented eyesight and hearing coming from her Cyborg enhancements. Problem is, the poor girl's powers aren't always on par with her more physically-geared teammates skills, which often causes her genuine psychological distress since she more than once feels useless compared to them.
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Each of the main characters have a sense that's unusually sharp. Tanjiro has an incredible sense of smell, Zenitsu possesses exceptional hearing, and Inosuke has a highly developed sense of touch. Kanao also has heightened eyesight, and Genya has the ability to consume demon flesh for added power, counting for taste.
- Dragon Ball:
- The Namekians are noted to have incredibly acute senses of hearing (explains why their ears are so huge), which is a plot point several times. In one movie, the downside was pointed out when Piccolo experiences extreme pain due to Gohan whistling, a weakness they later exploit to defeat a Namekian villain.
- Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan: Piccolo can hear things from all over the universe, including distant galaxies and the afterlife.
- Saiyans, at least in Goku's case, appear to have super scent. Goku even states that he can smell as well as a dog and can pick up the scent of people or objects. He demonstrated this by first being able to find a rock Master Roshi threw by smelling for it and knowing that Bulma was approaching by picking up her scent. He also suspected that General Blue was nearby, saying he smelled something funny. Saiyans also appear to have better eyesight than humans since Goku is able to see people from far distances before anyone else even noticed anything. In Dragon Ball Super, it seems Saiyans have better hearing than humans too, since Goku heard Bulma talking through a wall, when she wasn't talking that loud.
- Tien has beyond normal eyesight; he does have three eyes after all. He can see people moving even at Super-Speed and use it to predict his opponent's movements. This also turns out, however, to be his weakness, since he relies too much on his eyes. Goku demonstrates this by using Tien's own Solar Flare technique against him.
- Jaco has an incredibly sharp sight, superior to Tien's. In his own series he could see a boat clearly enough to tell how many people were on it when it was too small for a normal human to even notice the boat, and in Dragon Ball Super he can follow the battle between Goku and Golden Frieza (of the Z Fighters, all of which are far more powerful, only Gohan and Vegeta can do it. Not even Tien could see it, they were too fast even for him), and later can see Frost cheating, something that escaped two Gods of Destruction.
- Fabricant 100: No 33's special ability is to see the true structure of objects, which allows his to scout body parts efficiently, snipe across the forest and some close-range combat skills.
- The Dragon Slayers in Fairy Tail have superhuman sight, smell and hearing. Cobra in particular has such strong hearing that he can hear people's thoughts.
- Food Wars!:
- Erina Nakiri has the "God Tongue", an ability which allows her to perfectly analyze — and criticize — food. For an aspiring chef at a prestigious cooking academy, it's a very powerful gift to have.
- Her mother Mana Nakiri also has the "God Tongue", but her version is so incredibly refined that it forced her body to reject food entirely; leaving her incapable of gaining nourishment unless its administered through an IV.
- Franken Fran:
- Gavril has a sense of smell sharp enough to detect individual molecules. Due to the pungent odors the human body can produce, she generally considers dealing with other people unpleasant.
- Her youngest sister Veronica also has much sharper senses compared to a regular human's, which helps her in her job as an assassin and bodyguard. Though her senses still pale in comparison to Gavrill's.
- In Gunslinger Girl, Henrietta listens in on a terrorist meeting from the other side of a restaurant. Rico hears a vehicle coming before everyone else on a couple of occasions and detects Fermi throwing a coin at Jean's head even with her back to him.
- Inuyasha: Being half dog-youkai, Inu-Yasha's sense of smell and hearing may not be as good as a full-blooded dog-youkai, but far exceed what a human, or even many youkai, are capable of. His nose is so sensitive he can track scent-trails like a dog and be knocked unconscious by strong scents (such as pouring gallons of ink on him). His hearing is capable of detecting Shippou's whispering from a good distance away, when Shippou is muttering about how Inu-Yasha's scent-tracking method makes him look like a dog.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Battle Tendency: The Pillar Men come from a race of ancient super-vampires, so they naturally have much more acute senses than humans. Santana was able to see and hear through soundproofed one-way glass, Wamuu could determine the location of a person by sensing air currents caused by said person's breath, and Kars was able to detect body heat through walls accurately enough to determine the exact position and height of everyone inside a room from the outside. After evolving into an Ultimate Life Form, Kars takes it a step further — in this form his eyes work as well as an astronomical telescope, his ears can hear sounds on every frequency, and he grows antennae that can sense heat and air movements.
- Stardust Crusaders: Jotaro's Stand; Star Platinum has extraordinarily good vision, being able to draw a fly in the back of a dusty and dark photograph with such detail that they determined where the photo was taken based on the fly's native origin.
- Diamond is Unbreakable: Yuya Fungami has a strong sense of smell which he acquired by stealing nutrients from other people. He could tell if a peach has gone bad from across the room, track down a person by their scent and even determine someone's emotional state by the smell of their adrenaline.
- Golden Wind: Giorno's Gold Experience's life giving properties means that in the event that it hits a living being, it will give them Super Senses so powerful that time will slow to a near halt for them and they'll be able to view the world akin to an out of body experience. The problem is that these senses become so powerful that the recipient's body will find it impossible to keep up with the owner's thoughts and attempted actions, leaving the afflicted person unable to act despite these powerful senses and leaving the body vulnerable.
- Stone Ocean: Jolyne's Stone Free gives her amplified hearing from long distances, including hearing distant sounds similar to a Tin-Can Telephone thanks to her strings which can transmit sound.
- Jujutsu Kaisen:
- Satoru Gojo's Six Eyes technique allows him to view the world around him with incredible detail through Curse energy even when blindfolded, right down to objects with no Curse energy like buildings through the leftover Curse energy around them. Akutami describes Gojo's vision when blindfolded as looking at things with "high resolution thermal graphics."
- In the Hidden Inventory Arc, Toji Fushiguro, also known as the Sorcerer Killer, is capable of sensing almost (if not everything) with his enhanced senses. Sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell are all ramped up to eleven, granting him an alternate means of detecting cursed spirits. To add insult to injury for the sorcerers he butchers, he has nothing else: Toji was born with "Heavenly Restriction", which erased his cursed energy in exchange for immense vitality. Hence, why he refers to himself as a "monkey that can't use jujutsu". It's as if a well-trained soldier was taken down by a baboon with a stick.
- Kotoura-san already Deconstructed telepathy already, so why not this trope as well? Yuriko's mother had telescopic vision and was using it in a high-profile way, but was Driven to Suicide when people accused her for being a fake.
- Subaru of Lyrical Nanoha revealed that she has "pretty good eyesight" in the supplementary manga set before the third season when she's able to clearly read the names on a screen despite being so far away that her partner couldn't even see a thing. This turned out to be a hint on her cyborg nature as telescopic sight and other forms of enhanced vision are part of their package.
- In My Hero Academia, many Quirks grant some form of this.
- Mezo Shoji is able to replicate sensory organs like eyes and ears at the end of his arm-tentacle-thingies. The copies work better than the originals, although if he creates too many duplicated organs, he'll lose his fine touch with them.
- Kyoka Jiro's Quirk, Earphone Jack, allows her to channel vibrations through her Unusual Ears, which gives her Super-Hearing and a sort of echolocation if she plugs the jacks into a solid surface.
- Jurota Shishida, from Class 1B, gets enhanced sight, hearing, and smell in his beast form.
- Mei Hatsume's Quirk, Zoom, gives her telescopic vision.
- Pro heroine Uwabami's career is based off using the enhanced senses of the snakes in her hair to track down enemies or find trapped civilians.
- Anime-only character Sirius' Quirk, Good Ear, allows her to hear things beyond normal audible frequencies, which works well with her boss Selkie's ability to emit an ultrasonic frequency that can be used as sonar or Morse code.
- In Naruto, one super sense or another, through Superpowerful Genetics or training, is a common trait of ninja.
- The Inuzuka clan all train their noses to be super-sensitive; at one point, Kiba states that his nose is now more sensitive than a ninja hound's.
- Kakashi has supersensitive smell as well, to the point where he can track or detect people by smell at the age of twelve.
- The Sharingan and Byakugan, beyond bestowing new senses (and other powers in the former's case) gives extremely acute and telescopic vision, respectively.
- Zabuza and Dosu both have super-sensitive hearing, to the point the former could fight by sound alone and the latter's ears were resilient enough to withstand point-blank Melody Arm blasts, yet were sensitive enough to identify exactly what someone was writing just by listening to the scratches their pencils made.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
- Asuna possesses both super sight and super hearing. To give some examples, she was the only one to see the eraser momentarily floating above Negi's head despite the entire class looking at Negi at the time in the first chapter, and she managed to clearly hear the conversation Eva and Setsuna were having in the ring even though she was in the sidelines of a noisy arena during the Mahora Festival's Tournament Arc. Just some of the many hints on Asuna's Mysterious Waif nature. Setsuna's Ki allows her to at least triple her senses.
- Rakan and Chamo have both demonstrated a remarkable sense of smell, when they were able to locate an opponent who was more than 30 kilometers away by following the scent of her panties.
- Also, by reading the flow and charge of the air around him, Rakan was able to anticipate and counter the super speed that Negi got from his Raisoku Shundou technique (which basically made Negi a living lightning bolt).
- Pokémon Adventures:
- Amongst the many abilities Sapphire gained from having more-or-less grown up as a Wild Child include an acute sense of smell for tracking, a sense of hearing that allowed her to continue moving despite being momentarily blind, and a sense of sight powerful enough to clearly read the tiny writing on Jirachi's wish tag even though it was floating far away.
- Marlon has an acute sense of smell that is especially sensitive to water; he can tell where a water-type Pokemon (or a Pokemon that lived in water) came from by scent alone. He also deduced that the Hood Man likely didn't have all eight badges despite participating in the League anyways due to the fact he didn't smell like the water you had to pass by when you went through the Badge Gates.
- Rebuild World:
- There are a certain type of Differently Powered Individual like this as a result of Precursors Transhuman experimentation they inherited, being able to tell if someone is looking at them from a long distance away for instance, generally manifesting as intuition. Part of the reason Helmets Are Hardly Heroic in the setting is because they block that effect.
- With the help of borrowing his Virtual Sidekick Alpha's supercomputer processing power wirelessly via Brain/Computer Interface, Akira uses an enhanced version of his compressed time (Bullet Time but more grounded), that lets him percieve 'unfiltered reality', as in without time lag, and without the results of his senses being filtered by his brain, which could kill him by My Skull Runneth Over if he isn't careful doing on his own. This actually causes Akira brain damage which gets rectified by a certain Lost Technology medicine.
- Alpha takes advantage of Akira's organic wireless Brain/Computer Interface to connect the Everything Sensor of his Powered Armor into his brain, which manifests as something akin to vibrations.
- High level hunters are known to get Cyborg enhancements of extra senses, as many as dozens of different enhancements.
- Rurouni Kenshin:
- The Oniwabanshu are ninja trained to hear the faintest of sounds.
- Usui's hearing was enhanced at the cost of his sight. He uses it to read both his opponent's motions, like sonar, and emotions, which is why he christened it the Shingan ("Heart's Eye").
- In the first Acts/Episodes of Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon's red jewel odango hair decorations can amplify her hearing, which once causes her to pick up the sound of her friend Naru's cries for help and rush to her aid.
- Black Star of Soul Eater. His heightened senses are used early on to track Masamune, more recently in an attempt to find Medusa, and is said to compensate to an extent for his lack of soul perception.
- In Tiger & Bunny, Hundred Power enhances the senses along with strength, speed, and endurance. It doesn't see much use, but it ends up being quite helpful in episode 17 when Kotetsu has to find his lost daughter.
- In Toriko, the Four Heavenly Kings all have one of their senses enhanced:
- Toriko has an enhanced sense of smell. It's so good that he can track down any creature that has been in the area years before, even if the area itself is decimated. At his limit Toriko can smell things from all over the world, but at that level of sensitivity he can't sleep, unless he plugs his nose.
- Coco has enhanced eyesight. He can see non-visible spectra of light, which allows him to tell the future of people by reading their electromagnetic auras.
- Sunny has an enhanced sense of touch, which is used through his feelers — tentacles that are several hundred meters long and so thin that they are invisible to the naked eye.
- Zebra has enhanced hearing — Toriko claims that Zebra can hear a coin drop from tens of kilometers away. He also can use his super-hearing for echolocation, by combining it with his incredibly powerful voice.
- Every single character could be debated as having super taste, since it's set in a world all about food. Most notably Komatsu, who's able to pick out single ingredients in a dish based on taste alone, and to a lesser degree Toriko since smell and taste are dependent on each other but it's not as refined as Komatsu's.
- A notable non-human mention is Guinness, the Wolf King. His "Guinness Search" is a sniff that allows him to know everything about his target, from its species to its favourite foods. Living targets feel their own souls temporarily ripped out of their own bodies, which are left wide open against Guinness' attack.
- Philuffy in Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle has enhanced senses due to being part-Abyss. She can hear the sound of a horn flute (an artifact which controls Abyss) from such a distance that a normal person couldn't hear anything. Her sense of smell is strong enough to determine if an antique is the real thing or a fake. It's also possible (though not confirmed) that this is why she is a good judge of people's character, as she can detect subtle cues that others would miss.
- Both Sei and Rin in Yasha, due to being genetically engineered twins. They can hear frequencies beyond the normal human range, have Super-Reflexes, can easily learn new skills and are both extremely intelligent. They also both experience Twin Telepathy.
- From YuYu Hakusho, we have one of the three demon kings Yomi, who is blind but possesses three pairs of ears that allow him to literally hear everything that goes on within his kingdom. No whispered secret is safe from him.
- Zombie Land Saga: Downplayed with Ai due to the unclear degree, but she indicates she has better eyes and ears than the other girls and proves it by being able to hear an approaching boar before the other girls in spite of being one of the farthest from the sound.
Asian Animation
- In Noonbory and the Super 7, the entire theme behind the Super Borys' powers is that they represent one of the five human senses and have powers to match them. Jetybory has super hearing, Lunabory has super sight, Cozybory has super touch, Totobory has super taste, and Pongdybory has super smell.
Comic Books
- Aquaman has heightened senses which allow him to see in the total darkness, move underwater and navigate the deep trenches.
- Batman has this in the crossover Planetary/Batman, but it's not explained what specific super-sense he's got.
"I know you're behind me. From this position there are nine ways to take you down; six of them kill you outright. All of them lead to your friend here being accidentally rendered unable to walk for the rest of his life. Think carefully."
- Black Panther has enhanced smelling, hearing, and eyesight.
- Captain America: The Falcon's mask gives him telescopic, night, and infrared vision.
- Chew: Police Detective (and later US Food and Drug Administration Agent) Tony Chu of is a cibopath — he receives psychic impressions from the food he eats (including people, if he takes a bite out of them) and uses his talents to solve crime. His fellow FDA Agent Mason Savoy is also a cibopath.
- Domenic of ClanDestine has this power to such a degree that it makes day to day life rather difficult. He can see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, and can see his sister Samantha's Instant Armor before she conjures it, and his sense of taste is so acute that the taste of chocolate once caused him to slip into a catatonic state (albeit that was when he hadn't tasted anything but seafood for over a decade). His other senses are equally acute. Sometimes this comes in handy, and he did use his powers to become a successful escape artist at one point, but they've also incapacitated him more than once, and he views them as more a curse than anything else at this point (it's strongly implied that his powers have grown much stronger over the years, so the problems may not have been that severe at first).
- The titular character in Concrete had an interesting combination of this and Sense Loss Sadness. Concrete is a man whose brain, for reasons unknown, was transplanted by aliens into an eight-foot tall, sexless body made out of a substance similar to, well, concrete. Because of this, he has no sense of taste or smell at all, and his sense of touch is extremely limited. (He can feel being shot by an AK-47, but that's about it.) His hearing seems to be unchanged. His one consolation: his eyesight is far better than any human being. He can read newsprint from fifty feet away, or count the feathers of an eagle flying overhead. This one super-sense doesn't make up for the loss or near-loss of three others (or the loss of his genitals), but it's something.
- Contest of Champions (2015): White Fox has an astoundingly good sense of smell, able to distinguish what reality something is from (or isn't, in some cases).
- Daredevil:
- Matt Murdock has all the above except sight, which he compensates with a radar sense that he has described as "like touching everything at once". Among his feats, he can smell water, judge a person's weight by listening to their footsteps, and read by touching ink. He also has to sleep in a sensory deprivation tank because otherwise he'd just be overloaded.
- In Ultimate Daredevil & Elektra, Matt can smell the scent of people, and hear everything in the vicinity.
- Exiles:
- Since Mimic has half of Wolverine's usual powers, this includes his enhanced senses.
- Thunderbird mentions that as a Horseman he was given enhanced senses. Nowhere near as powerful as Wolverine's or Wolfsbane's, but not too shabby regardless.
- Deconstructed in Irredeemable. The Plutonian's hearing is so great he can hear almost everything at once. This means he can hear the cries of people he is unable to help and feels that he must be active in saving people twenty-four hours a day. It also lets him hear every criticism and snide comment, slowly driving him insane. It gets so bad he flies to the moon for ten minutes just to get away from it all. A flashback also shows that, unlike Superman and his ilk, he can't hear things from far away in real time. Thus, when he hears his foster mother about to commit suicide from a few miles away, even though he's able to cross the distance in a heartbeat, he was already too late to stop her.
- The Incredible Hulk: Hulk has incredibly good hearing. This comes with the drawback that sounds that wouldn't bother humans are debilitating to him. Of course, pain just makes Hulk angry, and the angrier Hulk gets...
- Justice Society of America: It doesn't come up often, but the mostly blind hero Dr. Mid-Nite's other senses are slightly enhanced. He usually has no need to rely on this given the goggles he wears allow him to "see" even in light bright enough to cancel out his altered vision (generally depicted as infrared), but when he's stripped of his goggles like in JSA Classified: Nightfall and stuck under blinding hot lights his sense of smell, hearing and taste make up for his loss of "sight" and allow him to be a formidable opponet anyway.
- Being a parody of Wolverine that he is, Lobo has what has to be the most absurdly powerful sense of smell ever, allowing him to track targets across interstellar distances.
- Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja : This is one of the Ninja skills possessed by John Doe and Dr. Yagyu.
Dr. Yagyu: You're getting mighty sloppy, boy! I could hear you breathing and walking through a solid steel door! I taught you better than that!
- Robin (1993): King Snake has hearing so good that his blindness is only an issue once when Tim modified his staff to whistle from the end if it was swung fast enough at the right angle. Otherwise he's one of the most skilled martial artists in the DCU capable of keeping up with any member of the Batfamily.
- The Seeing Being in Rocket (2017) is an alien Daredevil parody. A tragic accident meant he lost the echolocation ability all his race have, but in exchange he acquired a mysterious ability to detect and interpret light waves. Sometimes super-senses are in the eye of the beholder, so to speak.
- Spider-Man: Due to his eight Extra Eyes, Bailey has virtually 360 degrees of vision. He boasts that this makes it impossible for anyone to sneak up on him. But this is only useful if he's paying attention, as he fails to notice the truck driving up behind him while arguing with Peter over the phone.
- Superman:
- Superman is probably the best example since Depending on the Writer, he has Super-Hearing that allows him to hear clouds scraping together or a cell splitting, or hear across a vacuum, telescopic vision, microscopic vision that allows him to see electrons, can see the entire electromagnetic spectrum (including infrared, X-Ray, etc.), and more.
- Plus all the other Kryptonians under a yellow sun, such as Supergirl, Power Girl, Chris Kent/Nightwing and General Zod.
- Krypto the Superdog has all of Superman's powers, adjusted accordingly for his being a dog. This means, for the record, that his Super Senses are among the most powerful in the DC Universe. His senses of smell and hearing are far superior to Superman's, but his vision is inferior.
- Like his dad, Jon Kent is armed with Super-Vision of all kinds, from X-Ray to Telescopic. He also possesses his father's Super-Hearing, which also happened to be Jon's first superpower.
- In Krypton No More, Superman sees his cousin across a galaxy in real time.
- Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man: Superman uses his X-Ray Vision to track down the residual energies of a fake Superman.
- War World: As soon as Superman sees his friends kidnapped he scans all of Metropolis with his telescopic vision.
- In Kryptonite Nevermore, Superman tests his super-vision after getting his powers back:
Superman: Now to check my vision! Telescopic vision — Check! I can read the numbers on the bottom of a coin... locked in a basement vault in Moscow! X-Ray vision — Check!
- In Many Happy Returns, Kara has to explain several times what she can hear anything from anyplace.
Kara: Did you hear that? People screaming... and some sort of roaring...
Superboy: I don't — Are you hearing...?
Linda: I got nothin'.
Kara: And now I can see it, right in Metropolis, with my telescopic vision!
Superboy: Her what? Is there any power she doesn't have? - In the first issue of Supergirl (Rebirth), Supergirl is flying over the surface of the Sun and hears her foster mother's voice — who is standing on Earth — in real time. Later in that issue she uses her microscopic vision to read someone else's genetic makeup.
- In her first book's first scene, Kara uses her X-Ray Vision combined with her telescopic vision to read a letter while she's floating several hundred of meters over her apartment. Later, she uses her microscopic vision to analyze a statue belonging to her roommate and determine that it was made from alien substances.
- War World: Supergirl uses her microscopic vision to find the trail of Warworld, locating a stream of sub-atomic particles left behind by the satellite's exhaust.
- Kara can hear Batman's heartbeats several miles away in The Supergirl from Krypton (2004).
- In her second book, Supergirl sometimes complains that Kryptonian super-senses may hamper your need for a normal life◊, although the ability to recognize individual heartbeats has its uses.
Supergirl: Waitaminnit! That heartbeat... I've heard it before! With hearing as sensitive as mine, they're as individual as fingerprints!
- In addition to her usual senses, in Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade Kara has a very keen sense of smell.
- In Bizarrogirl, Kara reveals that she installed mass-loaded vinyl throughout the walls of her room because her super-hearing kept her awake at night. She cannot hear what is happening while Bizarrogirl tears up the city, but she can feel explosions nearby.
- In Who is Superwoman?, Kara's mycroscopic vision reveals Superwoman's identity when she examines the villain's cowl and scans several hair follicles stuck to the fabric.
- In All-Star Superman, Lex Luthor got empowered with abilities like Superman's for a day. While he at first reveled in the power and used it to terrorize Metropolis, at some point, the Super Senses began to kick in, and Luthor suddenly gained a newfound perspective. For the first time, he understood the wonder of the world that never mattered to him and the enormous weight that was on Superman's shoulders every day of his life.
- In Red Daughter of Krypton, Supergirl's superhuman hearing was used against her when Lobo knocked her unconscious via a sonic grenade.
- In Superman: Up, Up and Away!, After one year without his Super Senses, Superman gets briefly overwhelmed by sensory input from his surroundings when he recovers his extraordinary senses after spending one year depowered.
- In The Supergirl From Krypton (1959), Clark Kent uses his telescopic vision and superhumanly hearing to locate a rocketship falling from the space, several miles away from his position.
- Wonder Woman:
- Wonder Woman (1942): Diana can sense magic and her normal senses are enhanced beyond those of a baseline human as well.
- A good demonstration of Diana's enhanced senses is in Wonder Woman (1987) where she was blinded and it did little to affect her ability to fight and act as a crimefighter, and she continues on almost as if nothing had happened.
- When Donna Troy is from the same source as Diana she's got the same senses, even if they're not as matured due to her younger age.
- X-Men:
- Wolverine's super-smell gets most of the screentime, allowing him to track prey like a bloodhound.
- Actually, we should just include all the mutants in X-Men who have feral-type powers (Wolverine, Sabretooth) or transform into animals (Feral, Catseye). Also Warpath, who can hear pins drop.
- Wolfsbane in New Mutants has enhanced senses of smell and hearing when she's in human form. She tells Rictor that she has her wolf senses in her human form but changes the subject before explaining further. She receives a power boost in X-Force (2008) because of her pregnancy with the child of the Asgardian wolf prince Hrimhari.
- The Orphan, a member of X-Statix also called Mr. Sensitive, is a Deconstructive Parody of this trope. He had to wear a special suit to prevent all the information coming in through his skin from driving him insane and even had to use a special salve to dull his senses if he wanted to... eh... get physical with anyone. And at one point, a villain who has knowledge of the Orphan's power uses it against him: he has a henchman hold the Orphan tight, then tears open the suit and tortures him...by lightly scratching him with a penknife. To the Orphan's enhanced senses, it was unimaginably painful.
- Callisto of the Morlocks was basically Daredevil if he wasn't blind. When she lost her powers due to M-day and got a flawed version of them thanks to Terrigen Mist exposure, the Mist enhanced her sense of touch to such an insane degree that raindrops caused her tremendous pain. Fortunately for Callisto, the Mist powers wore off over time.
Fan Works
- In Catch Your Breath, Kakashi has a strong sense of smell and Genma has extremely accurate hearing.
- A Champion in Earth-Bet: Through his special senses, the Avatar knows that parahuman powers are inter-planar in nature.
- Child of the Storm:
- All Asgardians and superhuman species have these to one degree or another.
- Super Soldiers have them as a matter of course, as Carol alludes to in the sequel, when noting that Peter, now a mostly cured Dhampyr has a similarly enhanced sense of smell.
- Clint has enhanced eyesight, which allows him to see further and into the EM spectrum - it's a product of his descent from Minerva McGonagall.
- Sean Cassidy's hearing can serve as an extremely effective radar, this being one of the things that makes him extremely dangerous.
- Clark Kent develops X-Ray Vision by the start of the second book (and is immediately teased for it), but when he gets super-charged, clearing out the Kryptonite residue that was blocking his power development. He immediately gets a horrible case of Sensory Overload - even though he's in space, he can see the vast majority of the EM spectrum, and hear radio signals. The shock overrides his normal filters, forcing Harry to intervene.
- Digimon: Children of Time: Takuya's group all possess one enhanced sense, even in human form; Takuya has super-sight, Kouji has super-smell, Zoey has super-hearing, JP has super-taste, and Tommy has super-sense of touch.
- The Dusk Guard Saga: One of the members of the Dusk Guard is Sabra, a zebra monk who has hearing keen enough to use it as a sonar.
- In Worm/DC Universe crossover Echoes of Yesterday, Kara has Kryptonian super-senses. It's thanks to her super-hearing she is able to rescue Taylor after hearing her pleas for help.
No sooner had I started out of the alley, did I hear a distinct bang. Let me clarify, I heard many noises with my super-hearing. At its peak, it was possible for me to hear and process every sound on the planet, with time to concentrate of course. I had a very limited version of that at the moment, maybe a few blocks or miles at most, I wasn't sure. Even my ability to process information, I could tell was far slower than what I was used to.
- The Empath: The Luckiest Smurf version of Tracker from the cartoon show now has enhanced sight and hearing as well as smell.
- Fangs & Fins: Vampires and werewolves. All of their senses, such as sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing have become clearer, stronger and heightened. They are able to see, smell and hear things from a greater distance than that of a normal human.
- Fate/Reach Out: As a magus, Shirou can buff himself with a form of this through Reinforcement, one of the only two spells he can use at the start of the visual novel. Its first plot-relevant application was during the Investigation Team's stakeout on Tatsumi Textiles, where Shirou's enhanced hearing allowed him to keep tabs on the place while keeping the team from being noticed by Kanji and Naoto.
- In A Force of Four, Power Girl and Kryptonian villains Mala, Kizo and U-Ban have heightened senses.
- Gundam Build Fighters FF: Like Aila, both Charlotte and Haru are able to see the flow of Plavsky particles, giving them a kind of precognition during Gunpla Battles. Charlotte also made use of these senses while sneaking around Junko's house.
- In Hellsister Trilogy, Supergirl, her cousin and her boyfriend -and even her Evil Twin- have heightened senses as part of the Kryptonian powerset: telescopic vision, microscopic vision, infrared vision, X-Ray Vision, super-hearing...
"Supergirl had sent her super-vision ahead of her, for caution's sake. The images she saw arrived in her brain only a fraction of a second before her body arrived on the scene of Darkseid's den. But it was time enough to be effective."
- In Imaginary Seas, Percy has A+ Rank Clairvoyance suited towards observing the true nature of things as a side effect of the time he hosted Nekhbet to defeat Setne. Because of this, he's able to see Artemis orbiting the Earth in space from his position on the ground.
- In Kara of Rokyn, as soon as Kara returns to Earth and gets her super-senses back, she uses her super-vision to check on her family and friends all across America.
Kara shifted on her knees and used her telescopic vision. It was so fine to experience super-powers again, especially the super-senses. They were so convienient.
She picked out some familiar landmarks. First, Midvale, where her parents still lived. Then Metropolis. Then Gotham City. Finally, Chicago. She didn't use her x-ray vision to see within the houses yet. That would wait till after she was on Earth herself, and could investigate things directly. - In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, Paul develops the ability to see magic and power after he's hit by magical lightning twice in a row.
- In Last Child of Krypton, Shinji Ikari has Kryptonian DNA and the super-human senses that go with it.
- In The Last Daughter, Taylor has the enhanced vision, hearing and smell bundled in the Kryptonian package. She always knew she was special because she saw colors no one else did since she was a child.
- In Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race, Bass has highly advanced senses that can scan through walls and detect human heartbeats.
- Mega Man himself have higher than above hearing even for a robot. He can hear conversations through walls and telephone conversations from both sides. He can even tell when someone is lying through the fluctuations of their voice. He controls his range of hearing so he doesn't accidentally spy on people.
- The Miraculous Adventure Of Tessa And Lunala: Tiana Alexis "Tia" Digenova has incredible hearing abilities, as revealed by her introduction. She is able to discern who made what noise, whether or not someone is talking smack about her behind her back, and even someone muttering under their breath!
- In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku developed seven types of superhuman vision by the time he turned ten, including microscopic vision, telescopic vision, X-ray vision, and infrared vision. His Super-Hearing first appeared when was just four-years-old, allowing him to hear literally everything happening on Earth at once, including all sorts of disasters, crimes, and anguish. The experience was so traumatizing that he passed out and he has refused to use his Super-Hearing since.
- Lampshaded by Christopher Reeve in Superman and Man:
"He also recalled that Superman had other powers. X-ray vision, and heat vision, and half a dozen other visions. All from the comic books. All dreamed up by those idiots down at DC Comics, who really believed that such a thing was possible. Who bought into the myth so much, they tried to rationalize out every bit of it.
Only here, in this dream, it needed no rationalization." - Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation has Alan Kent and Katherine de Ka'an, descendants of the original Superman and Supergirl, respectively. As might be expected, they have Kryptonian super-enhanced senses.
- In Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton, this is one of the first powers developed by Asuka, who gets flustered when her X-Ray Vision turns on automatically.
- In Supergirl (2015) fic Survivors Kara hears all kind of sounds when she arrives on Earth, no matter how far away. She initially attributes it to the thinness of the atmosphere.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Supergirl crossover The Vampire of Steel provides several examples:
- Supergirl uses her super-vision to watch over Buffy.
"Super-vision could help her keep track of Buffy Summers, even 108 stories up, even through stone and steel."
- Later Buffy witnesses Supergirl using her super-vision. Being Buffy, she can't help but make puns.
Buffy looked at her flightmate. Kara's eyes were focused in a strange manner, and she was looking in the direction of Sunnydale Park. Super-vision, she guessed. To use that, do you need a Supervisor to teach you?
She decided not to make that joke aloud.
Kara's face turned grim. "I'm seeing something I wish I hadn't," she said.
"What?"
"Two murder victims," she said. "Big holes burned right through their chests. Their faces, what I can see of them, look alien."
"Demons," muttered Buffy.
"What?" Kara turned to her, inquisitively.
"Vampires aren't all we have to worry about in this town," she said.
"Glad to know," Supergirl said. "Don't think they've been dead for too long. Hang on. I'm going to check the park out with infra-red, and then we're heading down. Stay tuned."
"Infra-red?" asked Buffy.
"We have a lot of vision powers," muttered Supergirl. The thing was, their enemy probably did, too. If he was in the park, she could probably see him.
- Supergirl uses her super-vision to watch over Buffy.
- Three out of the four in With Strings Attached have these:
- John's hearing has been increased dramatically, to the point where he can hear things miles away, ultrasonics, etc. Luckily he's also able to tune his hearing so he doesn't overload. However, until he learns to do this, he spends some sleepless nights being awakened by "every stupid trivial sound."
- Once he gets the Kansael, he also can sense the water in things, and can use this sense as a kind of radar.
- Ringo's mindsight gives him a whole package of sight-related abilities, including microscopic vision (he can see atoms), telescopic vision, perfect night vision, and much more. However, he cannot see invisible things, or things that have been magically hidden.
- However, in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, he learns to perceive invisible people as silhouettes by looking for the skin flakes and hairs they shed, the dust they displace in the air, and similar things.
- George has the potential to have any super-sense as long as he can think of a creature to become that has that sense.
- John's hearing has been increased dramatically, to the point where he can hear things miles away, ultrasonics, etc. Luckily he's also able to tune his hearing so he doesn't overload. However, until he learns to do this, he spends some sleepless nights being awakened by "every stupid trivial sound."
- In A Very Kara Christmas, the main character's civilian disguise has disappeared, so she uses her superhuman sight, hearing and nose to locate it.
- The My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Long Eventide gives Rarity the the ability to boost her senses temporarily with magic, confirmed to affect her senses of sight, touch, hearing, and smell. However, keeping it active too long has the chance to overwhelm her.
Films — Live-Action
- Bird Box: Malorie is shown training her children to navigate by echolocation, so they're capable of getting around blindfolded. Tom likewise demonstrates this when fighting the unhinged people, managing to take down three of them just from hearing where their voices are coming from.
- E.T. "Sonar" Lovacelli in Down Periscope. "Someone just dropped 45 cents..." He also comments at various times about a colleague eating an Oreo, another in the restroom (by name), and a scuffle between lobsters on the ocean floor.
- Fright Night 2: New Blood: Gerri the vampire uses echolocation to chase down the heroes in a subterranean labyrinth, much like a real bat.
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
- One of the many alterations made in the film version was that they advertized the Badass Normal Alan Quatermain as having superhuman visual acuity. This is averted in the actual film itself. He needs glasses to see that far (and not ultra glasses either, he's just old and can't see all that well), and is able to pass the skill onto his protégé.
- Hyde has animal-level smell and hearing. When listening to a record left by the Big Bad, Jekyll looks in a mirror and sees his Hyde alter-ego covering his ears. Apparently, the record was secretly playing a signal at ranges only heard by dogs and other animals with heightened hearing.
- In both the movies and in the novels of The Lord of the Rings, Elves have spectacular vision: at one point, Aragorn asks Legolas to look for what a band of Uruk-Hai is doing, and while said Uruks are well out of eyeshot for Aragorn (and the viewer), Legolas apparently has no problem seeing them and noticing where they go.
- As a boy, Clark was overwhelmed by his super hearing and X-ray vision in Man of Steel.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe: Heimdall possesses extraordinarily acute sight and hearing that allow him to observe everything that happens in the Nine Realms, should he choose to look or listen. As shown in Thor, his senses can be clouded by Loki's Perception Filter. In Thor: The Dark World, dark elf cloaking tech fools his sight but he can still hear their ships' engines. In Thor: Ragnarok, he states that he saw Loki coming with The Cavalry. While never addressed in the movies, in the comics Heimdall selectively blocks unneeded information to avoid Sensory Overload.
- Molly (1999): After the autism-curing brain implant, Molly retains her acute hearing but is better able to process all the information, allowing her to eavesdrop from the stands on an argument between an umpire and a baseball player.
- Jack North, of Northstar, is an astronaut exposed to a magnetic field on the way back to Earth who develops super-senses along with heightened strength and endurance. Unfortunately, sunlight is so overwhelming to this heightened senses that he can only use them at night.
- Painkiller Jane: Jane's eyesight becomes much keener, even telescopic, due to her enhancement. She's shown being able to see things in great detail a long distance off. Along with this, her hearing is similarly improved.
- The Silence of the Lambs: Hannibal Lecter is enough of a predator that he verges on this.
"You use Evyan skin cream and sometimes you wear L'Air du Temps, but not today."
- The whole "drawbacks" aspect is lampshaded in The Specials. "The world is covered in urine!"
- Star Trek: Nemesis reveals that Captain Picard's DNA includes a hypersensitivity to sound, which was debilitating when he was a boy. Even after being treated, he still has very acute hearing.
- Teen Wolf can hear dog whistles.
- X-Men Film Series:
- Callisto from X-Men: The Last Stand can detect mutants.
- Warpath's mutant ability in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Gamebooks
- Lone Wolf: The discipline of Huntmastery augments a Kai Lord's senses at higher Magnakai ranks, giving telescopic vision to a Principalin, and enhanced hearing, smell and night vision to an Archmaster. Grand Huntmastery upgrades them even more, with vision in complete darkness and heightened senses of touch and taste.
Literature
- The Alteriens of the sci-fi series Alterien have super sharp senses. Their senses aren't extremely greater than a normal human's, but they can hyper-focus on the smallest sights, sounds or smells from far away.
- The title protagonist of Isobelle Carmody's Alyzon Whitestarr experiences a head injury and gains mystical-seeming heightened senses combined with Hyper-Awareness and Photographic Memory, to the point where she can sense personalities and emotions through smell. She has to learn to screen out the excess stimuli and interpret the new information she is receiving.
- The high spirits and the Aash Ra of the Astral Dawn series use an "omnisense" to see, hear, smell, feel and taste in ways mortals cannot. The omnisense is a psychic sense that allows them to perceive the world around them.
- In the Codex Alera series, the Canim have an extremely acute sense of hearing and smell. How good is their sense of smell? We find in a later book that the Canim can literally smell if two people are closely related, which makes a dramatic scene in an early book Hilarious in Hindsight as the Canim knew a certain bluff was not a bluff, but the character making the statement thought it was merely a bluff.
- In A Boy and His Dog, the titular Dog is a mutant who claims to have superior smelling ability even compared to other mutant Dogs.
- Super senses are Bedlam's secondary ability in Devil's Cape, and function even when he is in his normal human form.
- Devils & Thieves:
- Hardy claims his invictus powers allowed him to hear Jemmie and Alex spying on the Devils' League meeting when nobody else could, and long before they knew they'd been caught.
- Jemmie has a heightened magic-sensitivity, allowing her to not only feel the magic around her, but to also smell it and see it. It mostly just makes her feel sick and dizzy.
- Digitesque: All pathfinder senses are enhanced to help with their role as scouts. Hunters have something that is described similar, but is more like Enemy-Detecting Radar. They can see where people are, and also seem to have Innate Night Vision.
- Discworld:
- Angua's sense of smell. One character once described her abilities as being able to smell the result of a coin toss. While her sense of smell isn't quite that good while human-shaped (she's a werewolf), it is a lot better than most peoples (perhaps due to bleed-through from her wolf form), and it stays good for a few minutes after turning.
- The Listening Monks are trying to hear the echo of the universe's creation. They will not even accept a monk for training unless he can hear the result of a coin toss. When he's done, he's expected to hear what color the coin is. As an aside, they succeed. The sound is: "One. Two. One, two, three, four—"
- Vampires have good smell, perhaps almost as good as werewolves. But they do have excellent hearing, at least where heartbeats are concerned.
- The Divine Comedy: Upon entering Heaven, human sight becomes powerful enough to be focused directly upon the Sun without fear of blindness. Dante realizes this almost immediately and reasons that these new powers are granted because humanity was made to live in Heaven, physically and spiritually.
- The Ear, the Eye and the Arm delves into the severe downside of having Super Senses. The Eye has to wear special glasses to tone down the light level whenever he leaves home; the Ear can easily be overloaded through abundance of noise. The Arm has the ability to sense emotions — no, not a Super Sense per se, but played in much the same manner — and it frequently overwhelms him (so many all at once!), occasionally affecting his mood directly. When the Arm bonds with a baby, he goes to sleep when she does, and at one point they start echoing fear back and forth between them, each one scaring the other in a magnifying cascade of horror.
- Older Than Radio, from Edgar Allan Poe:
- The main character from "The Tell-Tale Heart" suffers from an "over-acuteness of the senses," which may or may not be why they killed the old man.
- In "The Fall of the House of Usher", Roderick Usher suffers from bouts of hyperacute senses, which are portrayed as entirely a burden, never an advantage.
- In The Egg Man, each human has one sense that's hyper-evolved to what we would consider superhuman levels. The protagonist is an aspiring painter who is despairing of making it as a Smell in a field dominated by Sights.
- The Elder Empire: As part of her alchemical upgrades, Meia can see and hear far better than an ordinary human.
Meia: [to Shera] I hear everything that happens on the ship.
Mason: Uh... everything, Gardener?
Meia: Everything.
Mason: [hides, embarrassed] - In The Elenium and Tamuli, the Physical Goddess Aphrael has divine senses related to supernatural phenomena and her worshipers (which causes her tremendous pain when one of her enemies tries to massacre her followers. In addition, her normal senses are so acute that she once mentions not being able to identify the constellations because her depth perception works even at interstellar distances.
- Members of the new Human Subspecies homo post hominem in the novel Emergence have unusual sensory acuity, including vision in the infrared range. Protagonist Candy (a hominem) comments that learning this explains a lot that's puzzled her about dealing with the humans around her.
- Bean from the Ender's Shadow books is described as being unusually good at picking significant things out of background noise, for instance being able to hear people coming up behind him despite being near a running helicopter. It's made clear that his ears are normal, and it's his brain that's doing the heavy lifting. Implied to be a side effect of his condition.
- Honor Harrington: Honor's artificial eye gives her both telescopic and microscopic vision, plus (when she activates the pulser built into her artificial hand) a targeting reticule.
- Legolas' feats of eyesight in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers novel include counting both the fast-moving Riders of Rohan and their riderless horses and observing that their leader is very tall while said Riders are still a dozen miles away. However, in the previous book: Legolas is also shown to not feel the cold as much as the others. This perhaps suggests that his sense of touch is not as good as a human's. In other parts of the Legendarium, elves are also shown to have exceptional hearing. Their senses of taste and smell are apparently the same as that of a human though.
- With a proper diet, the vampires of The Madness Season have heightened senses of smell and hearing. Even when weaned off of blood, they are still able to see into the infra-red spectrum.
- Mistborn:
- Allomancers can achieve this through burning tin. Spook ends up burning so much tin for so long that his senses become stretched to ridiculous levels, allowing him to do such things as avoid swords because he can "feel the vibrations in the air". Sanderson also does a good job of portraying the drawbacks of having Super Senses, with things such as bright lights and loud noises momentarily disabling the characters multiple times throughout the series.
- Feruchemy can "store" a power and bring it out later, and using tin can suffer from debilitated senses for a time in order to be able to boost them later. Unlike with Allomancy, this only works with one sense per storage object.
- Mike, the sentient computer from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, can make a reasonable judgment of a person's health just from the sound picked up by a common telephone receiver.
- The Neanderthal Parallax: The Neanderthals have a much stronger sense of smell than homo sapiens, to the point that Ponter is capable of hunting down a man across a city after just smelling him on a piece of clothing once, making him equal or better than a bloodhound. It's influenced their culture as well, since they didn't ever develop smelly technologies like internal combustion engines which would have vexed them. Surgeons also don't wear masks, in spite of the hygienic risk, since their enhanced sense of smell aids them while working on a patient.
- Of Fire and Stars:
- There are people who have a "sea sense" letting them tell when storms or dangerous tides are approaching. Ellaeni tells Dennaleia her girlfriend Claera, the chief cook on a ship, has this.
- "Farhearing" is also possible with magic, enhancing regular hearing.
- People who have a "shadow sense" can tell if someone's killed.
- Those with the earth Affinity can sense structures underground along with the people there.
- Grenouille in Perfume is able to smell out every constituent part of a perfume and replicate it on the first try without measuring any of the ingredients, track an individual over miles, and even sense an incoming projectile.
- In The Place Inside the Storm, Xel the robot cat has superior hearing and can see infrared. His skills come in handy when he and Tara are trying to avoid being arrested.
- Martians in "The Secret Sense" have several senses that humans don't (and humans have better senses than martians). The most significant of their senses is that of detecting magnetic fields. They are able to grant this sense to humans, but only temporarily.
- In Shadow of the Conqueror, any of the physical senses can be enhanced by Lifebinding. Daylen largely uses it for sight and hearing, though scent is also used prominently by the book's Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist to track him down.
- Sidekicked focuses on a Kid Sidekick named Drew "the Sensationalist" Bean, whose senses are so advanced that he can hear tell what's going on blocks away. He's aware that this is not necessarily a useful power in a fight, but is trained for things like picking out important conversations, smelling minute amounts of different chemicals and other useful tricks.
- In The Sirantha Jax Series and (more centrally) the Dred Chronicles, Jael has superhuman hearing. Among other things, it enables him to read people fairly well by listening to things like breathing and heartbeat. The downside is that he seldom gets any quiet.
- In Spirit Animals, many of the titular Bond Creatures grant their humans enhanced senses. This is particularly notable in Essix the Falcon, who grants her partner Rollan senses so acute that he can see if people are lying or tell that people are under the villain's Mind Control.
- Buzzer from Super Minion has such good hearing that he can count heartbeats in an adjacent building, as well as listen in on every conversation going on inside.
- Tarzan can track prey by smell, even though that's not really possible.
- In the Uglies trilogy, Specials can apparently smell a burnt out campfire from ten kilometers away, see in the dark and hear better than bats. Shay in particular can always smell what someone is feeling. Specials got super senses as a result of the operation that gave them super strength and super speed (and scary faces).
- In Vampire Academy, Strigoi, Moroi, and dhampirs all have enhanced senses of vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste. Their limitations are unknown.
- In The Vampire Files, the vampire Jack Fleming has unusually acute senses. The series also mentions the disadvantages of this, as Jack finds violin music painful even if it's well-played.
- In Warrior Cats, Dovewing's special power is that she has super senses — in particular, strong hearing — that allows her to detect what cats are doing even all the way across the lake. She is surprised to learn that not everyone is like that.
- The Wheel of Time: As a Wolfbrother Perrin can see at great range with Innate Night Vision, has extremely acute hearing, and can smell people's emotions.
- In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West "had only one eye, but it worked like a telescope", letting her see anything that happened in her territory.
Live-Action TV
- In one episode of The Adventures of Superboy, Lex Luthor attacks Superboy with a noise-device that inflicts pain thanks to the target's super-hearing ability.
- Rachel Pirzad in Alphas has the same ability as Jim Ellison in The Sentinel and with the same drawback: if she focuses on one super-sense, she temporarily loses the others. This is shown in the pilot, where she breaks into the apartment of an Alpha suspected of murder and focuses on super-sight so much that she doesn't hear her teammates screaming in the radio to get out.
- Amazing Stories (2020): In "Signs Of Life" Sara can pick up distant sounds, including radio signals, and repeat them back in the wake of her coma.
- Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory is regarded as having an incredible sense of hearing, claims that his peripheral vision is good enough to see his own ears, and is very sensitive to the lesser senses of pain, balance, kinesthesia, and thermoception.
- Buffyverse: All vampires have excellent hearing and smelling abilities. Angel, in his own series, has been able to find out if two characters have had sex (for example, Cordelia and Connor) just by smelling one's scent on the other. His son, Connor, has also been shown to have such abilities, such as when he overheard Fred and Gunn from a distance.
- In Community episode "Social Psychology" Pierce receives a ear-nocular for eavesdropping, then gives it up at the end of the episode.
Pierce: You see Jeff, there are certain things man was not meant to hear. We were designed, by whatever entity you choose, to hear what's in this range and really this range alone, because you know who's talking to us in this range? The people we love.
[Pierce gets up and leaves]
Jeff: [to himself] He must have heard us call him Inspector Gadget. - Doctor Who:
- Time Lords have highly advanced senses, including a strong sense of smell, so strong they can smell when another Time Lord is on the same planet. They also have a magical "Time Lord sense" that allows then to sense changes in the timeline and determine which points are fixed and which are in flux. The Tenth Doctor also appears to have a ridiculously good sense of taste, able to identify some material compositions by tasting them. In "The Christmas Invasion", he identifies not just human blood, but what blood type it is.note
- He can also identify mistletoe oil by licking the wall. He sticks two fingers in a jar of jam and licks them in "Fear Her". He licks sand in "Planet of the Dead". All of this leads fans to believe that he has an, ahem, oral fixation.
- The Eleventh Doctor has this trait as well. When companion Amy Pond asks him about it after eating some grass, ("Have you always been this disgusting?") he says, "No, that's recent." It appears that he first acquired that ability in his tenth incarnation.
- Eleven is actually able to tell how much time has passed just by licking the wood off of Amy's shed.
- There are also the Raxacoricofallapatorians, who can smell human sweat.
- Nestene duplicates apparently have superior hearing. In "The Big Bang", when the Doctor locates his exploding TARDIS and channels the sound through a satellite dish, Rory (then a Nestene, it's complicated) can hear River Song's voice inside the TARDIS.
Amy: I don't hear anything.
Rory: [points to one of his ears] Trust the plastic.
- Don't Look Deeper: Aisha gains these after getting control for her system, initiating audio enhancement. It had been demonstrated even before that she's able to hear sounds no human (or organic creature) can.
- Constable Fraser in Due South can also identify unexpected things by taste.
- Father Jack Hackett in Father Ted could be said to have super hearing. Of course, with Jack being... Jack, this "superpower" has only one use: granting him the ability to name the brand, type and vintage of bottled booze just by hearing said bottle clattering against something.
Father Jack: [being startled awake by the sound of Father Ted failing to stealth-pack a wine bottle] DRINK!
Father Ted: It's not drink, Father. It's just fizzy water.
Father Jack: Jacob's Creek chardonnay, 1991! - Future Cop: Haven can eavesdrop on phone conversations and detect people's heart rates without touching them. During a training simulation in the pilot, he sees a black man holding a gun and an elderly white woman screaming for help and arrests the woman because his sensors detect gunshot residue on her hands, indicating that she has fired recently.
- In Haven, Nathan has an acute sense of smell, likely heightened because his Trouble means he can't feel anything. In the first season, he has a collection of essential oils he keeps in his office and is able to identify a flower in a bouquet Audrey brings in with his eyes closed.
- Dale from Heroes has super-hearing, which she considers a gift but still has to listen to music at ridiculous levels to drown out the noise. When Sylar kills her and takes her power, he is at first having trouble with the overly loud noises.
- House: The hostage taker in the 5th season episode "Last Resort" suffers from hyperacusis. When talking on the phone he suddenly hangs up, runs across the room, and has someone open the blinds revealing a SWAT team sneaking outside the window. Even the hostages standing right next to that window didn't hear them approaching.
- Intergalactic: Candy smells things with her snake-like tongue, and can detect fear by doing so.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): Vampires gain heightened sight, smell, and are even capable of hearing people's heartbeats. It turns out vampires' telepathy also works on this principle, by literally hearing thoughts (Lestat says that, as with hearing heartbeats, they're people's brains at work). However, a vampire's sense of taste is severely diminished. Louis de Pointe du Lac imparts to Daniel Molloy that human food tastes like "paste, chalk, soap" to him. Claudia used to enjoy eating macarons, but after her transition into a vampire, only human blood tastes sweet to her palate.
- Jake 2.0: Jake has all of his body functions enhanced by the Nanomachines that inhabit his body, including his senses.
- Hyde in Jekyll. "Ooh, nice...but it's not your usual perfume, there's another one underneath." He later senses what gender a pregnant woman's baby is, how long ago an ex-smoker gave up, and how long said ex-smoker has to live before his tumor kills him.
- The titular Kamen Rider Gaim gains enhanced hearing in his Mid-Season Upgrade's third mode, Jimber Peach. He's seen practicing with it at the start of episode 24 before putting it to practical use over the next few, subverting the usual "overwhelming" scene.
- Kyle XY: Kyle can "concentrate" on one of his senses to supercharge it, being able to see in almost complete darkness or hear things hundreds of feet away through walls and the like. The downside is that he loses a proportionate amount of input from his other senses; e.g., if he is concentrating on his sight, he can't hear things as well.
- The police android Eve Edison from Mann & Machine was designed to have these. She can tell if a car needs an oil change by the smell of its exhaust.
- Monk: Adrian Monk can decipher what someone is writing on his back, even hours after it has happened. It's a gift... and a curse.
- Moonlight:
- Vampires have extremely acute senses, which Mick the private investigator uses to reconstruct recent events in an area by smelling them. Spilled blood might or might not have to be involved.
- The Fantastic Drug "Black Crystal" temporarily gives its users vampire-level sensory prowess, which makes for a pretty good trip just from how intense everything becomes.
- Ferals in Mutant X have animal-level senses, especially Shalimar, once she "evolves". Said "evolution" results in her hearing Jesse sneak up on her while listening to loud music on her MP3 player.
- Thermoman in My Hero (2000) also seems to have this power. He can smell natural disasters. Yes, smell natural disaster.
- The Outer Limits (1995): In "Afterlife", Stiles develops them as a result of being spliced with alien DNA. He can hear people speaking even inside a closed, soundproof cell and see them from quite a distance.
- Gus from Psych dubs his nose the Super Sniffer, and it has proven useful during investigations.
- In later seasons of Red Dwarf, the Cat becomes Starbug's pilot because he can smell Negative Space Wedgies approaching.
- The show titled The Sentinel has this as a premise.
- It comes with a catch, though: Whenever the titular Sentinel focuses on one of his senses, making it super-acute, he lost the other 4 almost completely. So while he can spot a sniper in a darkened window from half a city-block away on a moonless night, he meanwhile can't hear the guy right next to him screaming at him to get his head down.
- There is also a lost temple somewhere in the jungles of Peru, specifically built to increase the powers of the Sentinels to better protect the tribes. Unfortunately, it also appears to fry their brains after a while due to Sensory Overload. This is only shown once, and it's not clear if this Sentinel was doing something wrong.
- His super-senses also somehow translate into Improbable Aiming Skills. In one episode, he disarms a suspect by putting a bullet directly into her gun barrel from the other side of a bus. In another, he takes out a bad guy from a huge distance away while both he and the bad guy are in different helicopters. Oh, and he's always using his standard-issue police 9mm. Granted, Jim did have special ops training prior to becoming a cop, but this is pushing it.
- The super-sense for the title character of The Six Million Dollar Man is sight. The Bionic Woman has super-hearing.
- Clark in Smallville does this, as his build up to becoming Superman.
- Radu from Space Cases has super hearing, with the requisite complaining about loud (and small, irritating) noises, especially when he's in the same room as Catalina when she uses her supersonic screaming ability.
- Star Trek:
- Vulcan hearing is much more sensitive than human. In the original series episode "The Way to Eden", the antagonists use sound to knock out the crew of the Enterprise and Spock is shown covering his ears in pain several seconds before anyone else even notices the noise. Females also have a heightened sense of smell. Unfortunately, this leads to them typically finding the scent of humans to be rather vile.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine also establishes that Ferengi, with their enormous ears, have a very acute sense of hearing. Quark in particular has been known to hear the imperceptible humming of a hidden bomb, and Nog uses it to crack safes.
- Star Trek: Discovery reveals that humans in the well known Mirror Universe have an acute sensitivity to light. It's used as a plot point to reveal that a certain main character isn't who they were believed to be.
- The show Teen Wolf has this. Being a werewolf grants one such powers. Unfortunately for Derek, when he was feeling the incapacitating effects of the wolfsbane bullet, he received a painful sensory overload from the overwhelming noise and activity happening in the school. Especially from the school bell that happened to be placed right above him.
- Clement McDonald in Torchwood: Children of Earth has a superhuman sense of smell which he can use to determine everything from the presence of aliens to a person's sexuality.
- Desserians in Tracker have evolved on a desert world and have adapted their tongues to be able to taste poisons. Apparently, this ability also works when they're possessing a human body.
- Two members of the GUYS Crew in Ultraman Mebius have heightened senses — George with his sight, and Marina with her hearing.
Music
- The children's song "John Lee: Supertaster" by They Might Be Giants explores both the pro's and con's of that ability. The fridge logic (no pun intended) is that young children are more sensitive to strong flavors, so they may draw the conclusion they have superpowers from listening to this song.
- The Who:
- "Pinball Wizard" can play pinball so well because he us deaf, dumb, and blind, and thus can concentrate on feeling the vibrations of the ball without any distractions.
- In "I Can See For Miles" the singer claims that he could see his girlfriend's infidelity because "there's magic in my eyes."
"The Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal are mine to see on clearer days.
You thought that I would need a crystal ball to see right through the haze."
Tabletop Games
- Anima: Beyond Fantasy has this as advantages. For example, for vision you've low-light vision or supernatural vision (being able to see spirits and other supernatural stuff otherwise invisible), as cats in the setting have.
- Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. has this as options that can be added to cybernetic eyes or inner ears. For the former you've for example low-light vision or thermographic one, and for the latter you've — as examples — a voice analyzer or a broad-band radio scanner.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- In the 3.5th edition, nearly every species except humans has some sort of enhanced vision powers. 3.5 also had a number of feat-chains and classes that grant enhanced vision powers if you don't already have them.
- In the 4th edition, about half or so of the basic races have low-light vision.
- Some monsters (and the drow) can see without light using Darkvision. Absolutely necessary for the drow since they live in the Underdark, a place with almost no natural light. In 3.5 at least they suffer in-game penalties to their abilities if they go out in the daytime since they aren't used to the light of day.
- Eclipse Phase has sensory enhancement augmentations:
- Enhanced Vision: the character gains the ability to see a significant portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, letting them see "a total of several dozen colors, instead of the seven ordinary human eyes can perceive". Additionally, they have telescopic capabilities equivalent to binoculars.
- Enhanced Hearing: doubles the character's audible frequency range, as well as drastically increasing their auditory sensitivity. The given example is that they can "easily overhear even a softly spoken conversation at another table in a small restaurant".
- Enhanced Smell: a sense of smell "equal to that of a bloodhound", giving them the ability to identify people and objects by smell, track recent trails, and ascertain the health and emotional state of nearby people.
- Additionally, there are a few augmentations that provide the character with whole new senses: echolocation, direction sense, electrical sense, radiation sense, chemical sniffers, nanoscopic vision, lidar, and radar (although these last four are only available to synthmorphs).
- Exalted allows most of the characters who can use Essence to get some sort of super-sense. This ranges from the ability to perceive Essence flows to being able to recognizing the presence of a tasteless, odorless poison in wine by the dilution of the wine's own taste to seeing through all deceptions and attempts to conceal the truth.
- GURPS:
- The super-sensory Advantages for vision alone include: Telescopic Vision, Microscopic Vison, Infravision, Ultravision, Hyperspectral Vision, Acute Vision, Dark Vision, See Invisible, Night Vision and Penetrating Vision.
- And then there are still advantages for the other senses on top of that. Some classes give bonuses to Listen and/or Spot checks too.
- Also the Blind Fighting Skill.
- Mutants & Masterminds allows a wide variety of Super Senses through its Super-Senses power. Basically, any sense can gain enhancements to do things like allow it to be performed over a 360-degree radius, be hyper-acute, be able to sense fine details, perform the sense over a long distance, etc. And, of course, it allows for entirely new senses.
- Several Alertness and Investigation stunts in Spirit of the Century deal with pulp-level enhanced human senses. A straightforward one is Focused Sense, which allows a character to concentrate on a single pre-set sense (the stunt can be taken multiple times to cover more) to the exclusion of everything else, granting a bonus to appropriate Investigation rolls at the cost of a like penalty to rolls for anything else while the focus is maintained; Impossible Detail builds on that by letting a character potentially detect things that nobody else even could by allowing them to ignore any increased difficulties for a given important detail's size or subtlety.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The Bio-Augmentation process used to create Astartes includes a trio of organs that bestow perfect vision in near darkness (the Occulobe), enhanced hearing with the conscious ability to filter sound (the Lyman's Ear), and an enhanced sense of taste which allows them to track targets or distinguish specific chemical compositions (the Neuroglottis).
- In order to assist them in their mission to refine and develop the infectious blessings of the Plague God Nurgle, the Biologus Putrifiers have a unique mutation to their occulobes. These lidless, milky-white eyes are capable of seeing through an opponent's armour and flesh, allowing the Putrifier to perceive the spread and development of disease their latest concoction in minute detail.
- The Aeldari have senses far superior to those of a human. Their extremely heightened senses mean they need to exercise constant restraint or they risk becoming The Hedonist.
- Shows up a few times in The World of Darkness games:
- Vampires (in both games) can acquire the Discipline of Auspex, which allows those who've just gotten into it to increase their senses by superhuman levels. Of course, this comes with the downside of being knocked for a loop by sudden sensory changes.
- Likewise, werewolves in both games get access to superhuman level of smell, allowing them to easily track others.
- Beasts in Changeling: The Lost can buy the Contracts of Fang and Talon, the second level of which allows them to borrow the senses of the Contact's type of animal (e.g., the sight of a bird of prey, the scent tracking of canines). If the animal in question is not known for heightened senses (e.g., goats), they get a sizable flat bonus to Perception rolls instead.
Toys
- Played with/Deconstructed in BIONICLE.Dalu's Chargers can temporarily enhance one of her enemies' senses, which serves as a distraction as they try to cope with their new abilities. Gali actually went temporarily insane after having her vision enhanced.
Video Games
- The titular Baldi from Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning has incredible hearing abilities. He can hear, from across the entire school, sounds like an alarm clock, a door being opened, and a mathematical question being answered incorrectly; he can also discern who caused which noise, which allows him to track you specifically while ignoring everyone else. However, loud and constant noises like the aforementioned alarm clock hinder his ability, forcing him to deal with the noise before resuming the chase.
- Mai Natsume from BlazBlue has a bizarre super taste. She can detect even the most subtle of flavours, and can even somehow use it to see the thoughts and memories of the chef. She can also use her taste to determine the properties of supernatural objects. The downside is that normal food makes her sick, though on the other hand it lets her stomach Noel's atrocious cooking, as she can taste nothing but Noel's kindness and innocence.
- Nessiah is confirmed in Blaze Union to have superhuman hearing and sense of smell. This makes sense, as he isn't, after all, human and it's perfectly reasonable that his already-strong senses would develop further to compensate for his blindness.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: With the right Alchemy perk you can taste which ingredients can be used to make what potions, without this perk you can only learn the first effect of a possible four.
- The monsters of Evolve have an excellent sense of smell, allowing them to detect every animal, human, robot, and piece of equipment within 175 meters, even through walls and in a storm.
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: If Sol has the Eagle Eyes augment, their enhanced vision boosts their Perception and Animals skill gains by an additional 1 point.
- King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow has the Sense Gnomes, a set of five guards on the Isle of Wonder that each have a single hyper-evolved sense (one each of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing) that they use to ferret out intruders.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- In Majora's Mask, it is implied that a secondary function of the Bunny Hood is super hearing. Wearing it during the Postman's 10-second-counting challenge makes the on-screen timer visible and its ticking audible for the entire duration of the challenge, because Link can hear the Postman's stopwatch perfectly.
- Twilight Princess: As a wolf, Link gains heightened senses that allow him to follow scent trails, find objects underground, and see in the dark. They also enable him to see the physical forms of spirits and ghosts.
- Mass Effect 3 reveals that the Protheans had senses so incredibly developed and acute that they bordered on Psychic Powers, allowing them to literally read information encoded on a genetic level. Javik, the sole surviving Prothean, uses this ability to instantly absorb all known galactic languages from Shepherd's Translator Microbes, as well as all of Shepherd's knowledge of the current galactic situation, with a single touch.
- Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows: Pâquerette can somehow sense a dead end in the tutorial despite not seeing it and not being able to see the entire level. She can also smell bunnies through walls.
- In Puyo Puyo 7, Ringo tells Rulue she can see the Andromeda Galaxy in the sky during the daytime, meaning she has 20/4 vision - the ability to to pick up details from 20 feet away that most would have to be four feet away at most to notice. This might be referencing how Puyo Puyo as a whole has an Arc Number of 24.
- Touhou Project:
- Momiji has the ability to see great distances.
- Miko has all around excellent hearing, being able to hear soft sounds, sounds from far away, and comprehending large numbers of different things at once. Miko also has a super-inference power, so she can figure out all sorts of things about a person by talking to them for a short time.
- Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher possesses these courtesy of the mutation required to become a Witcher. It's best showcased in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, where he intimidates the Scoi'atel leader by sharing his knowledge of the four scouts he had hiding in the trees nearby, and diagnoses one as either a Fisstech addict or just suffering a cold, as he can hear the Elf wheezing.
Web Animation
- RWBY: Faunus with animal ears usually have them in addition to their human ears. Not only are the animal ears typically stronger, but having four ears is even better. This comes to a head in volume 6, when Blake is able to hear Yang's bike with her cat ears, while Adam (who only has human ears) can't. Blake correctly identifies exactly when and where Yang is coming from and is able to dodge out of the way when Yang hits Adam with her bike.
Webcomics
- Castoff: Vector apparently has super-sight. Where Arianna can barely see a light in the distance, he can see an inn and even read the sign at the front.
- Gwen's soulstone power in Earthsong is super-sight, and she spends most of her time up in Haven's tower scouring the landscape for new arrivals and threats.
- In El Goonish Shive, as a side effect of her telekinesis ability Grace has a remote tactile sense. It allows her to precisely sense the shape, location, and size of things in her vicinity as long as she is in a form that includes her antennae. It is accurate enough to sense where and how a twenty-sided die has rolled a few meters away from her without looking at it. It can also be used to enhance the fidelity of her clone form shapeshifting by sensing the exact shape of her target. A downside to this sense is that she is prone to Sensory Overload in crowds and she can't turn it off without morphing away the antennae.
- Florence Ambrose of Freefall, being a genetically engineered anthropomorphic red wolf, has heightened smell and hearing compared to a human, to the point of analysing a person's family history and whether their (not present) children had oatmeal that morning. The hearing was demonstrated by an anecdote of her time as an engineer: turns out humans are really good at designing industrial machinery that's quiet in their audible range, with the result that she spent a long (and retroactively embarrassing) time shouting over a background noise no-one else could hear.
- This apparently comes with being an avatar of the troll god Tectonicus in Guilded Age.
- Terezi from Homestuck is blind but makes up for it with what is essentially some form of synesthesia which leans into this — she can approximate sight by smelling colors and occasionally tasting them as well for greater clarity. She isn't really treated as having a superhuman ability to smell normal smells, but her ability to smell and taste colors is good enough that she can read text by sniffing and licking her monitor. (She's an alien, but her species' senses are largely the same as humans'.)
- The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!:
- Snookums the Tentacle Bunny is a Kaiju who got shrunk to the size of a basketball. Snookums still has all the nerve endings of a huge creature, now compressed down to a small space, granting him Super Senses. This makes him an excellent tracker.
- Princess Voluptua's people the Nemesites, being flying creatures, have excellent distance vision.
- Inhibit: David is Hypersensory, meaning he has heightened senses.
- Fiona Fennec of Kevin & Kell has amazing hearing, even considering her naturally large ears, she's considered to have good hearing. For example, she can hear where gophers dig to try to get the team's crops, where the ground starts to thaw, and where N.O.P.E. was trying to break into Lindesfarne's house. On the downside, it also means she knows exactly when mating season for the rabbits is.
- Vampires in The Kingfisher seem to have all senses heightened. Occasionally, a human will be differentiated in the comic with a fiery aura, which represents a vampire observing their body heat.
- In No Rest for the Wicked, both Red (a somewhat Ax-Crazy version of Little Red Riding Hood) but especially November (based on "The Princess and the Pea") have this; November is so sensitive that she can even smell if you're royal or not (including discerning if it's from birth of a Rags to Riches thing).
- Corrick of Plume has "hawk eyes" as probably the least noticeable part of his powerset.
- Schlock Mercenary:
- The titular Schlock is a Carboscilicate Amorph, who has been described as having "Molecular recognition better than a whole team of bloodhounds", allowing him to easily identify people by smell or taste. Arguably, he also classifies as having superior eyesight, not because his eyes are particularly good, but because of how many he can use at once, and the fact that he can move them around at will - thus allowing him to determine the altitude, speed, and climb-rate of an aircraft through triangulation. Finally, his sense of hearing is about as powerful, to the point he can eavesdrop through entire ships and can listen to an implanted microphone in another person's ear at conversational distance, better than the person with the actual microphone implanted. As Doctor Bunnigus explained, "assume he can always hear what you're saying".
- "Legs" has a superb sense of taste, assisted by her Overly Long Multipurpose Tongue.
- "Ebby" has a very large single eye that has amazingly high resolution, allowing him to see the recording implant in a human iris and that overcomes the 3D vision of a cycloptic race by focusing very quickly and repeatedly, giving him better rangefinding than the average human.
- Michelle of Skin Deep can read a magazine from high on a cliff due to her being a sphinx (part lion and part eagle). Merial, on the other hand, can see well underwater but needs glasses on land.
- Tower of God:
- In "The Hidden Floor", the young version of Jahad can hear there isn't anyone in a building he sees in the distance across a chasm, and sense that people are trying to tunnel past him under the ground.
- Being a Ranker apparently does not only mean that you have powers that would leave most heroes trembling, it also greatly enhances your senses: While Lero-Ro has exceptional ears, Quant can make out the position and number of his enemies by the flow of Shinsu in the atmosphere.
- Shelly of Wapsi Square now seems to have super-eyesight due to being a sphinx.
Web Original
- Sentry (His name is not Kid Sentinel. He's not a sidekick, he's an assistant, thank you very much), played by Daniel in Fandible's Rotted Capes game. His superpowers grant him enhanced senses, including the eyesight of an eagle, and the taste of an Italian. Often wears a blindfold, so he doesn't have to bear witness to the Zombie Apocalypse around him.
- In The Perils of Enhancegirl, the eponymous heroine possesses all of the classical five, with the exception of hearing. She most frequently uses these powers in combat, allowing her to sense well in advance what her opponents are about to do, and respond accordingly.
- In Tales of MU, Mack learns that she can use her innate magical ability to boost her senses.
- Whateley Universe:
- There are lots of mutants with one or more enhanced senses. Aquerna has the spirit of the squirrel, so she has enhanced sight and smell (as well as being regarded as one of the school losers). Chaka has figured out how to use her Ki Manipulation abilities to simulate seeing in slow motion. Jinn Sinclair can see emotions and magic and superpowers. And so on.
- There's also a boy at the school who has super-smell. It has only been shown as a liability, like the time Jade went to class after working in the sewers (her regular job) and getting monster goo splashed on her clothes (it's a really dangerous sewer system), and the boy passed out from the smell.
- Phase also has an amazingly good sense of taste, but this is probably not a true superpower, just something acquired from years of being a rich kid dining on the best foods in the world.
- The Worm universe has quite a lot of super-powered individuals with enhanced senses of some kind — the first one encountered is the supervillain Lung, who has supernaturally-acute hearing in his Scaled Up form.
Western Animation
- In Futurama, Professor Farnsworth creates a Smelloscope that can sniff out far away galaxies, invoking this.
- In The Simpsons episode "Father Knows Worst", Homer gains new taste buds that magnify his sense of taste to such a degree that eating anything with even the smallest amount of flavour is intolerable if not hazardous to him.
- Wildmutt, one of Ben's alien forms in Ben 10 has no eyes, but can navigate through smell, echolocation, infrared sensing, a combination of those, or something similar. It isn't entirely clear.
- Bravestarr. BRAVESTARR! Eyes of the hawk, ears of the wolf.
- Freakazoid!: Candle Jack. The guy would whisk you away whenever you said his name.
- In the episode of Teen Titans "The Quest", Robin is challenged in a cave by a snake creature; Robin notices that he's blind, and at first refuses, saying it wouldn't be fair. The snake responds by extinguishing the lights, saying it's fair now, because they both can't see. Robin soon learns that this isn't true; the snake doesn't need sight, using his hearing to fight, and now Robin is the one at a disadvantage.
- In the Samurai Jack episode "Jack and the Blind Archers", Jack tries to assault a tower guarded by, uh, blind archers, who have such an acute sense of hearing that he can't get near them. The tower is also stationed in the middle of a snow ridden field, and any movement on the snow alerts them to his presence. Eventually, Jack uses his own skill at blind-fighting to defeat them.
- In She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Catra is a Cat Girl and thus has similar skills to a cat such as enhanced hearing and smell.
- Feryl from Visionaries received his Wolf Totem because his heightened senses give him "amazing tracking skills". It is explicitly stated that his sense of smell is more acute than normal, allowing him to smell, among other things, fresh air and rusted metal. In addition, the episode "The Dark Hand of Treachery" implies that his eyesight is also keener than usual.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: Toph is able to use her earthbending to make up for her blindness by sensing the vibrations in the ground, but the Fire Nation play believes she uses echolocation instead (and has her played by a huge guy to better fit her personality).
- In He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002) the Speleans are a subterranean race that, like the bats they resemble, have far better ears than humans do.
- One episode of Edgar & Ellen had Ellen be temporarily blinded; the blindness resulted in her other senses becoming incredibly developed.
- In the Ready Jet Go! episode "Just the Right Distance From the Sun", Celery reveals that Bortronians have super hearing. While this isn't mentioned again in any other episodes, it does explain why she conveniently drives the minivan up whenever the kids mention going to space.
- Wakfu: Evangelyne, as a Cra, has above-average senses when focusing, notably telescopic vision.
- Cats Don't Dance: Max can hear a bowtie snap from several meters away. Especially notable as his ears are comically small for his size.
Real Life
- There are a couple of neural layouts that result in heightened senses. Not to mention there are some mental issues that result in blending of the senses!
- It is possible to train your sense of touch to become more sensitive, though this does take a lot of time. Blind people rapidly gain super sensitivity in their fingers, allowing some of them to read Braille with amazing speed.
- It's common for autistic peoplc to have an increased sensitivity to sensory input, i.e. a low-key version of this trope. It's a brain thing, though, not a case of having better sensory organs: a neurotypical brain ignores or strips out a lot of the sensory data it receives, so you won't be overwhelmed by the vast amount of things your senses are picking up at any given moment. If your brain doesn't filter that data as much as is typical, your senses will be better but you'll be more susceptible to Sensory Overload. There's also related hazards like perceiving totally ordinary sensations as unpleasantly intense (and perhaps intensely unpleasant), or being unable to concentrate on the important stuff when you're receiving both important and unimportant sensory input.
An autistic artist is known for producing hyper-accurate drawings of cityscapes from a single glance from above specifically because his brain doesn't filter out any visual stimulus and he can hold the complete image in his head as he draws. - Hypersensitivities, particularly to smells or tastes, aren't all that unusual. Many people who are considered "picky eaters" are simply more taste-sensitive than others, hence find some foods unpalatable due to unpleasant subtleties of flavor.
- Supertasters are especially susceptible to this, they generally have an excessive amount of fungiform papillae (the taste buds that actually taste) and tend to be highly sensitive to bitter compounds. Many supertasters will often have rather bland diets.
- It doesn't even have to be the result of a dish's taste or odor, those can both be exquisitely delightful, all for naught when the food's texture happens to disagree rather vehemently with one's palate.
- Similar to the above Autism and Hypersensitivities is the auditory disorder known as Misophonia - literally "hatred of sound". To date, little research has been done on it, but while the ears are normal it is believed to be an over connectivity between the auditory nerve and the limbic center of the brain - which controls the fight or flight response. Thus sufferers experience an uncontrollable hyperactive fight or flight instinct when presented with otherwise everyday sounds which normal people don't even take notice of. For those afflicted, being subjected to these "trigger sounds" for a minute has been compared to a normal person being subjected to fingernails on a chalkboard for an hour. Common triggers include such things as the sound of another person chewing, the hum of electronics or florescent lights, tapping fingers or clicking pens. Some sufferers have also reported being triggered by some visual cues, generally when seen out of the corner of the eye.
- People who use their sense of smell professionally, such as judges of fine wine, often carry nasal-spray bottles of distilled water with them to invoke this trope as needed. That's because spraying water vapor into the nasal cavity liquefies its mucus, making it easier for odors-molecules to reach the olfactory receptors and be detected.
- Migraines can also increase hearing, sense of smell, sense of touch and the ability to sense light. Of course, since all of those come with the price of pain during said migraine, this is far from a good thing.
- Humans have more sensory receptors for touch than many other land vertebrates, mostly because we have thin, hairless skin on so much of our body surface. Not as concentrated in one place as a raccoon's paws or a star-nosed mole's snout, but a fairly keen tactile sense overall.
- Some people with blindness have developed advanced echolocation abilities, allowing them to "see" with their ears. Most notably Daniel Kish, himself blind since the age of 13 months, trains other people with blindness in the art of listening to echoes from the environment to determine the distance of objects. His own echolocation ability is developed to a degree where he can safely engage in his favorite hobby — mountain biking.
- Another famous example would be the late Ben Underwood, who lost both eyes to retinal cancer two weeks before his third birthday, and was considered by his doctor to be one of the most proficient human echolocators.
- It was recently discovered that the deaf people's eyes actually reconstruct themselves in order to allow for enhanced peripheral vision. This allows them to better monitor their surroundings visually, which comes in handy when they can't hear someone come up behind them.
- Going the other way, people who are blind often have a "facial vision" which, through some not-well-understood combination of feeling subtle differences in air pressure, and hearing rebounded sounds (basically human echolocation) allows them to gather information on the the location and sizes of obstacles in the local area, without having to touch them at all.
- It's not uncommon for people with schizophrenia to experience sensory hypersensitivity, and to have problems tuning out irrelevant information. Abnormalities in the P50 wave, a brain response involved in auditory gating, are considered one of the best-established biomarkers for the disorder.
