Hyper-Awareness

"I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars in the parking lot. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray pickup truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking."

— Jason Bourne, The Bourne Identity

No detail escapes the notice of our character. With only a brief Sherlock Scan, he can deduce intimate and accurate information about an individual. With Hyper-Awareness, they will sit down and know how many people are in the area, what they are doing, which ones are important to the plot and what would be the best exit without attracting attention.

For example: During a stroll through a crowded casino while having an important conversation, he can notice that the woman at the outermost Baccarat table is wearing knock-off Dior, yet playing $10,000 gold plaques with abandon, left-handed, and she has a "tell" that is a slight shaking of her left foot.

Sometimes this is an element of a character's personality that has been well set up. Especially in detective / crime shows it may be the entire point of the story.

At other times, it is a new attribute that only serves the plot. It may never come up again.

Can overlap with the Scarily Competent Tracker, Living Lie Detector and Photographic Memory. Compare Super-Senses when it is literally that their sense of hearing, sight, smell and touch are hyperactive. Compare Spider-Sense for characters who are uncannily aware of imminent danger. May be visualized with things like Fluorescent Footprints or a stylized Bullet Time Stat-O-Vision like readout of what they see. Contrast Failed a Spot Check.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Arachnid heroine Alice Fuji has a concentration disorder that for most of her life only caused her to be absentminded and thus mocked by everyone, until she's trained to control and use it as a superpower. The worst enemies she faces are those who can also somehow instantly react to any threat around them.
• Caerula Sanguis from Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, being a fighter of no mean skill, lives mainly off of this trope, which she partly attained through lots and lots of combat experience. Even before picking up her special ability to read neural impulses, she had long set a rule for fighting with a sword against guns, carefully watching the gunner for his or her tell before each shot, and counterattacking when within a certain number of steps depending on the kind of gun. After she gains her special ability, however, all bets are off. Coupled with her ability to quickly gauge terrain and her drilled-in experience with and against several kinds of weapons, this allows her to take enemy capabilities and personalities — even subconscious reflexes — into account and completely take control of any fight.
• Ranpo Edogawa of Bungou Stray Dogs has the ability "Ultra Deduction" which allows him to instantly notice and process every single detail of a crime scene. The result is that he can solve a complex murder case within seconds of him putting on his glasses. Oh, and it turns out that Ultra Deduction isn't actually a special ability (as shown when Dazai secretly uses his Power Nullifier ability on Ranpo while he's doing his deduction). He's just naturally that perceptive, but deludes himself into believing he has a superpower like his allies.
• Case Closed:
  • In addition to the Sherlock Scan, Shinichi Kudo (and hence, Conan) has this gift. At one case, Shinichi sees a girl reaching for her murdered boyfriend's bag on a cabin overhead luggage compartment, remembers something, tells her story and then pulls the bag off the compartment. What we notice is the story she told us, what Shinichi notices is that she used her right hand before she told her story, and then she switched to her left hand afterwards. It was important because the murder weapon is a sharp object; the bra worn by the girl has a detachable metallic strap which she sharpened one of them. She wears the bra during the scene (since she can't throw it away) and sharp edge grazed her skin when she raised her hand and hence, she switched to her left hand.
  • Hattori Heiji. Back when they were in middle school, both Shinichi and Heiji solved a case at the exact same pace of deduction, so he must have the same hyperawareness as Shinichi.
• Cowboy Bebop has the crew of the Bebop falling under this trope. They almost always know when someone is not being forthcoming with them or when someone is out to get them. It's how they survive sudden gunfights in bars and attempted robberies by street gangs.
• Full Metal Panic!:
  • Nami (from the novels) claims that she was able to tell that Sōsuke was trained as an AS pilot due to callouses on his wrists and elbows that she briefly noticed while he was changing. Lemon, on the other hand, is convinced she was just checking him out.
  • Sōsuke himself has developed a preternatural sense of danger — in The Second Raid anime, Wraith mentions how he flips out whenever she points a sniper rifle at him for fun.
• Mai in Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star remembers positions softball players enter for a split second (for instance, Saki in mid-pitch) accurately enough that she can draw their poses, compare the drawings, and demonstrate how the players are moving differently than usual. She can also remember the faces, well enough to recognize them as classmates, of people she saw flying through the night sky at a great distance. The former looked like horrible writing at the time, but after the latter, seems more like a clumsy attempt at Chekhov's Skill.
• Golgo 13: It's practically impossible for the eponymous protagonist to miss out any details that would jeopardize his assignment.
• Several characters in Hunter × Hunter do this, including the main character, Gon. It's often taken to Charles Atlas Superpower levels (though perhaps justified by the setting's Ki Manipulation), especially with Senritsu, who has a truly insane sense of hearing.
• The main character from Lock On! has this in his left eye, which he calls his Shutter Eye. It is so powerful that he can even use it to detect freshly made dents in a wooden floor to track where a friend had walked off to. However, it is shown that if he overuses this, he becomes incredibly fatigued. To limit, it he usually wears an eye patch over it.
• Naruto:
  • Shikamaru, the lazy genius, has shown this at times, as has Shino.
  • Kakashi too, to the point where he was the only one to successfully see through and analyze the Big Bad's technique and come up with an equally successful counterattack in minutes. Similarly, and perhaps more on topic, he was able to deduce that Zabuza truly loved Haku.
  • In the Konoha 11 filler arc, Ino can tell someone's profession by the condition of their hands, and concludes that the corpse that is supposedly that of the trap ninja they're dealing with is fake because it doesn't have any.
• In Negima! Magister Negi Magi, several of the girls in Negi's class qualify for this, but Yue in particular is very, very good at noticing minute details.
• In Reborn! (2004), hyper-awareness is one of the things that links Tsuna to the first head of the Vongola family. It's actually in his blood though it's unknown if other Vongola boss possess the same traits. In the anime, the test of intuition is the one Tsuna could pass with closed eyes if he wanted to and if Verde wasn't trying to experiment on them.
• In Rurouni Kenshin, Sagara Sanosuke has a minor level of hyper awareness earned from a life in a gang, allowing him to detect many traps before they go off. This allows him to conveniently play Mr. Exposition for some of Kenshin's fights. It was also used to identify Saito before he could do his big reveal. All this doesn't help him overcome his lack of direction sense.
• Nishigami from Shindere Shoujo to Kodoku na Shinigami has this in spades, useful for an Amateur Sleuth.
• Doctor Alex Brisbane from Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters, when he, Yugi and his friends go to the inner places of a temple, says that he observes his surroundings since childhood, preventing them from going into traps. It is the second time that he enters the temple. Apparently not true because he's currently possessed by Alexander the Great's Enemy Without, who knows every detail of the temple.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Batman has this sometimes, in addition to being Crazy-Prepared, and Nightwing and Red Robin both usually display an uncanny awareness of their surroundings. Being aware of everyone around you and what they're wearing and doing was the first thing Dick started training Tim on back when he was still new. This is part of the reason the entire Batclan is so difficult to sneak up on.
  • Barbara Gordon, alias Batgirl, is highly intelligent and has an eidetic memory. She cannot miss out any details and she always remembers everything (including stuff she would rather forget).
  • From Gotham Central, we have Josie Mac, who has the psychic ability to walk into a room and tell if anything is out of place and where it actually belongs. Frustrates her co-workers to no end when they keep hiding her coffee mug and she finds it with no problem every time.
  • Post-Infinite Crisis, in addition to Superman having Super-Senses, his memory and super-fast thought processes have allowed him to make such observations as noting changes in the average heart rate of the average Metropolis citizen, stated numerically (indicating an overall increase in anxiety after an attack on the city). He's so good at this that he can pick out the heartbeats of individuals he is familiar with.
  • Supergirl has also demonstrated having impressive capability for analysis and deductive reasoning (which she calls 'super-instinct' in the Silver Age) owing to her Super-Senses, heightened memory and natural intelligence. In a classic story, she recognizes a heartbeat because "with hearing as sensitive as mine, they're as individual as fingerprints".
• One Donald Duck comic by Don Rosa reveals that Donald has this, as a result of raising three children that look and act nigh-identical. When Scrooge quizes him on which nephew is which, Donald points out differences like a mosquito bite and a single freckle, all at a glance. Of course, once Scrooge tries to exploit this talent, things quickly go south.
• It's explained that Spirit has this ability in G.I. Joe (IDW), to do away with the "Native American Tracking Master" stereotype. He's still Native American, but descended from the Pueblo tribes (city dwellers) and was raised in the suburbs. He was diagnosed with hyper-awareness as a child, and started living in the wilderness to avoid overstimulation, while learning to focus his ability.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Captain Mar-Vell was gifted with Cosmic Awareness that let him perceive everything around him. The limits of this ability weren't clear, but when he got it, he sensed without any mirror that his hair had turned from white to blond. He also could find the best timing to avoid a hit or to attack himself, and was also a plot point when Thanos became the entire universe thanks to the Cosmic Cube. He even became aware that he had cancer long before he underwent any medical tests to confirm it.
  • Due to having believed to have gained her powers in a freak accident that spliced her DNA with Mar-Vell's (in fact it actually woke up her half-Kree heritage), Carol Danvers also has Cosmic Awareness... but her version is much less reliable than Mar-Vell's, and often forgotten (with the precise correlation between the two being uncertain). She also doesn't have access to this power during her time as Binary, though it's reappeared a little in recent years, particularly during The Ultimates (2015).
  • Daredevil often has to deal with this as a side-effect of his powers; while he can't actually see due to his blindness, his other four senses are so enhanced that he possesses full awareness of everything around him, with the disadvantage that his enhanced senses can cause him pain if he is exposed to particularly powerful stimuli.
  • Amadeus Cho, of The Incredible Hercules, has a similar ability with similar floating purple equations as part of his super-intelligence.
  • Rogue from X-Men was originally a copy of a copy, having used her default Power Parasite ability to permanently add Carol Danvers's Combo Platter Powers to herself. Her Cosmic Awareness showed up even less frequently than Carol's did, and she lost the power when Carol's "essence" was permanently expunged from her body.
• Top 10 has Synaesthesia Jackson, who has this with a twist - while she's quick to pick up on subtle details, she also has, well, synaesthesia, which means they're processed through different visual feeds. For instance, in one early issue, she starts picking up notes from "Ode to Joy" at a crime scene... only to realize several issues later that it was from the "Joy" perfume the killer was wearing.
• In Usagi Yojimbo, Usagi's teacher made sure he would be constantly alert for danger — a vital habit for any warrior.

Fan Works

• Advice and Trust: Rei is the first person to put together that her co-workers Shinji and Asuka are behaving differently, and rapidly comes to the conclusion they are secretly dating. Accidental (and later not-so-accidental) trolling ensues.
• Child of the Storm:
  • Harry being increasingly hyper-aware of his surroundings and of other people, allowing him to read them like a book — even when he isn't able to use his Psychic Powers. While part of it is trained, it's strongly indicated that he inherited a talent for it from his mother.
  • Lily, as mentioned, was (and being Not Quite Dead, is) an example of this. As Sirius puts it, while the rest of them were smart, Lily saw things — which is how, during the First Order of the Phoenix, she figured out that Wanda was pregnant with Hermione being the only one apart from Remus at the time to even guess. Hermione makes the comparison between her and Harry when she encounters Lily's spirit and sees this tendency firsthand.
• The Games We Play (The Gamer/RWBY): Jaune gradually unlocks a wide variety of information-gathering abilities, and eventually learns that there is a reason why these abilities are moving him closer and closer towards omniscience.
• Played for horror in Nightingale when Neji's byakugan — which gives him X-Ray Vision and almost 360 degrees of vision — is turned on permanently. He slowly loses his mind and begins hallucinating because he can no longer handle seeing everything around him all at once.
• Turnabout Storm: Sonata is a unicorn with the special talent of hyper awareness, which gives her yet another parallel with Ace Attorney characters, Apollo Justice in particular. This ability is quite handy to her, especially for her blackmailing activities.
• The changeling who interrogates Shadowfax in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction "You Obey" has the ability to not only read even the smallest cues from his victims, but also read their auras to the point where he knows when he's being lied to.

Films — Animated

• The Incredibles:
  • Stretching doesn't seem to be Helen's only power; she has super-vision as well, as she notices an incredibly tiny piece of rubble on Bob's clothes and the detailed stitching on Bob's old super-suit.
  • Though not foolproof, Bob's "danger sense" (mentioned in his profile in the DVD extras) lets him anticipate imminent danger... including an angry wife!

Films — Live-Action

• This is the principal ability of Riko Rinda in All-Round Appraiser Q: The Eyes of Mona Lisa. She is able to tell the veracity, history and value of an object at a glance, which is how she gets pulled into involvement with the titular masterwork. She was even able to learn basic French overnight, which is hard enough for someone who has a Latinate first language, much less Japanese.
• The Assignment (1997): Carlos has this ability, picking up even the smallest out of place details in a location, which Annibal is taught to double him.
• Jason Bourne of The Bourne Series has this because of his Treadstone training. In The Bourne Ultimatum, he is able to direct a journalist through a train station with instructions from a cell phone, all the while avoiding the cameras himself and identifying and disabling the agents who are trying to track the journalist down. The Bourne Legacy explains that this is partly thanks to a wonder-drug.
• In Casino Royale (2006), Bond and Vesper trade instant analyses of one another on the train.
• In Down Periscope, Sonar Technician 2nd Class E.T. "Sonar" Lovacelli can hear how much change is dropped on a nearby submarine. And a crewman eating an Oreo on another deck. And a couple of lobsters dukin' it out. This IS helped by his listening equipment, but it takes more than fancy gear to point out that someone dropped "forty-five cents. A quarter... and two dimes", after jerking as if an explosion went off in his ear after the coins hit the deck. He can also hear a whisper from a long distance away with other, much louder, sounds masking it. Naturally, his former CO considered him a security risk.
• Used by Kato in The Green Hornet. It's used to explain how he can fight so efficiently. It is also parodied and then used straight by Brit when he spends several minutes staring into space while working out the plot twist and then to save Kato, respectively.
• Seaman Jones in The Hunt for Red October demonstrates this with aplomb, even when not wearing the sonar-set's headphones, onboard Red October, when one of the titular submarine's officers hears a torpedo and frets that the Americans are shooting at them again, Jones corrects him.
  Jones: Pitch is too high. The torpedo's Russian.
• Limitless is built on this trope. One dose of the Super Serum NZT, and Sherlock Scanning becomes a natural reflex.
• In Married to the Mob, mob boss Tony seems to have this as a result of sheer paranoia, being able to tell from almost unnoticeable little hints that his mistress is two-timing him, a new clown at a fast-food restaurant signals an impending assassination attempt, and that a guy he keeps noticing is an FBI agent tailing him.
• In Men in Black, this is one of the reasons why James Edwards was selected to become Agent J.
  Zed: May I ask why you felt little Tiffany deserved to die?
  Edwards: Well, she was the only one that actually seemed dangerous at the time, sir.
  Zed: How'd you come to that conclusion?
  Edwards: Well, first I was gonna pop this guy hanging from the streetlight, and I realized, y'know, he's just working out. I mean, how would I feel if somebody come runnin' in the gym and bust me in my ass while I'm on the treadmill? Then I saw this snarling beast guy, and I noticed he had a tissue in his hand, and I'm realizing, y'know, he's not snarling, he's sneezing. Y'know, ain't no real threat there. Then I saw little Tiffany. I'm thinking, y'know, eight-year-old white girl, middle of the ghetto, bunch of monsters, this time of night with quantum physics books? She about to start some shit, Zed. She's about eight years old, those books are way too advanced for her. If you ask me, I'd say she's up to something. And to be honest, I'd appreciate it if you eased up off my back about it. [Beat] Or do I owe her an apology?
• In Mission: Impossible (1996), Ethan meets his IMF superior for a debriefing after a botched Impossible Mission. He looks around the cafe and, despite Latex Perfection, recognizes around him another IMF team that had also been present at the botch.
• Painkiller Jane: Jane gains this ability from her enhancement, suddenly growing aware of minute details that she didn't pick up before.
• In Raising Arizona, Bounty Hunter Leonard Smalls tracks his prey to a trailer home. Upon seeing the chaos inside (two men had just had a destructive fight there), he immediately picks up the one clue he needs, a scrap of paper.
• Sherlock Holmes (2009) shows the downside of this: it never turns off and he's almost constantly being overloaded. In the sequel, the gypsy queen asks, "What do you see?" Holmes replies, "Everything. That is my curse."
• The T-850 Terminator in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines reveals that he has basic knowledge of human physiology and is able to deduce whether or not a human is lying or otherwise being deceitful.
• Colonel Hal Moore in We Were Soldiers seems to have a situational awareness that seriously borders on pre-cognition, being able to read the tide of battle a little too well resulting from decades of military service, one shared by the North Vietnamese commander in turn.

Literature

• The Tesks in Alien in a Small Town were genetically engineered as soldiers to have both heightened situational awareness and animal-like superhuman senses. This had the unintended side effect of essentially making them empaths, able to read a person's intentions and emotional state effortlessly through heightened sense of smell and awareness of body language. They tend to get rattled in the presence of Starfish Aliens, though, because they find them unreadable.
• Books of Bayern: In River Secrets, Razo apparently has this ability but never noticed it. His commanding officer asks him a series of questions about small details he's observed (such as "Who do you know who has ink stains on their hands?"), which Razo answers easily, and seems surprised when he's told that most people wouldn't have noticed.
• Allison Parmeter from Paul Cornell's novel British Summertime has this ability, which she refers to as "chipshopness" or the ability to "read the world". She can see patterns and meaning in anything, from facial expressions to sports statistics to the arrangement of buildings on a street. This lets her detect lies, predict the results of upcoming sports matches as part of her job in a betting shop, and determine the most likely location of specific types of establishments in cities she's never been in before, such as the closest fish and chip shop when she gets lost on her first trip to Edinburgh. She views this as a curse, since she is forced to face up to things she'd rather not know about, like people's real feelings towards her and the upcoming end of the world.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Joslyn has this, using it to pick small details up that others miss, for instance about other people's appearances (even their smells) that provide clues on who they are.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Tamlin is unbelievably perceptive of his surroundings, much to Feyre's dismay, given that most of her attempts at deceiving the High Fae of the Spring Court are botched before they even start.
• Deconstructed in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The autistic protagonist "sees everything", and at one point, he tries to explain this to the reader. He talks about a particular moment of his life, looking at a field of cows, and he remembers the slope of the field and the patterns on the cows and the position of the sun in the sky and one detail after another after another and all of this goes through his conscious mind at once... he can barely handle being in a room he's never been in before, because of all the information crowding in on him at once. Only familiarity makes things better, and he won't even move the furniture in his house to a different configuration for fear of the effect on his mind. He doesn't quite consider this Blessed with Suck, since he's a Sherlock Holmes fanboy and likes being able to use the Sherlock Scan, but it definitely impairs his ability to live a normal life. However, his being autistic (and thus having trouble understanding people) means that, even though he notices all the details a Sherlock Scan requires, he has trouble analysing what those details mean in context and putting together the sort of deduction that Sherlock might.
• Enhanced senses are just one of the many benefits of sinanju in The Destroyer. Remo can fight in the dark using his hearing, detect snipers over distance by the feel of the wind on his arms, determine the number of people in a room from its ambient temperature, and figure out a door code from the residual heat in the buttons the last person touched some hours ago. (Later, he simply opens an electronic lock through the sinanju art of manipulating electric signals. Yes, really.) And people think the fighting skills go into the superhuman...
• Discworld:
  • Klatchian Coffee takes you from drunk to sober and all the way out the other side, so you're knurd (anti-drunk). At this point, the rose-colored glasses are stripped away from you, and you see reality for how it really is. ("This involves a lot of screaming.") Then you drink lots of and lots of orakh (a Klatchian Gargle Blaster) and swear you'll never get knurd again. It is joked that Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch was born two drinks on the knurd side of sober, so he needs a drink or two to just be normal. This both makes him intensely cynical and gives him a tendency towards alcoholism (it's been jokingly suggested it's because "he gets the dosage wrong."). It also effectively makes him the straight man for an entire world of absurdity. Vimes, who says that new coppers glance once at a street and miss all the important things, like people hiding in the shadows and trying to kill you; experienced coppers like Angua will look carefully to make sure they get everything, and really experienced ones like Colon and Nobby will take one look, because that's all they need, has another type of hyper-awareness in that most of the time he can glance down a darkened street and see everyone there, including those trying to hide in the shadows.
  • One of the few people who can hide from him is, predictably, Lord Vetinari (who notably failed all his stealth examinations at the Assassins' Guild because he was marked absent — think about it). Vetinari is so clinically aware that he makes Vimes look normal — despite Vimes being described as "the most cynical bastard that ever walked under the sun". In Guards! Guards!, he is shocked and transfixed by the sheer depth of Vetinari's cynicism.
    Vimes: You really believe that? ...And you still get up in the morning?
  • Another example from Vetinari is at the end of The Truth when he corrects a newspaper printer's spelling mistake... which is in the middle of the text, and from Vetinari's perspective is upside-down and back-to-front.
  • Brutha from Small Gods, in addition to a perfectly Photographic Memory, is also hyper-aware, as he can recite a complete description of a room, down to the most minute detail, after only a few seconds of looking at it. And can also repeat anything spoken to him, word for word.
  • Tiffany Aching has First Sight (seeing what's really there, not what you expect to see) in The Wee Free Men, and it plays a reasonably large part in A Hat Full of Sky. Most witches have this (except possibly Magrat), and in Mort, we're told that it's the first thing wizards learn at UU as well. (Okay, the first thing they learn is where the privies are and so on, but after all that it's the first thing.)
  • Susan Sto Helit is also revealed to have this in Thief of Time, as part of her heritage from her grandfather the Grim Reaper.
• The Dresden Files: This is a minor effect of a potion that Harry puts together in Fool Moon. It's a "pick-me-up" or a "super-coffee", and before it wears off, he has shades of this. And composes a symphony. And blows all the tires of a truck on the highway. It was a sharing kind of mood. He also has shades of this when Thomas asks him to size up all the people in the park at the end of Turn Coat. This one is much more mundane — throughout the series he's mentioned things he's noticed as an investigator. Sure, most of them are features of women (or people who might be trying to kill him, who are frequently women), but his skill as an investigator is renowned, and it's a very practicable skill as an investigator. Earlier in the same book, Harry got access to a kind of localized omniscience called "Intellectus". He realizes, while in its throes, that because he's unfamiliar with it, he's visibly reacting to it (knowing there's someone there, he's trying to look for them) and therefore must look crazy. More than usual, anyway. It makes his trying to convince two hostile parties to work together that much harder.
• Dune:
  • The Bene Gesserit use their hyper-awareness as a tool for manipulation. Descriptions of Bene Gesserit thought processes in the novels are often comparable to chess masters watching the world around them like one big chessboard, and calmly noting their accruing advantage. At one point a Bene Gesserit correctly deduces that there is a hidden room on the other side of a large banquet room by noting the subtle geometry of the walls of the room and the objects in it as being specifically designed to produce a slight echo where those in the hidden room can listen in.
  • Even with mental processing as incredible as that, the Bene Gesserit still only learn those abilities as a supplementary skill for their main areas of expertise. The mentats, however, specialize specifically in Hyper-Awareness and so are infinitely more adept then even the best Bene Gesserit. This is because Mentats are, literally, human computers, as the inhabitants learned all too well what happens when they make a machine in the likeness of a human mind...
• The General Series shows a computer-assisted version. Through Raj Whitehall's mental link with the supercomputer Center, Center is able to use all of Raj's senses as input to be analyzed and feed back the results, including information Raj wasn't paying attention to at the time or couldn't interpret himself.
• Girls Don't Hit: Joss is trained to notice all surrounding details, and trains Echo to as well, so she can better kill people then get away clean.
• This is apparently an ability that John Coffey has in The Green Mile, from what Paul Edgecomb remembers when he is healed by him. Later, he gets another dose, and realizes that this, along with the fact that he probably would live a long, long life if he wasn't executed, contributes to Coffey's not being bothered by being executed even if he is Wrongly Accused.
• One The Hardy Boys: Casefiles book has Frank Hardy realize that a series of small noises on a car radio is a signal being transmitted, for what is probably a bomb attached to their car. He is, of course, right. This is also used to subvert the usual Magic Countdown: when the noises stop, they know they only have a few seconds. Now, many theatre people are familiar with what happens if you have a cell phone, even one that isn't in active use, in close proximity to a wireless microphone; it's a very characteristic sound. Still, going from "sounds like someone left their cell phone on" to "we have a bomb in the car" would not be an intuitive leap for most people.
• Luna Lovegood of Harry Potter fame is shockingly perceptive, except when it comes to her own Cloudcuckoolander beliefs. When Harry is transformed via Polyjuice Potion, Luna has absolutely no forewarning that he'll be in disguise, but she instantly recognizes him by the expression on his face. It does not, however, occur to her that walking up and greeting him by name might be a bad idea.
• In Death: More than once, Eve Dallas has picked up on details that everyone else would miss. Roarke doesn't miss a detail either, and it's been said that he has a brain like a computer. "Visions In Death" explained that Eve is not psychic, but her gift is essentially the opposite of psychic powers.
• Taking the "Soy Sauce" in John Dies at the End can temporarily grant someone Hyper-Awareness, in addition to the permanent ability to see supernatural things and simultaneously exist in multiple dimensions. However, most people who take the stuff end up dead or inhuman.
• Marlene Fisher from the Isaac Asimov novel Nemesis has this for body language, although she either can't or doesn't use it for things other than reading people like the proverbial book. It's treated like a superpower.
• Moonlight Becomes You: Maggie has a keen eye for detail and picks up on even subtle things that appear out-of-place, and are of course important to the plot. In fairness, she's a professional photographer and does sculpting as a hobby, so it comes with the territory. Her observation skills lead her to subconsciously pick up that something's not right at the cemetery where Nuala — her recently murdered stepmother — is buried: upon closer inspection she realizes that not only did Nuala and some her friends die only weeks apart, but that bells have been left on these graves.
• A few of the main characters in The Pale King. Chris Fogle has an absurdly good memory and attention to detail, David Cusk can keep track of room temperatures and lighting angles, and Toni Ware can read people exceptionally well.
• Quarters: Vree has been trained as part of being an assassin to notice even minute details around her that could help in her survival.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Lifebinders can enhance their perception to achieve this effect, noticing everything from hidden compartments to the type of wood used to construct a desk.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • This first shows up in The Thrawn Trilogy. Jedi Apprentice has Qui-Gon and his young apprentice Obi-Wan walk through an area, and Qui-Gon quizzes his Padawan on minute details spotted on the way through. It may be a little different from Luke's version, though; Obi-Wan was too distracted to pay proper attention and is called on it, while Luke doesn't have to pay any attention. Luke's version only works on his short term memory, while later Obi-Wan is able to closely review a memory of something that happened weeks ago.
  • Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade display a variant of this, along with a short-term sort of Photographic Memory, in Survivor's Quest. Being well-trained Jedi written by an author who eschews extravagant powers in favor of subtler ones, he has them walk through an area, stop, and sort of rewind their short-term memories. They're still only looking directly at the original things, but this way they can scrutinize whatever else was happening in their field of view, and pay more attention to background noise. They can't go too far back with this.
• The titular character of Ukiah Oregon has this due to his Super-Senses and Photographic Memory.
• Gregor from The Underland Chronicles can see his surroundings by using echolocation.
• Qibli from Wings of Fire is very observant and tends to notice everything. Umber, the MudWing in his winglet, is also noted to have this ability.
• Worm:
  • Tattletale has this an actual superpower, which she uses to great effect, although overusing it gives her incredibly painful migraines, and the certainty of squicky sensory overload means Tattletale Can't Have Sex, Ever.
  • Taylor uses her ability to share the senses of swarms of bugs to create a form of hyper-awareness over a limited area. She can also place bugs on enemies' limbs to sense their movements, giving her advance warning of attacks. She's so effective her enemies speculate her powers include limited precognition. Taylor's Hyper-Awareness is so effective that by the later parts of the series, she relies on it more than her normal sense. When she's temporarily blinded, she remains so aware of her surroundings that no one notices and she doesn't bother mentioning it. And she's not sitting down either-she escapes a deathtrap, then fights a Endbringer-level opponent without any loss of effectiveness.

Live-Action TV

• Andor: Cassian's background has made him very aware of his surroundings and able to pick up on things like which hand people shoot with without seeing them actually fire a gun. His paranoid attention to detail however gets him in trouble when it attracts the attention of a Shore Trooper, who arrests him and has him sentenced to prison for looking guilty near the scene of a crime.
• In the Angel episode "Supersymmetry", Angel is able to use his Photographic Memory to exactly reconstruct a crime scene and identify a suspect. While in earlier episodes he had demonstrated an impressive memory and other exceptional mental talents (he speaks several languages and can recreate faces almost perfectly), this particular ability was not been shown before; Angel Hand Waves this by stating that it's "not an automatic reflex".
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Giles tries to teach Buffy that the Slayer should have a sixth sense about vampires and be capable of identifying one without seeing fangs. Buffy deduces one individual being a vampire because their fashion choice is "20 years out of date".
• Used and subverted in Burn Notice. Michael explains that your mind can play tricks on you and you can start seeing things that really aren't there, especially when your adrenaline is high and with the training a spy would have. However, there are multiple times in the series when Michael does demonstrate a keen sense of observation, being a former spy.
• Control Z: Sofia has this, picking up many clues just due to keen observation of people and her surroundings.
• Counterpart (2018): Baldwin's reported to note even the most minute detail of her target's routines, as mentioned in "The Crossing", in order to accomplish missions with deadly effectiveness. This becomes a Chekhov's Skill later in the same episode when Howard Prime's failure to do something she'd noted Howard Alpha did tips her off that something's up, and she escapes the trap they set.
• The Doctor from Doctor Who. Most notably in the episode "The Eleventh Hour", in which he is able to analyze every detail of an area he glanced at while passing.
• Elementary: Sherlock Holmes displays this, noticing details about crime scenes and suspects that others overlook. Holmes considers himself Blessed with Suck as his abilities also mean he's frequently overwhelmed by the amount of information he picks up from the world around him. He turned to drugs such as heroin to try and manage the constant sensory input.
• Parodied with Father Jack from Father Ted, who fits this trope when it comes to alcohol. He can not only tell that a bottle contains alcohol, but the actual vintage of the wine just from the clinking sound. He is considerably less aware when, for example, being asked if someone should stop pouring him alcohol.
• River in Firefly fits this well, though perhaps more in Serenity. Taking one quick look at three gunmen behind cover, then ducking back and shooting them all dead without aiming, is for example rather impressive. However, it's difficult to tell when she's using Hyper-Awareness and when it's her Psychic Powers coming into play.
• Played for laughs in the Frasier episode "Ham Radio". Apparently, Frasier can tell a person's religion by their voice.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Lord Tywin Lannister.
    • When he notices Arya, who has been disguised as a boy for weeks and whose disguise no one else has been able to see through (besides Gendry Waters, who is also quite good at deducing things), he doesn't even need to hear her speak to see through the deception at first glance. He later deduces from tiny clues that she is highborn and from the North.
      Tywin: This one's a girl, you idiot.
    • In a deleted scene, Tywin wonders if he's the only one who sees through Pycelle's act.
  • Likely inherited from his father; Tyrion Lannister is very adept at reading people quickly. He accurately forecasts the imminent riot in "The Old Gods and the New" just by looking over the crowd, and takes steps to get Joffrey's heir Tommen to safety before it sparks.
  • The aforementioned Gendry is the first and only recruit of the Night's Watch who realizes that Arya is a girl. This is lampshaded by himself. He's also the first one to wake up when the Lannisters come to attack Yoren's party, before Yoren wakes up the rest.
  • Quaithe the shadowbinder (a.k.a. the masked woman in Qarth) shows her omniscience by knowing Jorah is behind her without seeing him.
  • Sandor often demonstrates shades of this, presumably honed by having been around Lannisters for so long. He notices the riot in King's Landing before it even breaks out and in "The Rains of Castamere", as soon as the guard began to act suspicious, immediately figured out exactly what's about to go down at the wedding. He's also able to spot a Valryian steel sword and quickly piece together that Brienne of Tarth has been equipped by a Lannister, having spent so much time around their men.
  • Irri realizes that Daenerys is pregnant before she is showing.
• Hannibal:
  • Will Graham's overabundance of mirror neurons gives him a Rain Man-esque talent for reconstructing crime scenes, gauging how a murder took place and inferring the killer's mindset from a glance around the scene. He very much considers this being Blessed with Suck, since it forces him to adopt the mindset of some very sick people.
  • Hannibal Lecter has extremely acute senses, in particular a sense of smell powerful enough to identify the wheat field a man was killed in after his corpse spent two days in a river, or even identify when someone has stomach cancer. This makes him dangerously good at reading people, as well as a particularly tricky guy to fight.
• House: At one point, House walks down a line of patients waiting at the (much hated) clinic and diagnoses entirely on their physical appearance and general behavior. More then a few episodes are dedicated to showing how he is certain that there was some little thing that he might have missed that is key to the problem of the week. In one episode, he manages to deduce he is in a coma-induced hallucination by a combination of in-universe fourth wall awareness and that everything is running too smoothly. Yes, House's Hyper-Awareness is sufficient to allow him to break free of a hallucination made by his own mind.
• Pretty much how crimes are solved in the Japanese drama Kimi Hannin Janai Yo Ne?, combined with extraordinary amounts of deductive reasoning and the main character's powerful Photographic Memory. Sakura can deduce actions and entire methods of murder just by piecing together scraps of evidence.
• Legends of Tomorrow: Snart, somewhere between this and Properly Paranoid, can pick up a tiny sound nobody else even seems to hear and immediately know the Time Masters are invading the ship and he and Sara have to find a place to hide.
• In Lie to Me, the leads have this. However, this can also engender Hyper-Awareness in the viewer, as you try to catch the little tics the characters notice before they're pointed out.
• Malcolm of Malcolm in the Middle is shown to have this in the first episode, part of how they deduce that he's a Child Prodigy.
• Patrick Jane of The Mentalist — it's basically the whole point of him being good at his job/at pretending to be a medium.
• Monk: In one episode, a rock is thrown through Monk's psychiatrist's window. He recognizes the rock. You really can't get much more hyper aware than that. In one episode, his psychiatrist prescribes him pills that allow him to relax and reduce his OCD. As a result, his detective skills also suffer.
• Prison Break: It is established that Michael Scofield has low latent inhibition combined with high intelligence, which gives him Hyper-Awareness. See Real Life, below.
• Shawn Spencer from Psych was trained by his police father to pick up on small and unimportant details. He even has special effects showing the audience how he notices things. And turns his head sideways and left with a silly expression that Gus now mocks. Even people who've only just met him figure out when he gets a clue. However, because he's Brilliant, but Lazy, the cops refuse to believe this slacker could figure out a crime from just small clues on TV and that he must be in on it. In desperation, Shawn convinces them he's psychic and spends the rest of the series keeping up the act.
• In Sherlock, the entire success of Sherlock Holmes' work as a "consulting detective" is based on his immense ability to notice and evaluate the tiniest details on one glance.
• Stargate SG-1: When Jonas Quinn is placed on the SG-1 team, he shows to have skills at recall and noticing tiny details that other characters found spooky. Though it serves the story for him to quickly be able to replace Daniel Jackson on SG-1, it is indicated to be because he (or possibly his species) is slightly more evolved than Earth-based humans in one episode of the series. This is clearly demonstrated in an episode in which they are investigating a small town after a strange call. Teal'c and Jonas are sitting in a diner, and Jonas easily points out the strange things people are doing, such as a guy who is reading the same page of a newspaper three times, or another who has put a dozen teaspoons of sugar in his coffee. He's never showing actively looking around him and seemingly notes things at a glance.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Data, being an android with perfect recall, has this, and often exasperates his crewmates by picking up on tiny details that are not at all relevant.
• Supernatural: Do you think you would be able to notice a single fingernail embedded in a chalklike wall in a dimly lit cellar? Or a small symbol carved on the inside of a vase you happen to be walking past? Sam Winchester can.
• In Watchmen (2019), this is Wade Tillman/Looking Glass' "superpower", although it's deconstructed to a significant degree. Being incredibly observant of human behavior, from outward expression to involuntary reflexes from subtle stimuli, he makes for an excellent police interrogator. However, this is largely born out of a general paranoia of being around other people, being inherently distrusting and constantly anxious that something is about to go horribly wrong with the world. He tries to ease up on this with regards to his love life, but his inability to fully accept and understand people on an intimate, personal level proves to be his own downfall, having led to the collapse of his marriage and getting lured and trapped by a Seventh Kavalry member preying on his emotions.

Radio

• The Adam Carolla Show: Adam claims to suffer from hyperawareness. His actual complaint is more along the lines of not being able to ignore the little things wrong in a situation the way most people can. (Notable example: on multiple occasions, a caller phones in and their smoke detector's "low battery" chirp is overheard on the call. It drives him nuts that they didn't replace the battery the instant they first heard the chirp.)

Tabletop Games

• In Aberrant, characters can take points in Mega-Perception. With Mega-Perception, noting and remembering all the license plate numbers in the parking lot, Bourne-style, is level one on a five-level scale.
• In Changeling: The Lost, changelings with high Clarity gain a bonus to their senses.
• Dungeons & Dragons: The psionic power Hypercognition does exactly this. Indeed, any character with a high Wisdom score and a good modifier for the sensory skills can end up in this trope, in any D20 system game.
• In Exalted, characters with Perception, Awareness and/or Investigation scores of 3 or above (to say nothing of the corresponding Charms) will very likely be doing this regularly. With the corresponding Charms, you get people doing things like critiquing the mating dances of insects or identifying every illicit affair at a high society event through scent. The best of them, Sagacious Reading of Intent, allows you to discern someone's lifegoals and Berserk Buttons just by looking at them, or knowing how everyone in a group relates to each other person. Eclipse Castes explicitly consider parties and social functions to be their "battleground".
• Possible with the Super-Senses power in Mutants & Masterminds. In this version, it is actually possible to have Hyper-Awareness with sonar as though you're a mixture of Daredevil and Sherlock Holmes.
• The Hypersenses mutation in Paranoia. Great for gathering information on your (many) enemies, but (this being Paranoia) with a measure of Blessed with Suck (sensory overload, hallucinations, what have you).
• Spirit of the Century has stunts that can make a character Hyper-Aware. In particular there are the Focused Sense and Impossible Detail stunts. The former allows the character to have a single hyper-developed sense (and can be taken multiple times to apply to multiple senses), while the latter removes any penalty to notice a detail because it's too small or subtle.
• In Warhammer 40,000, followers of the eldritch god Slaanesh have honed their senses to an incredible degree, able to distinguish between the subtlest differences in any of their myriad senses. Why? To enjoy their senses more, of course! This has the unfortunate side-effect of eventually requiring more and more stimulation to reach the same high. Eventually, the worshiper is rendered unable to be roused by anything except the most audacious, perverse, and extreme stimulus.

Video Games

• The "eagle vision" of the Assassin's Creed series is an inherited Hyper-Awareness passed down through a family line, being possessed by every main character across the ages. A person with this trait becomes clued in to their surroundings, instinctively identifying friends, enemies, and any number of other clues and signs relevant to them. It is implied that this ability was gifted to this genetic line by an ancient race of pre-human Precursors living on Earth. Being put in the Animus awakens this latent ability in Desmond Miles, who's story acts as a framing device for those of his ancestors.
• Condemned: Criminal Origins and its sequel Bloodshot use this as an ability of protagonist Ethan Thomas, a detective serving in the FBI's Serial Crimes Unit. Described as a "gift", he possesses a certain instinct for finding clues, which borders on being supernatural. There is some implication in the games that it might actually be supernatural.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution allows Adam Jensen is able to gain this through a few augs. In particular, the social enhancer, which allows Jensen to analyze and notice things that players wouldn't particularly notice. It helps with persuading and convincing NPCs of doing what you want them to do (with the help of pheromones).
• Fallout:
  • With the Awareness perk, you are able to see how many Hit Points the target has and which weapon he's wielding. With Friend or Foe, you can instantly distinguish between friendly and enemy NPCs. Black Isle apparently decided the latter was a dick move and just allowed any and all PCs to discern this from the start. There's also the Empathy perk, which effectively tells you which conversational options will make a person happy or sad without having to resort to Save Scumming.
  • Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas have this too in the form of the compass radar, which displays markers showing the player where other sentient beings are. The range at which these markers appear is based on the character's perception attribute.
  • Also in Fallout: New Vegas is the Spotter perk granted by a companion, which highlights hostiles when you aim down the sights, making it way easier to pick out enemies even if their coloration camouflages them.
• Zael from The Last Story is noted to have exceptional eyesight, being able to spot things the other characters don't notice at first. This becomes Fridge Brilliance when you realize that this is because the player can control the camera, giving you (and by extension, Zael) a higher awareness of the surrounding area than the NPC party members.
• In the Trails Series, people who are practitioners of the Eight Leaves, One Blade style are able to sense other people despite being so far away from them, are from a different room, or are in different rooms far away from them. Rean Schwarzer from The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel plays this for laughs in his third game where he's able to sense his students if he's in a room, privately talking with somebody with the door closed and calls them out.
• Sans of Undertale seems harmless at first, but notices a lot more than he lets on. When the player loads a previous save, it's not simply a gameplay mechanic, it's worked into the plot that this is an ability the player has, akin to time travel. No other character is aware of when you do this other than Flowey, who retains his memories across resets. Sans doesn't retain his memories, but he is aware that the ability to reset exists, and is perceptive enough to deduce that you can do so based on your reactions to the world.

Visual Novels

• This could be called Ace Attorney's Apollo Justice's and Trucy Wright's "superpower", and is mainly used to call out Character Tics. Oh, and by the way, it's In the Blood.
• It's subtle, but events early on in Fate/stay night show that Shirou has extraordinarily good eyesight; he's able to pick out a single person standing on top of a skyscraper while being on the ground himself. He also has a form of super sense through his magecraft that instinctively lets him know how something is broken, where it is broken and how to fix it just by touch. He pales compared to the supernatural servants, however: Servant Archer can pick out single people in perfect detail from kilometres away, and can instantly identify and discern all details of crafted objects through a cursory glance. Shirou ends up siphoning this ability from him due to the time paradox.
• Ryuuguu Rena of Higurashi: When They Cry. Dangerous when she's infected with the Hate Plague, very useful when she's helping to investigate someone else who is (except that one time when it gets her killed — her comments about strange details that the infected party is hiding end up convincing him that she is the murderous one).

Webcomics

• Quantum Cop from Casey and Andy is so aware he has to wear sunglasses all the time in order not to go mad.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Hedge has been shown to be adept at information gathering. Maybe he's no Sherlock Holmes, but he grasps any clue present, like occasional slips of Elliot knowing Grace or Grace being in a relationship.
  • Diane also displayed this ability when determining that Ellen and Grace were new to Moperville South. She was even wearing a Sherlock Holmes outfit for one panel.
• In Girl Genius, Agatha Heterodyne builds the ultimate coffee maker, which brews coffee so perfect it induces this state in those who drink it, very similar to the knurd state of Klatchian Coffee in Discworld.
• Ravenwing teaches this to the scouts of the Clan of the Hawk in Wandering Ones. At the same time, others in the clan are taking the awareness to a metaphysical level.

Web Original

• The Bastard Operator from Hell uses his Hyper-Awareness to set up his plans.
• Spectre from Noob has this, and the creator admitted to lifting the cause (low latent inhibition) from a certain Prison Break character. It becomes relevant in the webseries storyline as it's also the version that reveals that Tenshirock's wife had low latent inhibition, which eventually lead to her death. It also turns out Tenshirock spent time as Spectre's guildmate before becoming a hacker, figured out his condition and got him to quit the MMORPG they were both playing. Spectre's storyline exists because he ended his retirement during the main timeframe.
• Roc (Tagg's Staraptor♂), in We Are All Pokémon Trainers, exhibits this trope, nicely contrasting (or complementing) his laziness for (e.g.) a Sherlock Scan. His daughter, Shahinne (Silent's Starly♀) has inherited some of it, such as being able to sense one of her teammates has been dragged to the Netherworld.

Western Animation

• Alex Mann from Action Man (2000) has an ability called "The AMP Factor" that allows him to be aware of everything in a given situation, the physics of things moving, likely results of actions, etc. Expressed visually by everything turning blue and numbers floating around.
• King of the Hill: In "Peggy's Turtle Song", Bobby is diagnosed with ADD and is given Ritalin that hones his attention to superpower levels.
  Bobby: [sniffs] There's some milk in the fridge that's about to go bad. [Beat] And there it goes.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Testing, Testing 1-2-3", we find that when she's flying, the normally Book Dumb Rainbow Dash is hyper-aware of everything going on in the air around her and on the ground below. Afterward, she can describe what she observed down to the smallest detail.

Real Life

• There is a real-life physiological condition called low latent inhibition which, coupled with a high intelligence, can produce real-life "sherlockholmesian" Hyper Awareness.
• People with ADHD are often more sensitive to changes in their environment, but it usually doesn't have the same effect as Hyper Awareness. Some notice every little detail around them, which just means they can't focus on any one thing.
• Low-level ADD also can manifest as this, so that people who can otherwise control a tendency towards distraction may seem to be doing the Sherlock Holmes routine.
• Autistic people frequently have this ability, and get overstimulated easily.
• Around 15% to 20% people are Highly Sensitive People (HSP), which can be mistaken for autism or ADHD.
• Psychologists working with police deal with this condition. Unfortunately, it's much less a condition that grants Sherlock Holmes superpowers than something that makes it difficult to distinguish between real and imagined threats, often causing considerable harm to the the officer's social life. The technical term is "hypervigilance" and is one of the component symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
• It is well known that Conan Doyle based Holmes' perceptive and deductive abilities on medical school professor Joseph Bell, the father of Forensic medicine. According to his wife Doyle was no slouch at it himself.
• On the flip side, as some of the above examples imply, hyperawareness can be a bad thing at times due to false positives. Hyperawareness is a bad thing, because you simply don't have enough brainpower to process every last detail of your environment in depth. That's the very reason they are usually filtered before being passed to consciousness. You are basically experiencing a constant sensory overload.
• Sensory Processing Disorder, a condition currently trying to gather enough evidence to be included in the DSM-5, is basically those negative aspects in a nutshell. People with the condition are so sensitive to stimulation, that they can have emotional breakdowns when it gets too much, often to the complete bafflement of everyone around them.
• One British ASW captain made a habit of taking earphones connected to his ship's sonar when going on maneuvers. One time, he woke up and said "that's a submarine". It should be noted that originally sonar did require a living person to analyse the echoes they were hearing, so a trained operator would need to be able to recognise things like that in order to do their job. Identifying it in your sleep is another matter, however.
• This is very frequently a symptom of giftedness, and gifted individuals often find themselves misdiagnosed with a disorder such as ADHD because of it.
• Hyper-awareness is a very common symptom of PTSD and C-PTSD (complex). Out of a subconscious need to protect themselves, people with PTSD frequently "scan" their environment for potential threats that remind them of a trauma. They are also more reactive to noise, especially loud ones.
• A version of this related to reading people as opposed to the environment commonly springs up in people who grew up in or otherwise lived long-term in an abusive home. Victims can become very good at picking up on a person's unconscious indicators of mood and emotion, even the subtlest ones, and monitoring how it is changing without even consciously trying, sometimes without even being aware that they're doing it—a skill learned, for example, by a small child who needs to know exactly how Mom or Dad are feeling so they can discern what the course of action necessary to escape as much violence as possible is. It can get to the point that they put some (fictional, supernatural) empaths to shame. And while this may sound like an amazing, real-life superpower, it and the psychological baggage attached to developing it generally hinder much, much more than they help once the affected person is out of a dangerous environment and around people who generally like them, want them to succeed, and will not inflict violence on them.

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