How blind people can "see" using echolocation like bats

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/13/how-blind-people-can-see-u.html

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Is there an echo in here?

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My head is echoing right now

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The stuff that studies of humans echolocating imply about the brain is pretty wild.

Blind people echolocating show activity in the areas of the brain involved with visual activity, but sighted people who’ve learned to echolocate don’t.

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I’m not blind but I can usually sense the general geometry of a space in the dark.

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I couldn’t make it through the video because that guy ordering me to be amazed by stuff every 2 seconds was too much of a struggle. But the unnoticed world of sound is very interesting. To me, the noteworthy thing is not that people can hear their environment; it’s the fact that this would seem surprising.

I think our cultural programming has heavily warped our consciousness of sound. Spoken language, and more recently sound reproduction, make us think almost exclusively in terms of The Sound that we are listening to at a given time, with everything else rejected as background noise, but that’s just one choice. Physically, we are capable of processing sound as a panorama – like if you just sit in a room with the windows open while it’s raining – but when there is a song playing, or (especially) someone talking, there’s a nearly irresistible compulsion to focus on that one sound. I suspect that is a very large part of the issues autistic people have; we all have to operate in this mode to participate in society, but some people can do it on autopilot, while for others it is a continuous mental effort.

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Old news. Bat boy did it first.

Bat_Boy

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Sorry, brain fut – I was thinking Tommy by The Who.

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He does “echo” my reaction to this method – which is genuinely cool, but trying to drive by echolocation is kind of funny, too.

ETA: Also thinking how different that old SNL skit with Stevie Wonder using a camera might have worked out so much differently.

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