Everyone knows that bats are blind. Most of us are familiar with the echolocation sense in which bats use to navigate through their surroundings and locate food. But are humans capable of the same extrasensory feats?
Echolocation has gained prominence in recent years as a skill that some blind people use to map their surroundings with astonishing precision. They can detect trees, buildings or doorways by making a clicking sound with their mouth and listening for the echo. But research has shown that the basics of orienting yourself this way can be learned by anyone, blind or sighted. A growing body of research encourages us to expand our sensory potential-awakening senses that have been neglected, suppressed, or even considered outside the human realm.
Human echolocation has been known as a concept since the 1940s. But it has only been studied systematically in the last decade, both as a potentially life-changing skill for blind people and as a way of examining how our brain deals with sensory information.
"We measure the best possible human echolocators, what we refer to as 'echo experts'," says Lore Thaler, a psychology professor at Durham University and one of the world's leading experts on human echolocation. "These are typically people who've used it for a long time and show just really good acuity. They can do things which, if you're new to this, you just cannot do."
"If you are in a sighted world, like we are, and then you lose your vision, you really lose a whole lot in terms of how you can access things and how you can move around," she says. "Having echolocation in there makes it much easier, because it gives you more control over the space you're exploring."
Thaler and her colleagues are currently studying brain scans of sighted and blind people learning to echolocate. So far, preliminary results have shown something rather startling: when sighted people learn to navigate by sound, they engage the part of their brain that usually deals with vision.
Are you curious as to whether you can use your hidden sense of echolocation? If you want to have a go, try this experiment with a plate or tray. Close your eyes, start speaking or making a clicking sound, and move it back and forth and from side to side. Listen for the change in sound. Without opening your eyes, you may gradually be able to tell where the plate is. Or for another exercise, Thaler recommends slowly rotating in a corner, eyes closed, and using your sound to tell whether you are facing the wall, or the room. I'll be trying it, you should too.
