Dolphins, orcas ant bats use echolocation - a sonar-like process of detecting objects by emitting sounds and analyzing how they are reflected back - and humans can do it too.
“Human echolocation is a way of seeing with sound,” Daniel Kish, president of the U.S.-based charity World Access for the Blind, “You’re using sound waves instead of light waves to gather information from your environment… to construct images in the brain.”
Kish intuitively found a way to navigate through his world as a child by making clicking sounds with his tongue and then listening to how they echoed off objects around him. Today, he’s considered to be an exemplar in the art of human echolocation.
In a study published Thursday in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, a team of researchers led by Durham University psychologist Dr. Lore Thaler have detailed the process of human echolocation in unprecedented detail.
For his part, through World Access for the Blind, Kish is dedicated to sharing the technique with visually impaired people around the planet. Over the past two decades, the charity has trained more than 2,000 people in over 40 countries in echolocation.