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Human Echolocation

Third Eye Open

Graduate Poster
Third Eye Open
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Mar 13, 2008
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This guy became blind at a very young age, and has learned to use echolocation to get around. I was pretty amazed by all the stuff he is able to do, but at one point in the video they showed him playing video games, and he said he could hear what was going on enough to play. Ok, how the hell can that work? That got me wondering how much of this video is sensationalized.

What do you think?
 
I have pretty good hearing even though I'm not blind. When I was a kid I noticed that a baloon moving around the room changed the ambient sounds I could hear. I could close my eyes and almost make out where it was as it drifted around. The blind kid can probably notice this sort of thing to the nth degree. He could also be hearing the padding noise of even the softest footstep. As for video games, if they're playing DOA then all he would have to do is press forward and mash random buttons. That's what I did to win almost every time. Most fighting games are like that unfortunately.
 
It depends on the game but I can see it working in some cases. In a lot of modern games you get 3-D positional audio that is realtime mixed into 5.1
 
PingOfPong said:
As for video games, if they're playing DOA then all he would have to do is press forward and mash random buttons. That's what I did to win almost every time. Most fighting games are like that unfortunately.
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My strategy for fighting games was always "Pick a button and stick with it."
 
The video game part is believable, I suppose. A couple of years back I heard a similar story. I think it was a blind Korean kid playing Starcraft or something. Mind you, I don’t know for sure that that was true either.
 
It is the incredible stereo of the modern game systems. Old systems with mono sound wouldn't work with hearing only.
 
It's been shown that blind peoples' senses aren't any better than anyone elses', they are simply better at paying attention to the cues they are getting from them.

Some blind people actually use a device that provides echo-location pulses.

Of course, most registered blind people aren't totally blind; they have some residual vision.

Leon
 
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When I worked at IBM I saw a blind guy navigating the humongous hallways there by patting a pocket full of change. When he approached an obstacle, the clinking sound would change, and he would slow down and use his cane to work his way around it.

Cool.
 
aggle-rithm said:
When I worked at IBM I saw a blind guy navigating the humongous hallways there by patting a pocket full of change. When he approached an obstacle, the clinking sound would change, and he would slow down and use his cane to work his way around it.

Cool.
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When I was on high school, in one of my extracurricular groups, we were doing various 'trust' exercises.

One was to have a person walk down the hall with their eyes closed, and let another person tell them before they walked into a locker.

I found that if I hummed while I walked, I could hear the echo change as it bounced off the lockers in front of me. So I was never worried about walking into the lockers.

So I'm not sure if I passed the exercise, or failed.
 
"Senses are better" is vague enough to allow wiggle room. ordinary people have vast differences between their senses. As to the ears or skin or smell organs being "more sensitive", that may be true. Blindness does not infer the organs growing "better", but the amount of neurons connected to a sense organ does allow "better" processing of information, without any physical change to the tissue.

Anyone who loses their sight can know this. Hearing, smell, skin, all become more "sensitive", and no doubt their is extra neural activity and dendrite growth over time.

"Better" isn't a scientific enough term.
 
Professor Yaffle said:
There is more to hearing than just the ears.
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The parallels between this thread and the circumcision thread are eerie. Compensatory processes for loss of a sensing part of the anatomy, more to hearing than just ears etc.

Regarding the wiki entry on this boy, there is a section on echolocation in fiction.
Does anyone remember a film where there was a blind hero crimefighter who had the ability to hear his surroundings by the noises they made? I recall he "saw" his lover's face by hearing it during a rainstorm. It wasn't the Matt Murdock character they describe as far as I recall.

ETA - I was mistaken, it was the same character - played by Ben Affleck in this 2003 film.
 
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robinson said:
"Senses are better" is vague enough to allow wiggle room. ordinary people have vast differences between their senses. As to the ears or skin or smell organs being "more sensitive", that may be true. Blindness does not infer the organs growing "better", but the amount of neurons connected to a sense organ does allow "better" processing of information, without any physical change to the tissue.

Anyone who loses their sight can know this. Hearing, smell, skin, all become more "sensitive", and no doubt their is extra neural activity and dendrite growth over time.

"Better" isn't a scientific enough term.
Click to expand...

What scientific evidence is there for this increase in sensitivity? I don't remember seeing anything to that effect when I was studying psychophysics some years ago, although things might have changed.

Leon
 
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