Echolocation in blind people reveals the brain’s adaptive powers | Hacker News Reader

Echolocation in blind people reveals the brain’s adaptive powers

sciencemag.org

Legally blind person here. I've followed these claims for a while and am very interested in them. I was very excited when I first heard about this phenomena but quickly became skeptical when I couldn't find any serious research of it. Other than some case reports and a few people on the internet claiming they could do this. Also the near constant resurgence of Daniel Kish every time someone writes about this gives it kind of cult like vibe.

Honestly, the reporting has been of a somewhat offensive variety. Particularly an NPR article and podcast a few years back. The reporting was like, "you'll never believe what this blind person can do! They ride a bike!"

Which of course we can. A completely blind person could absolutely learn to ride a bike, especially in a place they knew was safe and had repeat access to. The article failed utterly to gauge the actual day to day impact this supposed echolocation had. That's the true way to judge if a piece of equipment or technique is helpful to a disabled person. What does it do for them at their worst not in their most well known and optimal setting. I don't need my monocular at any of the street crossings near my home. I know their timings and patterns like my morning routine.

Even worse the article blaimed the failure of this technique to catch on upon orientation and mobility experts who assist blind people in learning to navigate the world.

I've worked with quite a few of these folks and the idea of suppressing effective behavior to better fit in is super outmoded. Even in the 90s in the rural state I grew up in that would not have been tolerated. If anything the low blind and low vision folks themselves cares far more about whether they stood out than the mobility experts did.

Anyway, the dearth of significant research, the seeming inability to spread it widely through the mobility and orientation community and its near total revolution around the claims of Kish leave it feeling a bit suspicious. I hope it's real and can help a lot of people by becoming standard education for blind and low vision but I'm not holding my breath.

I have normal eyesight but I have practiced echolocation for fun. I can gain some situational awareness and navigate familiar spaces with eyes closed.

What you should hear is similar to tweaking a reverb effect in an audio software. With repeated practice you will learn the difference in the tone of a hard object and a soft object or an object near or far. In audio engineering terms, you're trying to measure the impulse response of the room around you.

The important bit is generating sharp impulse clicks to listen to. You can make clicks with your mouth but your tongue will get tired soon. You can also try a handheld clicker like used in behavioral conditioning for dogs. I try to make a directional sound pointed left or right.

I saw a documentary about echolocation training, and they started with an assistant holding a glass piece around the student and the student trying to guess where it is.

Other things you could try is navigating a familiar space with white noise from a sound system to understand how you subconsciously listen to echoes of your feet, etc.

This is absolutely something you can learn by simple practice, there is no magic to it.

The question is not whether people can infer some information from their environment using sound. That is very clearly the case. As most people will know from personal experience by detecting the presence or absence of nearby walls due to the presence or absence of ambient echo.

The question is whether the claims of "expert" echo locators can be verified and whether it would be a worthwhile pursuit to standardize and teach this technique to blind and low vision persons.

I could attempt to learn this technique but I have enough vision that I'm generally not in need of it especially with the application of current compensations. I could attempt to learn it for personal verification reasons but I would then be just another anecdote and that's not really what I consider suitable evidence for validation.

It might be that reaching expert level in human echolocation requires some "musical talent" to hear the differences.

The Wikipedia article on human echolocation has some links to research groups and programs, maybe their publications have some of the information you are looking for.

I have high myopia (normal eyesight with glasses) but went through a few years where I was told my vision might be at risk, so I developed an interest in assistive tech, Braille, etc.

I found that I could orient myself “by ear” indoors - usually by snapping fingers (tongue clicks are tiring) or by passively listening for existing sounds - a washing machine, TV, open windows - that gave me a way to figure out where doorways were.

This video features an echolocation trainer and has some interesting tips - like learning to count trees as you walk past them by the “audio shadow” they create:

https://youtu.be/08smCjKWNL0

exDM69 says>"The important bit is generating sharp impulse clicks to listen to. You can make clicks with your mouth but your tongue will get tired soon. You can also try a handheld clicker like used in behavioral conditioning for dogs. I try to make a directional sound pointed left or right."

I'm surprised that, by now, there is not a "sonic flashlight" for blind people - something that emits clicks and/or other useful sounds and can be held in the hand, mounted on the head or on eyeglasses.

I puzzled over using sound to help blind people sense the environment more than 50 years ago but put it aside. Since then I have periodically encountered the same or similar solutions but very few actual implementations: I see nothing today more advanced than ideas 50 or more years old. I must sadly conclude that there is no significant economic benefit to these ideas and that indeed the blind are the children "of a lesser god":

"I found Him in the shining of the stars,

I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields,

But in His ways with men I find Him not.

I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.

O me! for why is all around us here

As if some lesser god had made the world,

But had not force to shape it as he would,

Till the High God behold it from beyond,

And enter it, and make it beautiful?

Or else as if the world were wholly fair,

But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,

And have not power to see it as it is:

Perchance, because we see not to the close;—

For I, being simple, thought to work His will,

And have but stricken with the sword in vain;

And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend

Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm

Reels back into the beast, and is no more.

My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death:

Nay—God my Christ—I pass but shall not die."*

from Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45325/idylls-of-the-k...

> I must sadly conclude that there is no significant economic benefit to these ideas

Halfway through the movie Ray, about Ray Charles (a blind musician), I closed my eyes and watched the rest of the movie "blind" to ... try to empathize with the antagonist. It was a good theater, good sound system. The audio in the movie really helps. I remember a scene near the beginning with a cricket or grasshopper he was listening to as a child and the location of the sounds drew my eyes right to that spot on the screen.

There was a school for blind children near where I grew up and I had been to that school as a child, not because I'm blind, but for other reasons. After watching Ray, I was inspired to help the students there and developed a piece of software that blind people could use to "hear" things on the screen as they moved their mouse around.

I used it on sighted people. They could tell vaguely what was behind the blanked out screen with only sounds playing to indicate something was behind or under the mouse. "It's a tree!" they would say, when it was a cross, for example. I thought, "It works!"

So I took the software to the blind school and showed it to the administrators.

They sat back in their chairs.

"This is nice. I appreciate the effort you spent, but there's no aptitude in the students here for something like this, they couldn't learn to use this." One of them said.

I said, "Can we try? Can you give it to one of the kids with some aptitude and see if it'll help? I can make it better. I can work with them one-on-one and see if we can make it work!"

He kinda shook his head, "No... no I don't think so, but hey I've been wanting someone to help me with my website can you help me with that?"

So, there you have it.

I was so sad. So disappointed that I was shut down like that.

Brings a tear to my eyes just typing this out right now...

I guess my point is that ... who cares about economic benefit? Why is the world like that? I cared enough. I had no economic incentive. I just wanted to help people use computers better. Get access to things. Have a new way to perceive the world.

Why isn't that good enough? I had that inspiration and went out and did something to make the world better and the people in power, those in charge, shut me down.

Why on earth would he do that?

My guess: those who have a vested interest in "aiding" the blind would be damaged by something that frees the blind in any way. Most extreme case: suppose you created a "cure" for blindness. It would render all services for the blind obsolete. Don't you think the "industries for the blind" would do all they could to stop you?

It's the same reason there are maintenance drugs for such ailments as diabetes, HIV and herpes but no cures: the vested interests stand to make far, far more money with maintenance programs than with cures.

My perspective as someone with normal vision may be naive, so please pardon any disappointment with the following account or recommendation. After reading James Nestor's Deep[1], it has after one year, remained my favorite book in memory - a kind of panacea for much that ailed me and just plain fascinating. If I remember correctly, Brian Bushway[2] is featured in parts of the book. Having minimal experience and admittedly much ignorance on matters of blindness, my perspective may be presumptuous and dumb, but I found the story extremely significant.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nestor_(writer)

2. An article by Nestor mentioning who I suspect is the fellow from the book: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-sight-of-sound/

I remember reading an article about Ben Underwood[1]. It was headlined with something like a blind boy can play video games using an echolocation. It turned out he just remembers the right succession of moves after a lot of try and fails. On the one hand, I should blame the author, not the boy for the title. But when I tried to research the topic, all I was able to find is only a couple articles using similar gimmicks, so I became quite skeptical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation#Ben_Underwo...

Exactly. I'm wary because it would be very easy for this to be a clever Hans situation. There are many signals blind and low vision people use to help themselves that it's very hard not to conflate them.

Interesting. Did you try learning it?

Also, effective techniques might not be taught for various reasons other than effectiveness, like foreign language classes' seemly inability to teach students how to speak foreign languages well.

>I couldn't find any serious research of it

Where did you look? The keywords echolocation and blind returns hundreds of relevant articles in google scholar. Many of them from serious journals.

I've found a lot of those articles to be a bit like the psi experiments of the 1970s and 1980s. They generally begin from a place of treating the echolocator's claims as credulous or they seriously underestimate the ability of blind people to derive signals from many different cues.

I'd really like to see some double blinded studies comparing the success of echolocators in every day tasks against non-echolocators.

>I'd really like to see some double blinded studies comparing the success of echolocators in every day tasks against non-echolocators.

I'm trying to think of how you could set up that study. There's a lot of factors you'd have to control for. You'd need to set up some kind of baseline to work off of. Which I feel like could be difficult with something like compensating for a disability.

There's the length of time being blind to consider. Someone who's been blind longer likely has better abilities at finding their way around and finding things whatever methods they use. Then as another poster mentioned, there's controlling for echolators using different methods along with echolocation. Then there's sample size. To get an actual unbiased set of data work with you would need more than a handful of people. You'd need a fairly large group of disparate people in each category you're testing for to get any kind of statistically significant result.

There's lots more to consider, these are just a few that came to mind off the to of my head. It would be a cool study to see done though.

Minor nit: I'm not sure how one would double-blind an echolocation study.

I think one useful distinction we can draw from your point is that there's a difference between (1) establishing that human echolocation exists and (2) establishing that human echolocation is a useful skill for persons with visual impairment in their daily lives.

Regarding (1): Skimming the literature, human echolocation seems like a very robust lab phenomenon. I think it's safe to say we've established beyond a reasonable doubt the laboratory-fact of human echolocation in the general population using traditional psychometric research techniques. (I am not an expert, but the research linked from the target article has a pretty robust citation network in very good journals using a broad spectrum of lab techniques, google scholar turns up some review articles on the phenomenon in respected journals, etc.).

Regarding (2): After a very cursory search I don't see much out there. It's both messy and expensive to establish the success of coaching/skill acquisition (like training in echolocation) in the long-term wellness of individuals. There must be a robust literature on evaluating outcomes for learned skills (it's relevant to everything from evaluating skills for managing memory impairment to evaluating training programs for anger management skills to such pure horseshit as empathy training for corporate execs).

What criteria would you suggest for a successful experiment in (2)? Is there something you'd like to lean on as a precedent?

Also note that the target research article isn't interested in either (1) or (2). It takes (1) for granted and uses it to suggest a model of neural modularity that is task-oriented rather than modality oriented, but we're far enough down the comment thread that whatever.

What about this review?[0] The list of articles citing the review should also be a good place to look.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037859551...

Totally blind person here. I haven't used echolocation much in my life, except for the standard wall/door detection tricks, of course. I've met a very small number of people who do it successfully, though. One guy I know is a near expert. He lost his sight like 4 years ago and he alrady learned it on a pretty advanced level. He taught us to detect things like glasses on a table and tell where they are. The class was only like 3, 4 hours though, so I guess it's just the tip of an iceberg.

The article mentions that echolocation is a way the brain adapts in some blind people but your comment seems like echolocation is at least partially learned skill.

Since you’ve taken a class on it I’d be curious to know whether you got the sense it’s something most people could learn if they wanted to spend the time/effort? Or does it seem like the sort of thing that some people just seem to pick up “naturally”?

The things he tried to teach us could be done by most students at least semi-reliably. I think practice helps here, but talent helps too, just like with learning to play a musical instrument. There are people for whom it comes easily, but it seems other people can be taught too. This is all anecdotal evidence, though.

Does training for something like this lean more towards perfecting technique or forcing adaptation through repetition like training a muscle?

We had just one class, so I can't really tell for certain. The advice the guy gave us was to try this at home, in various situations and see what we can do.

It’s amazing how much information we ignore. I used to volunteer at a nursing home and I was pushing a blind lady down the hall and she said “this room is mine.” I asked her “how did you know?” And she explained that she could hear the recessed doorways (and the difference between open doors and closed ones) as we passed them, and knew that hers was the 11th door. She told me I could do it myself. I thought “bullshit, this is some magic power for blind people” but when I just closed my eyes and focused on it, it’s completely easy. Your footstep’s echo off a closed door is completely different than hallway. It took me literally no practice, I could do it on the first try.

A few years ago, I was very inspired by Daniel Kish and others who use echolocation. So I started a side project called Project Sonorous. Sonorous was a prototype to explore combining AR with echolocation and 3D audio. This allows you to translate visual spatial information into echolocation-like audio cues through headphones.

I would still love to work on this idea in the future. But it would require a lot of funding and advanced technology (similar to that used by self-driving cars.)

https://blog.syllablehq.com/project-sonorous-a-proposed-navi...

Strange idea, that blind people have some special power here. Any human brain has sophisticated techniques for locating the sources and nature of environmental sounds.

Just close your eyes, have somebody stand behind you and put a hand up to your right or left ear, 8 inches away. You can instantly tell where their hand is. Just from the change in the way environmental sounds reach your head.

Did you try it?

Not strange so much as a matter of contrast in circumstantial demand and acclimation, which must be measurably different for the blind vs hobbyist. James Nestor, in his time with Bushway, was able to accomplish echolocation feats that astonished him. Though I don't think he ever argued that the ability is equal for the blind and seeing, he did seem to conclude that the ability isn't restricted to the blind. I expect it would require a rare and great dedication for the dilettante to compete with a serious full-timer, in any skill. Functional blindness is a very formidable skill, one that very few would (could?) optionally practice full time.

As a kid when playing blindfolded trying to catch others I used this (echo location) all the time to avoid bumping to walls. Nothing in it is something which would be unique for blind people.

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