This American Life: Batman

Decades ago in grad school, I was under my 1969 VW bus doing maintenance. Had a set of combination wrenches at curbside. Ten year old blind kid who lived next door came out and wanted to know in detail what I was doing, and I talked him through what I was doing to get ready to pull the engine to install a new clutch plate & throwout bearing.

I could see the nuts and bolts, and knew what wrench size I needed, but when I'd reach for it, I'd often pick the wrong one (13mm felt pretty much like 12mm, etc.). He asked me to say (only once) the wrench size each time I picked one off the curb. Thereafter, he told me what size I was about to select as soon as I touched it, making it scrape ever so slightly against the concrete. Saved me some time by telling me when I was about to pick up the wrong wrench.

I wasn't surprised, as I'd seen him on his bike in the neighborhood, doing the click echolocation described in This American Life. I was in a neurophysiology program at the time, and was totally impressed with his living demo of neuroplasticity and audio world mapping.

"Running into a pole is a drag. But never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster."

Wonderful quote.

Sorry if this is off-topic with respect to the content of the episode, but does anybody know what kind of software NPR uses to create these transcripts? There is a very specific structure to the layout and I'm wondering what the data entry UI looks like, if it's a commercial package, or if they rolled their own. Thanks.

I am just a casual observer, but how did they narrow it down to the way the rats were touched? Couldn't it have just been the people "running" the experiments instead being more casual about their results? Maybe for a dumb rat you hit your stopwatch a second later or a second faster for a smart rat, for example.

How did they isolate the touch of the experimenters?

One of the things I was hoping I'd hear people comment on here what Miller says towards the end, that perhaps Kish's aversion to physical closeness, perhaps "loving" in general, and a desire to be independent, were mutually exclusive. While, I personally would agree there is an argument that being a helicopter parent does not help build a sense of independence in someone, I'm really curious if it really is true that a desire of closeness to others in general is really the opposite of that.

I guess it makes some sense naively (independence or apartness vs. dependence or together-ness)? But the way I think about it is that a desire to be independent needs to be tempered with a desire to socialize and be close with others. May be they are orthonormal axes in a person's "personality space," but a healthy balance of both will give a person a good norm overall. This seems opposite of what they hint at toward the end, that these two qualities may not be orthogonal but in fact, anti-parallel.

Perhaps Daniel's aversion helped him overcome the enormous odds against him, an entire culture that put that "blind" label on him and would have necessarily pulled him far into that the more "dependent" side--I mean, that was the point on the whole rest of the episode. It was needed for him given the extreme pressure he was under from this culture. Still, I hope that for many other people who do not have this extreme desire for independence that they need not be forced into it just so that the rest of us see them as equal. That certainly is not fair for them if they do not desire it.

I say all this because while I have a close love for a few close friends and family members, I usually like to be independent myself. However, I've learned as I've gotten older that sometimes you need to rely on others even when you think you won't, which isn't easy for me. A healthy balance seems better, as I've reluctantly accepted.

Further details about batman at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kish

As an educator the whole power of expectation thing probably was more interesting to me than things like the echolocation aspect. I mean yes, we know that students perform better when you expect more of them, but some of the aspects of how that translates into actual performance gains hadn't occurred to me before.

I really enjoyed this episode (and pretty much everything This American Life does). The one fact of the podcast that got me really thinking was how a lot of the blind will naturally turn to clicking in order to help me navigate.

Can we do this computationally? Dokmanic et al say yes in certain situations in their paper "Acoustic Echoes Reveal the Shape of the Room," PNAS, vol. 110, no. 30, 2013. Daniel Kish is mentioned in the paper to motivate the problem. Thaler's work is cited in the commentary by Mark Plumbley.

Here's a more accessible commentary: Mark Plumbley, "Hearing the Shape of a Room," PNAS, vol. 110, no. 30, 2013. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/30/12162.full

For those who want a downloadable version, youtube-dl can pull it from SoundCloud:

https://soundcloud.com/this-american-life/544-batman

Read about him a year or 2 ago in National Geographic ... bothered me then as now that he was referred to as "Batman". He's clearly Daredevil.