Those of you who have read Daniel Galuy's science fiction novel The Blind World probably thought that all this is fiction.
After all, how can people in real life adapt so strongly to the world of impenetrable darkness in order to navigate in it better than bats in a dark cave and use echolocation (and in the novel also thermal imaging) to learn about the world around them? It turns out they can.
Blind people are adept at using echolocation to "see" their surroundings - but even sighted people can learn this skill, according to a recent study.
Participants in the new experiment learned to use echolocation in a virtual environment - that is, to receive information about the environment using sound waves bouncing off the walls. Usually, the human brain suppresses echo, but picks it up when a person uses echolocation.
Unlike previous studies of this phenomenon, this one focused on echo cancellation - the phenomenon of echo canceling out by the human brain so that the original sound can be heard more clearly. This ability is very useful, because otherwise human speech would be practically indistinguishable.
During the experiment, the sighted participants put on headphones with microphones. In the “listening” phase, they listened to sounds and simulated echoes through headphones, and they needed to distinguish the position of the sound source from the source of its echo.
In the "echolocation" phase, the participants produced sounds themselves. The computer processor simulated the echo that would have produced this sound when it met the reflector, and played it back into the headphones.
The sighted participants learned to determine the position of this reflector in the same way as they determined the position of the sound source in the first phase of the experiment.
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But if humans are capable of echolocation, why don't they use it all the time? "Unless you're running in a dark environment or blindfolded, echolocation is simply unnecessary," says neuroscientist Lor Thaler. Although research has shown that sighted people can learn this skill, blind people are generally better at it.
Perhaps blind people are better attuned to the sound environment. Or perhaps the brain's resources normally used for sight are being redirected to hearing, Thaler says.
“However, I think this is a very interesting finding, and I want to see how blind people show themselves in this experiment,” says the neuroscientist.