Echolocation?!

[evenwolf]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpBm4KoWsrY


Anyone feel really really really inadequate?   Stop and think about a disaster where you are stuck in darkness with obstacles all around.    This kid could actually save your life by pulling your ass out of there.   Let's send him to Mars!

[Nikolas]

Sh*t!

WOW!

This IS amazing!

I still reserve a tiny bit of relactance if it's true or false, but still, I think it is true!

[Indie Boy]

Wow thats amazing. Just shows what the human body/brain can do. I take it no one knows how they learn this, I mean he can't teach this to anyone can he? It sure would be handy once and a while.

[Gregjazz]

Saw this a long time ago. Pretty amazing!

[evenwolf]

Something tells me that this skill would take a blind toddler many many many trips and falls before learning.    And if you were the mother of that blind child, you wouldn't want him/ her falling all over the place and smacking into things.

I think its something like language.   Would have to learn it during the "critical period" and then refine it over the years.   But perhaps its unique to him because he lost his sight when he was a baby.   Definitely worth researching.

Does echolocation not have its own mechanism in bats & dolphins?   Or is it just the ear?   That's what seems off about calling this "echolocation".

[Sam.]

I dislike that the reporter was knocking bins over just to get the kid to walk around them.

Plus, the kids talent seems to be wheelie bin based only.

SUSPICIOUS?

[space boy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uobuBc2GO0o

[Andail]

I think they definitely have some use for that sound thingie, but I also think the reportage tries its best to portray those people as superbeings, like Daredevil or something.
I mean, perfect accuracy during a pillowfight? Who has that, even with functional eyes? That seemed totally edited to me.
Also, blind people have extraordinary abilities to memorise things, like paths they usually take, so knowing where the trashbins and trees are located could just as well be part of his mental image of his neighbourhood. Which is of course quite impressive.

[evenwolf]

I don't know man.   rollerblading and mountain biking?

Ive wondered in the past if humans couldnt apply the same principles as bats.   I used to walk to this bridge which houses the worlds largest urban population of bats and there was all this literature.    I understood sonar but had no idea it was just the same old brain interpreting the distance of sounds.     Humans were bound to adapt it sometime. 

[Andail]

Yes, there is nothing inherently alien in echolocation - that is, the human senses and brain could certainly be used for it - but our equipment isn't the best. Most animals employing echolocation probably emit sounds of very high energy and need ears tuned for those frequencies.
The human ears are not designed for high frequencies, since we need them to hear speech. Our sight is so vastly superior as a means of locating stuff that ears never came close during our evolution.

Interestingly though, every type of information input can be interpreted "naturally" if we just learn to accept it as another sense. Experiments with implants letting the test subject register a spatial dimension using hi-tech sonar showed that the subject after some time started to interpret the signals as natural sensory input. I don't have any references for this, I just remember reading it somewhere. Of course, the people in the experiment might have wanted to make it sound more impressive than it was.

[Indie Boy]

I was just thinking about this again today. It is useful in a quiet area, but somewhere like in a middle of a road or in a busy city where you are really need to be able to know where everything is you wouldn't have a clue where anything is. Wouldn't all the sounds distract him? But still he can see without having any eyes therefore he is amazing! 

[Babar]

I don't think noisiness is a problem. It seems to help, in fact. You just need to hear something that's bouncing off something else.

* Babar is having trouble distinguishing his clicks in front of a wall from his clicks far away from a wall

[Indie Boy]

Yeah its like If we are told to remember a whole lot of objects that are in front of us, we are going to take time for it to go in. So wouldn't that be the same with hearing. I mean maybe he knows where something is, but he doesn't have super brain and memory power* to know where everything is at one moment. So I take it he can't go to a roller disco or something

*(starting to sound superhero-ish)

[ManicMatt]

I am without sound, but how the hell can he play a videogame when the sound effects are in stereo??

[vict0r]

Thought the same as Matt here.
It is great for them that they can navigate without eyes, but they are in no way "superhuman" in my opinion. In the daily life or for that matter, on mars, they don't have the upper hand compared to people who are not blind. We basically have no need for echolocation other than giving blind people a way to identify their surroundings.

With that said, it is pretty cool!

[Andail]

With most of those beat 'em up games you don't need to see what you're doing, you just need to tap all those buttons as fast as you can!

[Stupot]

Not too long ago I saw something on telly about a device that can help blind people see with their tongue...

What happens is that there is a camera which is attatched to the person's head and it picks up a low-res black and white image and transfers that to a small pad which is placed on the tounge.  There are dots on the pad representing each pixel and each dot gives of a small pulse whose strength depends on the tone of its respective pixel.

When the camera is looking at an image the tongue can quite effectively pick up an image from the pulses which the brain can then interpret as a mental picture.

When I saw this it was only in the early stages, something like 8x8 pixels.  But the guy tried it, looking at a white line, and he could clearly make out the line and could even tell which way it was slanted... when they develop it and fit a few more dots in this could be a brilliant way of helping the blind to see... its incredible.

[evenwolf]

What if the blind guy wants to take a walk while eating a sandwich?


Not a serious question although it did remind me to eat a sandwich.