Humans' Hidden Ability to Navigate the World With Tongue Clicks
Researchers are discovering just how easily both blind and sighted people can be trained to echolocate.
by Veronique Greenwood
Feb 27, 2017
2 minutes
Humans, when you train them, can be phenomenally good at pattern recognition. Our long history as the descendants of organisms who could spot a predator in dappled grass probably has something to do with it, but today, this ability makes all manner of things possible. For instance, people who have lost their vision, or never had any to begin with, can learn to echolocate, using the sound bouncing of a small study in which they trained a blind person and 11 sighted people to use sound to deduce the size of a room, scanning their brains in the process.
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