Blind People Can Echolocate
Smithsonian Magazine:
Like bats, some blind people utilize echolocation—bouncing sound waves off objects to locate where they are—as a means of assessing and interacting with their surroundings. To do this, some snap their fingers, while others click their tongues, Health Canal writes. While researchers have known about this skill for years, the degree to which it stands in for vision is poorly understood.
Neuroscientists from Western University’s Brain and Mind Institute recently discovered that echolocation is a much closer substitute for vision that originally assumed. As they report in the journal Psychological Science, echolocation is so tightly associated with vision that it succumbs to the same shortcomings as that sense.
Read the whole story: Smithsonian Magazine
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