Echolocation: The Ability to Determine Things Around a Person Despite Blindness

Then two-year-old Ben ceased from seeing out of his left eye. His mother brought him to the doctor and soon found out he had retinal cancer on both eyes.

Following failure of chemotherapy and radiation, surgeons took out both of his eyes making Ben's vision gone forever.

When the boy turned seven, he had developed a strategy for decoding the world surrounding him by clicking with his mouth and listening for the returning echoes. This story came out in TIME.

This tactic allowed Ben to identify the site of open doorways, people, parked vehicles, and garbage cans, among others.

What the boy was going through was "echolocation" in which, as described by TIME, one bounces his sound waves off "objects the environment, and catching the reflections" to develop a mental framework of his surroundings.

(Photo : Tobias Dahlberg from Pixabay)
Echolocation is a condition in which one bounces his sound waves off ‘objects the environment, and catching the reflections’ to develop a mental framework of his surroundings.

Phenomenon Since the 1940s

Echolocation may sound like an implausible feat for a human, although thousands of blind humans have perfected this method, just like Ben.

This phenomenon has been written about from at least the 1940s, when elocution was initially termed in a Science piece titled "Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats and Radar."

From this condition, arises the question of how could blindness give rise to the striking capability to understand surroundings with a person's ears.

Each time humans are learning something new, they pick up a new skill or improve their habits, the brain's physical structure changes.

Neurons, the cells accountable for fast processing of information in the brain, are interlocked by the thousands, although similar to friendships in a community, the connections between them change constantly-strengthening, weakening and searching for new partners.

'Brain Plasticity'

In neuroscience, such a phenomenon is called "brain plasticity" which refers to the brain's ability like plasticity, to undertake new forms and hold them.

Additional recent discoveries in neuroscience propose that the brand of flexibility of the brain is far more nuanced compared to holding onto a shape, nevertheless.

To capture this, scientists refer to the plasticity as "livewiring" to focus on how this enormous system of over 85 billion neurons and about 0.2 quadrillion links rewires itself each moment of a person's life.

Neuroscience used to perceive the brain's different parts were predetermined to do specific functions. However, more recent findings have upended the ancient paradigm.

One part of the brain may originally be assigned a particular task, for example, the brain's back part is identified as "visual cortex" as it typically manages sight.

However, such a territory can be reassigned to a different function. There is nothing extraordinary in particular, about neurons in the visual cortex.

Visual cortex are simply neurons occurring to be engaged in the processing of shapes or colors in humans with functioning eyes.

However, in those without vision, similar neurons can rewire themselves to process other information types. Nature has imbued the brains with flexibility to adjust to conditions.

In the case of Ben, the flexible wiring of his brain repurposed his visual cortex to process sound. Consequently, the boy had more neurons existing to deal with auditory information, and this augmented processing power enabled Ben to interpret soundwaves in surprising detail.

The super-hearing ability of Ben exhibits a more universal rule: the more brain territory a specific sense has, the more efficient it performs.

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