BATTING PRACTICE: Participants in Daniel Rowan’s experiment tried to navigate a virtual environment using only their sense of hearing.AMY SCARFE
Daniel Kish, an expert echolocator, uses sound to see the world. After losing his eyesight to retinoblastoma at the age of one, he learned to navigate using the noise from his tongue clicks bouncing off nearby surfaces. Dubbed “Batman” for his abilities, Kish is able to independently bike down streets and hike through the wilderness with ease.
While some may perceive echolocation as an almost superhuman sense, it’s a surprisingly ubiquitous ability. Although the vast majority of people are unable to navigate using echolocation alone, even those without training can use this skill to sense their environments—for example, by hearing the difference between standing in a cathedral and a soundproof room. “We hear echoes all the time,” says Daniel Rowan, an audiologist at the University ...
