Have you ever dreamed of manifesting a super power like invisibility, super strength, or maybe…”seeing” in the pitch dark? Well, maybe magic won’t enhance your vision, but the science of echolocation sure will!
What is echolocation?
We all have some idea of what echolocation, maybe through learning about bats from school field trips to the zoo, or perhaps from reading “did you know” fun facts about nocturnal animals. Echolocation is a mechanism that some animals, most commonly bats and dolphins use to communicate and pick up information about their surrounding environment. Instead of using their eyesight to do this, these animals use their hearing. Bats, for example, contract their larynx to make high-pitched sounds emitting high frequency waves. These emitted waves rebound off of objects, producing echoes which tell the animal the distance and location of an object.
A huge part of echolocation is tuning into the surroundings and listening to the small and subtle changes in sounds and other sensory details around us.
Echolocation in humans:
Experts have found that the human brain has areas that are dedicated to receiving and processing echoes, and it is also estimated that 20-30% of blind people learn how to echo locate at some point in their lives. Echolocation is a skill that anyone can learn, and it comes with several benefits such as being more focused, and aware of the changes that are happening all around us.
Like every skill, echolocation takes practice and everyone has a different way of going about tackling this, but the following are a few tips that are recommended by scientists and experts:
- Learn how to lose yourself in your surroundings: As I mentioned before, learning how to tune into the environment around you is key to echolocation. It is important to develop the ability to pick up on the change in sounds. For example, when you are going out on a walk to Nose Hill park on a snowy day in Calgary, you can listen to the sound of the snow crunching beneath your feet, or if you are sitting near the Bow River on a beautiful and picturesque autumn evening, you can look out for the churning of the water or the sound of the water rushing downstream. According to Daniel Kish, who has been blind since he was 13 months old, and uses echolocation to communicate, “everything we pass reflects sound differently.”
- Picking an echolocation sound that you are comfortable with: Every individual has a different sound that they use to help them locate their position and the position of objects around them. These sounds can include tongue clicking, finger snapping, or cane tapping. Experts say that it is important to choose a sound that you can reliably reproduce, but for beginners it is usually a clicking sound that sounds like tsk-tsk.
- Take it easy first, and later, level up the difficulty: Since echolocation is a hard skill to master, it is important to start training yourself with easy exercises. These exercises can include blindfolding yourself, walking up to a wall, and trying to stop at the appropriate time with only using your sounds and your senses of hearing. As you feel comfortable with this, start moving onto harder exercises such as moving into a room with different acoustics or adding more objects in the room for the sounds to bounce off of.
- Learn when to take breaks: For beginners, it can be disorienting to be without their visual senses and to only rely on their hearing for direction. Experts suggest that beginners cannot practice echolocation without taking breaks after every 30-45 minute time interval.
Echolocation is a difficult skill to master as we are not accustomed to being without our visual senses for long periods of time. However, even if we cannot become perfect at this, it is worthwhile to try this out as it can make us feel more confident and empowered as we strengthen one of our senses. This skill, also teaches us that every small detail in our lives can make a difference in how we perceive the sounds and positions of objects surrounding us.
I, for one, am excited to try out this new skill, and I hope that you will join me in this journey of learning something new!