This article is a great read for anyone interested in the subject. It's several pages long and covers the following topics:
- Famous echolocators
- A video from 1941 depicting experiments in "Facial Vision" (another term for echolocation) (http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/library/data/lit39549? )
- How would echolocation feel?
- Underestimating echolocation
- Echolocating in a big magnetic tube
- Listening to echoes
- Why does echolocation use the ‘visual’ cortex?
- Echolocation isn’t just in your head
- So why can’t the rest of us echolocate?
- Unmasking our other senses by blindfolding
- The next step: super-human echolocation
This is an absolutely amazing article and it uncovers a lot of research that is not well known. Below is a short snippet from the article.
- Sensing is broader than perception
; that is, our nervous system may react to many things that we are not consciously aware it is noting in any meaningful way. Sensation is ‘bigger than’ consciousness (and I realize I’m using those terms loosely.).
- Human echolocation highlights, again, that the anthropology of the senses needs to realize that the theory of ‘five senses,’ an idea that we really get from Aristotle it seems to me (although I have no interest in digging any deeper into the intellectual history of the concept), is a bit of cultural common sense and not at all a scientific approach or reflection of verifiable psychological or phenomenological reality.
- Human echolocation is a capacity of any human being, but the extraordinary skill shown by exemplary practitioners like Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood requires much more than just a human nervous system and the right training: the skill requires a community that ‘gets it’ and supports the capacity.
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