Is it possible to learn echolocation

For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. People can learn click based echolocation in 10 weeks, a study shows The learning time was the same for people with and without vision loss This method can improve the independence of people with vision loss. Interested in cryptocurrency? Further reading: Echolocation , Blindness , Science.

Best Deals of the Day ». Tech News in Hindi. Remarkably, both blind and sighted people can improve their ability to interpret and use sound echoes within a session or two. This is important because attention has also been implicated in other forms of learning.

As the authors state, knowing that attentional capacity might affect echolocation learning might also be useful when devising training programs. In their study Ekkel and colleagues trained sighted people to echolocate whilst they wore a blindfold. They did not ask people to make mouth clicks, but people were allowed to use a loudspeaker mounted on their head.

People could press a button so that the loudspeaker made a brief 10ms sound. People then made judgments about the relative sizes of objects using echoes that came back from those objects. Participants came into the lab on four separate occasions and each time the researchers measured their ability to do the task. That is, those people who had higher attentional capacity scores also showed greater improvement in their echolocation ability.

Scientists were not sure how it worked, but many believed that some select blind people were able to mysteriously detect subtle changes in air pressure on their skin, as they approached a wall or some other large obstacle. A series of early experiments conducted at Cornell University, however, made it clear that blind people were actually listening to the echoes of sounds bouncing off surfaces in their immediate surroundings.

Subsequent research went on to show that both blind and sighted people can learn to avoid obstacles without vision, as long as they are able to use their hearing. Some use the tapping of a cane or the snapping of their fingers to make the necessary noise, while others use their mouths to make a clicking sound.

Despite how useful this skill can be, very few blind people are currently taught how to do it. Expert echolocators have been trying to spread the word for years now , and this new study suggests a simple training schedule is all that's needed. Over the course of 20 training sessions, which were about 2 to 3 hours long, researchers found that blind and sighted participants, both old and young, all improved considerably at click-based echolocation.

For weeks, participants were trained to navigate virtual mazes — corridors arranged in T-intersections, U bends, and zig-zags — and identify the size and orientation of objects using mouth clicks.

Sighted individuals learned to perceive the positions of reflectors in the echolocation experiment just as well as they perceived the position of the sound source in the listening experiment, the researchers showed. They found that in the listening experiment, perception of the leading sound caused the lagging sound the echo to be suppressed in the brain. But in the echolocation experiment, both leading and lagging sounds were perceived equally well, suggesting the echo suppression diminished during echolocation.

So if humans can echolocate, why don't they do it all the time? While the study shows that sighted person can learn the skill, blind people are typically better at it, she said.