✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

How Does Human Echolocation Work? | Smithsonian

smithsonianmag.com · 1,921 words · saved by 1 readers

Blind since he was very young, Daniel Kish is the world’s foremost proponent of using vocal clicks to navigate Nathan Hurst Daniel Kish, president of World Access for the Blind, developed his own method of generating vocal clicks and using their echoes to identify his surroundings and move about. Ever an advocate for this technique which he calls “flash sonar,” Kish teaches in small groups or one-on-one in field exercises around the world, with an emphasis on training instructors who can further spread the method. This year Kish collaborated with researchers from six different universities on an in-depth analysis of the practice, published in PLOS Computational Biology. “You could fill libraries with what we know about the human visual system,” says Kish. “But what we know about human echolocation could barely fill a bookshelf.” The study sampled thousands of clicks from three different echolocators, and examined their consistency, direction, frequency, and more, including describing a

Daniel Kish is an expert in human echolocation and president of World Access for the Blind. ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Daniel Kish, president of World Access for the Blind , developed his own method of generating vocal clicks and using their echoes to identify his surroundings and move about. Ever an advocate for this technique which he calls “flash sonar,” Kish teaches in small groups or one-on-one in field exercises around the world, with an emphasis on training instructors who can further spread the method. This year Kish collaborated with researchers from six different universities on an in-de

Explore this link on the map →

related reading