• 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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    28 days ago

    No for real. You can do a 2-second Google search and find a bunch of studies showing that humans can learn to do it very well within a 10-week course of 2 hours a day. But I know there is a video floating around of some students who managed to prove that even within just a few hours of training test subjects did remarkably better navigating a room using clicks whilst blindfolded then they did before the training and with no clickers. The research speaks for itself. You already have the skill in your brain and you’re using it all the time when you move around in the world, you just don’t consciously realize it. It’s why you have two years instead of like one big ear right in the middle. Your brain can discern the difference in sound from one ear to the other and use it to triangulate the source of the sound and sources of reverberation and echoes. I’ll see if I can dig up the video.

    I can’t seem to find the video. It was some research college and the experiment was to see how quickly humans could adapt to echolocation after being blinded. So you took regular people and put them in a room about the size of gymnasium with a bunch of lines and marks on the floor, They had a bunch of generic shaped furniture like from Ikea that they would move around the room using the different marks for the different tests, and one of the tests was to just take a group of people and leave them in this dark room for like three hours, walking around bumping into everything, then they move all the furniture and bring the subjects back in, and the collisions with furniture drops way off. The camera angles from the study are shot from above and shows I believe groups of two trying to navigate. It may well have been the study that showed it took 10 weeks and my memory is just not correct, but I have a very specific takeaway that was just a few hours the results are not only measurable by stark.

    Very definitely documented cases of blind people who are apparently masters of echo location, most use a hand clicker, their mouth to click, or taps with a cane.