How much sensory input from the world do we miss each day? Apart from things like sounds outside of the 20Hz to 20,000Hz range (the usual reange of human hearing), and the enormous amount of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can’t see, there remains a staggering amount of information that passes us by. Our ‘reality’ is actually a tiny amount of environment.
Daniel Kish is an individual who has learned, through necessity, to take more notice of the information available through his sense of hearing. Daniel was born totally blind, and both his eyes were removed by 13 months of age. As such, he has no visual memory of the world, and yet he has learned a way to perceive the space around using his hearing. Daniel is ‘the Batman’:
We teach people how to perceive their environment the same way that a bat perceives its environment. We learn to issue a sound, which could be a tongue click, and that sound goes and it bounces off of everything in the environment, and it comes back.
Watch the video below to get a sense of how much information Daniel Kish can pull from the environment around him simply by clicking with his mouth and listening (see also this short documentary at The New Yorker for more insights). Amazing.
