In 2011 in PLoS ONE, Lore Thaler from the University of Western Ontario, with Stephen Arnott and Melvyn Goodale, rIn a recent edition of PLoS ONE, Lore Thaler from the University of Western Ontario, with Stephen Arnott and Melvyn Goodale, reported brain imaging research that tried to sort out how individuals who can echolocate – who have what one blind activist calls ‘flash sonar’ – accomplished this perception neurologically. Did they use an especially acute sense of hearing, or did they develop another kind of sense, able to transform echoes into spatial perception?

What the researchers found, in short, was that blind individuals who could echolocate did not really have better ‘hearing’; on normal tests of hearing acuity, they scored the same as sighted subjects who could not echolocate.  However, when a recording had echoes, parts of the brain associated with visual perception in sighted individuals became extremely active, as the echolocators were able to extract information from the echoes that was seemingly not accessible to the control subjects who were sighted. This piece explores the implications of human echolocation for sensory anthropology.