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The blind man who taught himself to see
- moblivu 16y agoPretty amazing. It is quite difficult to understand echolocation since we are able to see, but it is also difficult for him to understand vision since he can't. I think that vision is the lazyiest sense we have, it's too easy and the body have a great potencial to use our senses to the max; we're just not using it.
- markszcz 16y ago"He’s tired of being told that the blind are best served by staying close to home..." Kudos to him. It's amazing how people have the ability to reprogram their bodies in order to break their handicap. Reminds me of a story "Blind Teen Gamer Obliterates Foes" http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2005/07/68333 http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2005/07/68333
- younata 16y agoWow. What an incredibly uplifting story.
- tscrib 16y agoIndeed! If only he got more mainstream support, could be expanded to more people
- rokhayakebe 16y agoHow do you "explain" to someone who was born blind that he is "blind"?
- yuvadam 16y agoBeautiful question. You could also ask if blind people are able to perceive vision in dreams. To which the answer, I believe, is that they simply cannot, due to the fact that their brains have no notion of a visual image.
- tintin 16y agoI'm not sure about that. Sight happens in the brain. When the eyes don't work this doesn't have to mean the visual part of the brain doesn't work. Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185429 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185429
- modernerd 16y ago'...dreaming is a gradual cognitive achievement that requires the development of visual and spatial skills and other forms of imagistic skills as well.'[1] Those who've never seen, or who were blinded very early, have auditory dreams. (They dream in sounds.) Those who were blinded after the age of around seven -- when the ability to form mental images necessary for dreaming develops -- are able to dream in pictures. [1] http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/kerr_2004.html http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/kerr_2004.html
- markszcz 16y agoI wonder how a brain that has never "seen" an image would percieve technology to allow the blind to see using this: http://vision.wicab.com/technology/ http://vision.wicab.com/technology/
- rokhayakebe 16y agoThis breaks my heart.
- Xurinos 16y agoI read something recently by a blind guy who said that sometimes he perceived some amount of light in his dreams. This was because his blindness is not complete blindness. There are varying degrees of it. In his case, he could detect some light changes.
- gurtwo 16y agoI suspect we commonly underestimate blind people mental capacities. One can argue that 'seeing' goes beyond the perception of lights and colors. It's also about shape, so I guess a blind person can perfectly 'visualize' a rectangle, a cube, etc. And probably do geometry, or even 3D-object rotations. Can anyone confirm this?
- jodrellblank 16y agoOn Reddit recently, in an "I am blind, ask me anything" thread, this comment appeared: "Do you see blackness all the time?" "No, I don't know what blackness is; I see the same as you see out of the bottom of your feet".
- quickpost 16y agoWow. What a beautiful answer that perfectly illustrates the point. Thanks.
- jodrellblank 16y agoPossibly too late to be seen now, but I've been wodering about this too; for instance how do you talk about windows? A blind person who has a sense of the size of a room, have they any idea that windows are transparent and have a view over a vast area of cityscape/fields/oceans/length of road/etc? Standing on a hilltop or in a viewing tower, you can see people in the landscape, but too small to see their faces or identify them - still identifiable as people by shape and gait. I often automatically turn to Google images for an idea of what something I'm unfamiliar with "is", having to revert to a dictionary and textual description would feel like a step backwards, and that's a very recent (last 5 years) development.
- maeon3 16y agoNot sure why he wouldn't use this, this seems vastly superior to the system he uses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRgfaUJkdM&feature=player_embedded#at=12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRgfaUJkdM&feature=playe...
- aplusbi 16y agoI don't know about that. While that system is clearly easier to use, from what I've heard about echolocation it provides much more detail than that system. If you look at my other post, I linked to a video of a kid who used echolocation. He could distinguish objects - he walked past two garbage cans in the street, and said "Is that a car? clicks his tongue several times No, it's a garbage can."
- maeon3 16y agoI used the software I linked to above (I'm not blind), you can download it to a laptop, plug in a webcam and earphones. I could tell the difference between a car and a garbage can with no practice at all. Can he click with his tongue and tell if the picture on the wall is a picture a square or a circle? No, this software can enable him to do that. I'd like to get his opinion of this: http://www.seeingwithsound.com/ http://www.seeingwithsound.com/
- aplusbi 16y agoI stand corrected. It's hard to tell from the video.
- davidhollander 16y agoYou wouldn't be able to hear someone walking from behind you, or to your side, or around a corner. This emulates a low refresh rate, very limited field of vision at the cost of reduced hearing. What he's interested in is absolute gains in hearing. I don't think trying to emulate a worse copy of vision fits with his philosophy.
- estel 16y agoPlease please please don't link to pages that open the print dialog :(
- beaumartinez 16y agoIt's probably the only all-in-one-page version of the article. Although I do agree the dialog popping up at the beginning is annoying, it's only one click (or key) to dismiss it; I prefer that to having to click on several "next page" links.
- estel 16y agoThen surely it makes sense to link to the root page which has a (single-click) link to the print page?
- TheSOB88 16y agoOnly if you're horrified of print popups.
- thelastnode 16y agoWhich then opens the print dialog, so actually two :P
- barrkel 16y agoI'd rather have a single page which opened the print dialog than have multiple pages.
- Groxx 16y agoNo more print articles, please. I'm tired of print dialogs popping up, un-asked-for. Use Readability if you don't like the layout. http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-...
- baby 16y agoWhat the ? How is this even possible ? Am I the only one doubting the story ?
- markszcz 16y agoHere is a post to a video to quench your doubting mind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2284276 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2284276 (Direct Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4)
- mbateman 16y agoIt's a pretty well-documented phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation
- tintin 16y agoAmazing that his mind adapted so that he in fact sees (the echo as a flash of light). I don't think this is a fake story since what we see happens in the mind, not in our eyes.
- aplusbi 16y agoHere's a teenager who could do the same thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4 The video is from when he was 14, he died from cancer at 16.
- Torn 16y agoSite with more information: http://www.benunderwood.com/ http://www.benunderwood.com/
- JacobAldridge 16y agoI saw Ben's story on a documentary or news program a few years ago, and it was the first thing I thought of reading this article. I had no idea he had died - a sad note to a series of uplifting life stories.
- modernerd 16y agoDaniel Kish was featured in Derren Brown's 'Misdirection' series. The clip here shows him using echolocation to describe the shape of a car and ride a bike: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcvixIRxs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcvixIRxs 'You might think of it like being in a choir or an orchestra... The world is like a living symphony... This car is kind of like an instrument, except that, instead of making its own sound, it's reflecting sounds I'm making.' Extraordinary.
- moblivu 16y agoIndeed! Unfortunatly we will never be able to practice Echolocation. Imagine if we are able to give him back vision.... What will he be able to do from there !
- StavrosK 16y agoWhy won't we be able to practice echolocation? There's nothing stopping you (apart from the fact that it's not very useful when you can see)...
- moblivu 16y agoWell when you grow up without any vision, your other senses develops at a much faster rate, especially the hearing. Because we grew up with vision, we know what it is to see and our ears will never have the capability to develop the same way.
- Scaevolus 16y agoThe article mentions that he has successfully taught echolocation to someone that lost sight at 14 years old, so you seem to be underestimating the powers of the human brain.
- moblivu 16y agoThen it is a field that we must take advantage of. We are barely using the full capacity of our senses; we're too lazy with our eyes. It's something we should consider in the future, try to develop the human senses.... I'm sure there's a little budget for that in the 3 trillion they spend on military ventures!
- edw519 16y agoKish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity. Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?
- BobbyH 16y agoCan't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet". If he got the K-Sonar approved as a medical device, I think he'd be able to get paid from deep-pocketed insurance companies too. Improving the range (and doing research on inner-ear microphone implants) could be done in later versions (if mainstream blind customers really are interested in playing tennis, which I am skeptical about). If v1 makes people more independent, that's a huge deal already! I bet he could get pretty far just by reallocating his existing $200k/year budget to commercializing the technology, which has the potential to be embraced by a lot more people than the blind people he is introduced to (only 10% of whom even get good at echolocation-through-clicking).
- rbarooah 16y agoPart of it involves surgery - which might be tricky to do incrementally. It also doesn't sound as though he knows much about startup methodology or has the personality or desire to solve the bootstrapping problem. He's seems like a domain expert but not an entrepreneur. I guess that means a lot of blind people will have fewer opportunities.
- VladRussian 16y ago>If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet". There is an easy(cheap, i'd say tens of dollars, see prices for ultrasound parking sensors) implementable "virtual cane" : the pair of laser (like in laser pointer) + receiver + small chip which would re-scale the sensor output to the hand from light speed scale (10m / 300000 m/s = 0.00003s ) to the tactile feedback scale - tenths of a second. The same can be done with ultrasound. The both can be even paired, for precision and cases of say low light (or sound) reflecting surfaces. The main problem i think is that blind people have their hands full just trying to live the life, while non-blind don't care and or passionate enough to cross the threshold into doing something. The guy in the article is just a miraculous exception.
- mconnors 16y agoHe's Daredevil!
- rbarooah 16y agoFor those who don't know - Daredevil is a comic book character who is blind but has trained his other senses to compensate. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Marvel_Comics) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Marvel_Comics) Not an amazing contribution to the thread but relevant and hardly worthy of punishing with downvotes.
- jholman 16y agoFiltering non-contributions with downvotes is part of how Hacker News is supposed to work. Punishment is beside the point.
- peterbotond 16y agomy great grandfather gone blind years beofre i was born. when i was 5, he pointed out the birds by kind in flight and distance, and built all kind of house furniture, home repair. strangely to me, he was able to somehow 'see' the tape measure, maybe just he had a keen sense of measures. a few years later, his sight started coming back he said, then he passed. this is not such a great story, just an example the human brain and personal encouragement can go a long way. hats off to mr kish.
- aneth 16y agoSo incredible. I would love to learn to do this myself - seeing the world with sounds must be so different. If I were a billionaire I'd pay invest that $15M and hope I could learn.
- zalew 16y agoHe's not the only one. Here's a documentary about a boy who uses the same technique http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA I have once seen tests in some popular science tv show. They blindfolded a few people and let them walk in front of a door (or sth like that) to check if they'll stop before they reach it, and somehow they managed to do it. We can use echolocation by nature, we just don't develop this skill.
- PietroPs 16y agoyou see Daniel Kish in the doc as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Px-aPnk4ZU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Px-aPnk4ZU
- stevejohnson 16y agoI really enjoyed this article. I do take issue with a couple of sentences: "We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right. "We hear better than we see." This is an apples-to-monkeys comparison.
- Florin_Andrei 16y agoYes and no. There's something funny going on with front-back perception. Normally it shouldn't be doable, but the external part of the ear is like a direction-dependent frequency filter. When the brain hears a familiar sound, but the spectrum is skewed just like this, it goes "aha, this comes from the front side". If the spectrum is skewed the other way, it goes "this comes from behind". It's not 100% reliable, but it works some times.
- sethg 16y agoAlso: people who depend on behind-the-ear hearing aids do not get the benefit of these echoes, which means that, for example, it’s harder for them to distinguish the voice of someone talking to them from background noise or from echoes off the walls.
- nevinera 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization There's a lot more to it than that, and it's not just something that occasionally works. The outer-ear notch filtering is also used in vertical localization.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- vaporstun 16y ago> "We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right. Put on some headphones and listen to this and tell me you cannot visualize it in 3-D: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuxaOO6PsAw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuxaOO6PsAw This is a binaural recording. More info on these here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording You can hear in multiple dimensions because, as the original article mentions, there is some post-processing in your mind due to the time delay between sounds entering your left ear and sounds entering your right. Just because your ears are aligned on a single axis does not mean that you cannot perceive in multiple axes. No moving of your head is necessary to perceive in more than one dimension.
- JulianMorrison 16y agoThis, along with sign language, are things I as a sighted, hearing person want to learn. (Even with fully operational eyes you can't see in the dark, or in smoke. Even with fully operational ears you can't hold a conversation beyond shouting distance.)
- tc 16y ago"Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster," he writes. "Pain is part of the price of freedom." Pain is part of the price of freedom. That's a truth that could use to be applied more widely.
- Tichy 16y agoI've read such a story about somebody else before (I think it was somebody else - younger, and colored). So it seems the same trick has been invented several times by blind people. Still very cool.
- jhaglund 16y agoI know I've only been thinking about the problem for about an hour, but seems like you could hack together a solution involving a kinect processed to do audio output for a lot less than $15 million. The kinect's range isn't 1000 ft (i think more like 10, tops) but it's a "the future will inevitably upgrade" part. Audio output would be in normal hearing ranges, no surgery required, and could be adaptable to different users.
- whackedspinach 16y agoIs it possible to learn echolocation without being blind? as a kid, my doctors were worried my deteriorating vision would leave me blind, so I learned Braille (that never happened). I wonder if I could have learned this skill with vision (if your auditory senses weren't compensating for loss of sight).
- 6ren 16y agoHigher frequencies, as bats use, give finer resolution. This seems impossible for humans, but since we have cochlear implants, there's no reason they couldn't respond to a shifted audio spectrum. Or, just have an external hearing aid that frequency-shifts the sounds (and cancels out the original), together with a higher-frequency sound source. OTOH, eye implants are probably not that far off. > Just the auditory cortex of a human brain is many times larger than the entire brain of a bat. This really startled me. It seems plausible that we could do as well, with early training etc. Plus, I imagine that some of the higher-order processing of the occipital cortex would also be seconded.
- squasher 16y agoIf you're interested in reading more about pushing the limits of remapping the human brain, check out The Brain That Changes Itself by Doidge. Fascinating.
- danssig 16y ago>Others, like a commenter on the National Federation of the Blind’s listserv, consider him “disgraceful” for promoting behavior such as tongue clicking that could be seen as off-putting and abnormal. Appalling. Forcing people to be cripple because solving it might be "off-putting" or "abnormal" [1]. Blind people being able to do all the things the sighted can do (and more in some cases) is worth hearing a few clicks now and again. [1] I say "solving" because Kish doesn't seem to be at a strict disadvantage. He has disadvantages and he has advantages in areas we don't (e.g. finding the way out of a car park, "seeing" around corners, etc.).