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Hang out in the shower and with eyes closed move your head around and try to figure out how far you are from the walls. This is very easy and anyone can get a s

Hang out in the shower and with eyes closed move your head around and try to figure out how far you are from the walls. This is very easy and anyone can get a sense for it in 15m or so. Next, move to an area with reflective surfaces and little soft mass (e.g. a drywalled room without tons of upholstered furniture), walk around a little.bit, and listen for the boundaries with high bandwidth noise present (fans, white noise machines, cars driving by at high speed), or vocalizations like tongue clicking etc., as you walk around. It will become clear. Finally, extrapolate from these experiences. Eating a moderate amount of LSD or some functional equivalent will help a lot, especially at the beginning, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. It helps a lot at the beginning but doesn't add much once one's figured out how to listen to things.

fsckboy 4y ago
>> I wonder how long the training takes. > Hang out in the shower and with eyes closed move your head around and try to figure out how far you are from the walls. This is very easy. not really taking sides here, but given that it takes about 18 years of play and training for boys to fine tune their sensory-neuro-motor eye-hand-everything else coordination (and based on women's gymnastics, maybe slightly less time for girls? probably has more to do with adolescent growth spurts), along the way we pick up echo location like you speak of in the shower. It's subtle, but I imagine it takes a good amount of time/repeated trials to develop, maybe one of those 10,000 hours things. (I realize that book has been debunked, but still)
- xkcd-sucks 4y ago
  Sorry, not for development of anything close to sighted perception in normal adults but more an example of how some degree of non sighted perception is practically achivable. Fwiw my eyes work pretty well and I rely on them for everything, but also learned how to not break my toes in the dark etc. The shower thing is of course trivial though. Presumably people that rely on hearing exclusivelly for spatially oriented perception have a whole lot more nuance and detail on which to comment.
  - wingerlang 4y ago
    > .. but also learned how to not break my toes in the dark With echolocation?
dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
> Eating a moderate amount of LSD or some functional equivalent will help a lot I imagine the hallucinatory effects of LSD outstrip its usefulness in creating neuroplasticity. If I had my eyes closed, even on a moderate dose, I would more than likely experience vivid enough visual and auditory hallucinations that figuring out the environment might not be possible. Although one time on a dose of mushrooms I swear I could hear where people were by their heartbeats. It's unlikely I could actually hear their heart beat from that far away, but I was weirdly aware of where they were and could predict when they would come into the room long before I would normally be able to do so.
- cleanchit 4y ago
  Heartbeats and not footsteps?

fsckboy 4y ago

>> I wonder how long the training takes. > Hang out in the shower and with eyes closed move your head around and try to figure out how far you are from the walls. This is very easy. not really taking sides here, but given that it takes about 18 years of play and training for boys to fine tune their sensory-neuro-motor eye-hand-everything else coordination (and based on women's gymnastics, maybe slightly less time for girls? probably has more to do with adolescent growth spurts), along the way we pick up echo location like you speak of in the shower. It's subtle, but I imagine it takes a good amount of time/repeated trials to develop, maybe one of those 10,000 hours things. (I realize that book has been debunked, but still)

xkcd-sucks 4y ago
Sorry, not for development of anything close to sighted perception in normal adults but more an example of how some degree of non sighted perception is practically achivable. Fwiw my eyes work pretty well and I rely on them for everything, but also learned how to not break my toes in the dark etc. The shower thing is of course trivial though. Presumably people that rely on hearing exclusivelly for spatially oriented perception have a whole lot more nuance and detail on which to comment.
- wingerlang 4y ago
  > .. but also learned how to not break my toes in the dark With echolocation?

dj_mc_merlin 4y ago

> Eating a moderate amount of LSD or some functional equivalent will help a lot I imagine the hallucinatory effects of LSD outstrip its usefulness in creating neuroplasticity. If I had my eyes closed, even on a moderate dose, I would more than likely experience vivid enough visual and auditory hallucinations that figuring out the environment might not be possible. Although one time on a dose of mushrooms I swear I could hear where people were by their heartbeats. It's unlikely I could actually hear their heart beat from that far away, but I was weirdly aware of where they were and could predict when they would come into the room long before I would normally be able to do so.

cleanchit 4y ago
Heartbeats and not footsteps?