Dr. David Eagleman

He said, no, no, I hear the dog bark out there.

Which sounds crazy, but obviously that's the same crazy thing happening with our ears.

You know, we've got this whole mechanism going on that we're very used to.

And so we say, oh, of course the dog is out there.

But in fact, it's all happening in here in the darkness of the skull.

Exactly.

In fact, the term was coined in 1930 in a science paper this gentleman wrote called Echolocation in Bats and Blind Men.

And blind people, since almost 100 years now, can do this thing where they use clicks of their tongue or the tap of their cane or any kind of sound that they make, and they listen very carefully for what's bouncing back to them, and they can echolocate.

It also turns out that seeing people can echolocate if it is relevant to them.

You know, if you really want to put the effort into it, you can learn how to do it.

Again, this just points to the plasticity of the brain, how good it is at doing this.

Some years ago, I suggested this Mr. Potato Head theory about thinking about the brain, which is whatever senses you plug in to a brain, it'll figure out what to do with that information.

And so when we look across the animal kingdom, we find all kinds of very weird stuff.

Not only, you know, eagle eyes and so on, but we find...

You know, many animals, like let's say snakes, they pick up on infrared range of vision, which is invisible to us.

You've got lots of fish that pick up on perturbations in electrical fields.

They have electroreception.

You have this animal called the star-nosed mole, which has this nose with 22 fingers on it and it feels its way through these tunnels with like these 22 fingers.

It's a weird thing.

Lots of birds and animals and birds and cows and insects have –