Dr. David Eagleman

You can learn how to see that way.

And again, it's with correlation because you feel something with your fingers.

Maybe you hear something also.

And so you're putting that together and your brain says, oh, okay, I got it.

There's a visual thing out there in the world.

And the really wacky part I'll just mention is that people using the brain port who, let's say, used to have sight and lost it, they will report it is like sight.

They say, I remember seeing, and this is like seeing, even though it's coming through their tongue.

And with the neosensory wristband that we built, you know, I interviewed a guy after he'd been wearing it about six months, and I said, look, when you hear a dog bark, do you feel the buzzing on your wrist?

And then you think, okay, that must be a dog bark.

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.