Ed Yong
speaker
354 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 Sep
Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He is one of several human echolocators.
So he is blind, and he has been blind since very close to his first birthday.
And he navigates through the world with a cane, as many blind people do, but also by making these very loud clicks with his tongue.
So if I try to click with my tongue,
The noise is kind of pathetic and wet and muffled.
His is like much closer to me snapping with my fingers.
It's sharp.
It's loud.
It produces a very strong echo.
He does this as he moves about his neighborhood, and I went on a walk with him, and Daniel is incredibly independent.
The cane helps, of course, but with his echolocation, he can tell when we're walking past a house, a car, a lawn, whether there's a fence next to us.
He can tell a lawn?
The texture of the grass is different from the texture of concrete or texture of pavement.
He can tell when there's a tree, a branch blocking his path.
you know a fence you can tell whether it's like chain link or slatted were you walking with him and testing him no no he's just narrating like you know I'm just walking along he's narrating at some point there's a branch across our path and I duck and I forget to say hey Daniel there's a branch and he gets it like he knows um
The word echolocation was actually defined in a paper that was about bats and humans.
And everyone kind of forgot the human bits.
And a lot of people know that bats can do this.
So what bats are doing is that they are releasing very, very high-pitched ultrasonic calls, too high for us to hear.
They're doing it at often incredible speeds, up to a couple of hundred times a second.
Showing 161–180 of 354 · page 9 of 18
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