Ben Underwood – Boy with Sonar Vision

American Ben Underwood had his eyes removed at the age of three because of a retinal cancer. He discovered echolocation at the age of five. He is able to detect the location of objects by making frequent clicking noises with his tongue.

Yet, he plays basketball, football, rides on a bicycle, skateboarding and lives a quite normal life.

He taught himself to use echo location to navigate around the world. With no guide-dogs, he doesn’t even need hands: he uses sound. Ben makes a short click sound that bounces back from objects. Amazingly, his ears pick up the echoes to let him know where the objects are. He’s the only person in the world who sees using nothing but echolocation, like a bat or a dolphin.

What is Echolocation?

Human echolocation is the ability of humans to sense objects in their environment by hearing echoes from those objects.This ability is used by some blind people to navigate within their environment. They actively create sounds, such as by tapping their canes or by making clicking noises with their mouths. Human echolocation is similar in principle to active sonar and to the animal echolocation employed by some animals, including bats and dolphins.

By interpreting the sound waves reflected by nearby objects, a person trained to navigate by echolocation can identify the location and sometimes size of nearby objects, and use this information to steer around obstacles and travel from place to place. However, since humans make sounds with much lower frequencies and slower rates, human echolocation can only picture comparatively much larger objects than other echolocating animals.

Unbelievable huh? I think you’ll also be interested with Daniel Tammet’s Unbelievable Mind