Brian Borowski has a supersense. Blind from birth, he discovered he could get information about his surroundings by listening to echoes from tongue clicks and finger snaps, bats use a similar technique to echolocate.
When did you learn to echolocate?
Probably when I was about 3 or 4, along with my brother David who鈥檚 a year younger than me and is also blind. Once, when my parents were putting metal stakes into the ground, David and I noticed that when they were banged with a hammer, the echoes bouncing off the house were really strong. We realised we could use that.
Advertisement
Playing games like hide-and-seek in the garden with our sighted brother honed our skills. His idea of hiding from us was standing in the middle of the lawn. At first we couldn鈥檛 find where he was, but as we got better at echolocating, he had to hide behind trees. We soon learned to find him there too.
Did it let you go further afield?
Yes. My brother and I taught ourselves how to ride our bikes when we moved to a farm, aged 13 or 14. We didn鈥檛 just use echolocation, we would use other things as well to keep track of where we were: the slope of the road, the roughness of the road, whether the gravel was loose or well-packed. But we would always be clicking, listening for the weeds and the grass growing at the side of the road, or, when we were coming to our driveway we would listen for the post that had the mailbox on it and we would know: gotta turn in right there.
So you never had any formal training?
No. At my college they thought it wasn鈥檛 a good thing to do. They said blind people have enough trouble fitting into society and you shouldn鈥檛 do anything that causes you to be more different than you already are. But we more or less ignored them. If the teachers really put pressure on us, we just avoided doing it around them and then reverted back to normal behaviour when we were away from them.
Do you still use it as your primary means of getting around?
When I go to a new place there鈥檚 a lot of information to figure out. I listen to all the noises that are going on around me, whether that鈥檚 talking or machine noise, say. Then I attempt to work out the size of the place I鈥檓 in. I might bang my cane or make a noise to hear the sounds that come back. As I鈥檓 walking I listen to changes in things going by on each side of me and for objects in front of me.
The truth is that when you get older your hearing goes down a bit. When I was younger I could get a lot more detail from echolocation. These days I can tell whether objects are large or small but I can鈥檛 necessarily say what they are.
Are you still able to use your bike?
Yes, I still go bike riding and wandering around. Sometimes I go on walks with a really good digital recorder, then later on I play those recordings back and I hear the world exactly as it was outside. I can tell where I鈥檓 walking, how far away the cars are, if there鈥檚 a wooden fence on the left or the right. It鈥檚 like reliving the experience.
I got the idea after listening to a podcast by a blind person about a walk he took. I heard the walls of buildings 2 metres to his right, then you could hear a doorway. He might not even have been hearing them for all I know. But I鈥檓 building up an image of his world as he walks.
Read more: 鈥�Human bat uses echoes and sounds to see the world鈥�
