See What I’m Saying 8 (Photo Caption: Blind mountain biker Daniel Kish uses echolocation to follow trails and avoid large obstacles.) Chapter 1 The Sounds of Silence It’s a beautiful afternoon in the hills of Mission Viejo. A light breeze provides relief from the high sun and cools my already moist face. The sound of birds mixes with the breeze rushing through the oaks. And as the sun warms their needles, the pines give off their familiar scent. “Is everyone ready?” Daniel Kish, our guide, asks. “Remember to stay behind each other, but not too close.” Megan O’Rourke, who is new at this, says, “This is kinda scary. But fun!” “Fun until you crash into me!” Brian Bushway says. We all laugh. As we leave the safety of Bushway’s driveway, we enter the street and hear the plastic pull-ties we’ve connected to our bike frames clicking against our tire spokes. The sound is very much like that made by the baseball cards kids fasten to their bike wheels to make a faux-motorcycle sound. But today this clicking sound has a very adult purpose. “Now, Megan, follow the clicking of my wheels so you stay on the side of the road,” Kish says. We turn a corner and I look up at an imposing, apparently endless, upward slope. I think that I wish I were in better shape. I also think that, right now, I am the least fortunate one of our group. I am, after all, the See What I’m Saying only one who can actually see how much effort we’re about to exert. My companions—Daniel Kish, Brian Bushway, and Megan O’Rourke—are blind. ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ I reach the top of the hill first, while Kish and Bushway stay back to instruct O’Rourke. As the three of them climb the hill and get closer to me, I start to hear sharp intermittent clicks—different from those of the bike wheels. These sharp clicks are emanating from the mouths of Kish and Bushway, who are using them to hear what I can see. They click with their tongues, about once every two seconds, so that they can hear the sounds reflect back from nearby curbs, shrubs, parked cars, and other obstacles. This method of navigation is known as echolocation, and it enables Kish and Bushway to lead these mountain bike excursions. They both click using the side of their tongues, as if coaxing a horse to gallop. And they often change the loudness of these clicks depending on their surroundings. Right now, their clicks sound pretty loud, but they blend nicely with the sounds of the clicking tires and squeaking bikes. Finally we reach the trail head and begin our official mountain bike ride. “Here comes the hard part!” I say to Bushway. “Not for me,” he responds. “I prefer riding around rocks, trees, and shrubs rather than the cars, running dogs, and kids in the streets. Mountain biking is more relaxing for me.” And this seems to be reflected in Bushway’s echolocating, which is now more sporadic than when we were riding on the street. As we ride, I ask Bushway, “So what parts of the trail can you perceive from echolocating?” He responds, “I can hear the sides of the trail where the brush meets the dirt. I can also hear if there are any big rocks or trees in or near the path. All the important stuff about the trail—except maybe the horse droppings. I use another sense for that.” We all laugh. ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ The Sounds of Silence Kish and Bushway have been leading mountain bike trips for about 10 years. Their Team Bat usually includes 3 to 5 students, but they’ve led groups as large as 12. All of the participants are severely visually impaired, and most have little, if any, light sensitivity. Besides giving the students a roaring great time, Kish and Bushway believe that these outings build their confidence. They’ve also been teaching blind students to echolocate, which they feel is one of the most effective means by which they can gain independence. Kish actually conducted scientific research on echolocation for his master’s thesis in 1995. Daniel Kish and Brian Bushway are particularly adept echolocators. Besides mountain biking, they’ve used echolocation to hike, roller skate, skateboard, and play basketball. Along with his cane, echolocation is Kish’s principal way of navigating the world. Kish and Bushway’s echolocation skills have also made them celebrities of sorts, landing them on national news and talk shows; in magazine features; and on the lecture circuit, making instructive and inspirational presentations to numerous organizations. In the media, they are often portrayed as “medical mysteries,” or as possessing a “special gift.” This fact is unfortunate because, while Kish and Bushway’s skills are certainly impressive, human echolocation is neither mysterious nor special. And, as you’ll soon learn, you too can echolocate, and you do it all the time. ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ Daniel Kish was never able to see. At the age of four months, he was diagnosed with retinoblastoma in both eyes. Retinoblastomas are cancerous tumors of the retina. They are potentially fatal, and treatment often requires complete removal of the affected eye. In Kish’s case, one eye was removed when he was 7 months old and the second when he was 13 months. Before then, the blastomas were so large that it is unlikely that he was ever able to visually discriminate anything more than light from dark. After his eyes were removed, Kish’s parents staunchly encouraged his independence. They refused to restrict his activity in any way, despite his potential for bumps and bruises. They also refrained from acting as guides, allowing him to locomote and explore the world on his own. He attributes much of his adult navigation skill, including his See What I’m Saying expertise with echolocation, to his parents’ approach and the confidence it provided him. Kish remembers himself always echolocating. His parents claim that he started clicking even before his eyes were removed and that he later did it to guide his crawling, cruising, and early walking. By the time he was seven, he used echolocation to bike ride and roller skate. Like most kids, he loved riding his bike around the neighborhood. He was able to hear oncoming traffic and pedestrians by listening for their emitted sounds and stayed safely to the side of the street by echolocating to follow the curb and locate parked cars. Perhaps most impressively, he could judge where he was in the neighborhood by echolocating the driveways between the lawns (hearing the difference in textures) and counting them as he rode. These days, his riding skills are astounding. During production of a television segment about Kish, he was asked to ride his bike around a playground basketball court. The resulting videotape shows him easily riding within the boundaries of the concrete court, and deftly circling the poles that hold up the basket and backboard. Despite Kish’s early expertise with echolocation, until his early adulthood he was unaware of how his clicks were helping him. While he had suspected that sound played a role in his mobility skill, he never experienced his awareness of objects as something he heard, but instead something he “sensed” or “felt.” And then in college, he learned about human echolocation in a psychology class. The discovery, which he describes as an “aha” moment, changed his life. After voraciously reading the research literature on human echolocation, he dropped his plan to become a psychotherapist to instead study echolocation and its potential for mobility training. Kish firmly believes that his knowledge of the research literature made him a much better echolocator, which bodes well for improving your own echolocation skills. ... After our mountain bike ride, I asked Daniel Kish how he would describe the experience of being an expert echolocator to a sighted person. He provided a lovely analogy: He often camps in the mountains with both blind and sighted friends. His group enjoys late-night hikes and sometimes a sighted friend will bravely forgo a fl ashlight and let him lead the way. The friend will hold his arm as they walk the trail under the mountain sky and the thick oak canopy that render the path pitchblack. But now and then, the canopy will reveal enough starlight to dimly illuminate the path for a moment. Kish believes that he recognizes these moments by sensing a brief boost in his sighted companion’s confi dence, which then shows him the frequency and duration of these illuminations. Based on this knowledge, Kish believes that his companion is experiencing something like a visual version of echolocation. Expert echolocation, like night hiking under a thick tree canopy, affords dim “glimpses” of the environment that permit identifi cation of major obstacles and establish The Sounds of Silence the direction to head until the next glimpse comes. Of course, Kish has an advantage over the sighted hiker, because by echolocating at will, he can decide when and how often these glimpses occur. ... Daniel Kish is now the president of World Access for the Blind, an association dedicated to helping blind individuals and their sighted friends and family understand the capabilities of the visually impaired. Brian Bushway is also a charter member. A cornerstone of its approach is teaching echolocation for mobility purposes, and educating the general public about its potential. Kish and Bushway travel the world consulting with institutes for the blind and tutoring blind individuals. They have trained over a hundred people to use echolocation with good to excellent success. What makes one person a better echolocator than another? Kish believes that there are no innate differences that predict a student’s success. A student’s age when becoming blind can have a small infl uence on echolocation skill, but it need not. In fact, his best students have ranged from young children with autism to college-aged high achievers to a 65-year-old woman who hasn’t been blind very long. Instead, he believes that a student’s willingness to use echolocation as a primary means of guidance best predicts his or her success. He says, “Students willing to rely on the skill when they’re faced either with a new environment or physically challenging task ultimately fare best with the technique.” Put simply, diligent and varied practice is the best way to become an expert echolocator. Interestingly, Kish’s observations are consistent with science’s recent understanding of how the brain develops a new perceptual skill. Research shows that the perceptual brain shows a surprising degree of adaptability or plasticity. It has long been known that people who lose their sight in The Sounds of Silence 11 childhood will have their brains’ “seeing” regions co-opted by the auditory and tactile systems. But even individuals with adult-onset blindness show a co-opting of the visual brain regions by these systems (albeit to a lesser degree than in blind children). The brain changes its structure with even more subtle short-term experience. As you’ll learn in Chapter 6, tapping a subject’s fi nger repeatedly in the same location for a few hours will reorganize his or her brain to enlarge the area devoted to that fi nger. It’s as if the brain is ready to accommodate even the simplest expertise. Your brain’s plasticity holds tremendous potential for your ability to improve your echolocation skills, and to improve all of the skills presented in the book.