[CLICKING] MAN: It's a high-pressure-stake game here.

You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation and why I'm walking around blindfolded making weird noises.

Hey, smart people.

Joe here.

So recently, I got to try something that made me feel like I basically had superpowers, and you can do it too at home.

But before we get there, you need to meet my new friend, Molly Burke.

So I met you a couple months ago and immediately became fascinated with this guy.

MOLLY: He's my guide dog, Gallop.

Oh, good boy.

So when I was four years old, I was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease called retinitis pigmentosa.

Slowly over time, I went blind.

I lost the majority of my vision when I was 14, which was in 2008.

Despite the fact that I still look 14, I am now 25.

And I am a blind YouTuber now.

You navigate the world in a really special way that totally blew my mind when we met.

Tell us about it.

When I was around seven or eight years old, I started taking O&M, or Orientation and Mobility training, that included passive echolocation.

I learned how to pay attention to the sound waves that exist already.

We live in a really loud world.

I mean, listen to this.

[CHATTER] We don't usually notice every sound because most of our brains are constantly tuning out what's not important.

There's so much noise out there that we have to... [VOLUME TURNING DOWN] ha ha, very funny.

There's so much noise out there, we have to be able to filter that information out so it doesn't sound like a jumbled mess.

But imagine being able to pick out any one sound and use only that sound to navigate any environment, even one you've never been in before.

Now as a sighted person, this seems impossible and, honestly, like a pretty good way to hurt myself.

But with the help of a teacher in her O&M program, Molly learned how to do it.

MOLLY: So the way she would train me is she would blindfold me.

She would put me on a sidewalk, with my cane, of course.

And I would walk down the sidewalk and she would have me count trees as I walked down the street.

So the best way I can kind of explain it is there's sound and there is a lack of sound, but really a lack of sound still makes noise.

Wow.

We call them sound shadows.

JOE: Sound shadows, whoa.

Am I right?

It's like there's a whole world out there that sighted people aren't even aware of.

And that got me wondering-- Can anyone learn echolocation?

Well, we're about to put my dumb ears to the test.

Echolocation is used by tons of different animals from whales to bats to birds.

Even cute little shrews can do it.

The species that are the best at it use active echolocation, the same way that sonar works on a ship.

Instead of just listening, they first send out a sound, like a click.

These sound waves sweep through the environment, and if they hit something, they bounce back.

By reading these echoes, the brain can actually form a mental map, like Marvel's Daredevil.

Well, I prefer the real Daredevil.

I said the real Daredevil.

Perfection.

JOE: The time between when the sound is made and when it bounces back helps the brain calculate things like distance.

And the quality of the sound bouncing back can even carry information, like an object's texture or its hardness.

So to recap, passive echolocation detects things using sounds already in the environment, while in active echolocation, a special sound is emitted.

MOLLY: So I've always wanted to learn active echolocation, but I've only been trained in passive echolocation.

JOE: Funny you should mention that, Molly, because, well, we have a surprise for her.

Molly, I told you I had a surprise for you.

MOLLY: Yes.

I have a guest here with us.

I have Brian Bushway is walking in with me.

MOLLY: Hello.

BRIAN: Hello, Molly.

JOE: Brian works with a nonprofit called Visioneers, and he is a master echolocator.

Brain uses active echolocation, like all of those other animals we mentioned, and he teaches it too.

And he assured me that, with some practice, anyone who can hear can do this.

BRIAN: Active echolocation is just passive echolocation-- what you've already been using-- at a more enhanced level.

Whether we send the brain patterns of light, which is vision, or patterns of sound, the brain will still construct an image.

JOE: Now speaking of the brain, there's this old idea-- one that a lot of people still believe-- that when you get to some age, your brain freezes, and it's always going to be wired like that forever.

But what we're learning is that the brain is a lot more flexible and adaptable than we thought.

We call this ability to adapt and rewire neuroplasticity.

What does it mean for a brain to be plastic?

Well, it's almost like rearranging-- not physically, but parts of the brain can be reassigned to handle new things or tasks.

Scientists have found that blind people are almost always a little better at echolocating than sighted people.

Their brains had to develop new ways to handle sensory information.

That's exactly what happened to Molly.

BRIAN: Well, if you're already able to walk down the sidewalk and passively detect trees, that means your hearing is super astute.

So now when we teach you this active signal, that's going to bring more clarity to your image.

So the visual analogy is this-- we have, let's say, active echolocation, which we teach through a tongue click.

[CLICKING] Oh, my gosh.

That doesn't sound like a tongue click.

That's such a good tongue click.

We give you control over your environment with the active click.

It allows you to, almost like a screen refresher-- so if you're running down the street or riding a bike down the street, you can click and you can actually hear the back of parked cars or curbs.

In a quiet residential neighborhood, we can ride a bike and we can actively click.

So you're riding a bike as a blind person, which is, like, I would bet you-- Not a tandem bike.

Not a tandem bike.

Of course, not a tandem bike.

JOE HANSON: It blows my mind.

Right, because I had to stop riding bikes when I was eight because I rode into a pole.

And so we had to get a tandem bike after that.

And that was so frustrating for me.

And ever since, that's always one of the things like when people ask me what I miss about being sighted, I always say the things that I miss the most are the things that give you freedom.

It would be really cool to find a way to get that back.

And I have seen, you know, blind people using active echolocation, where they're skateboarding on their own, or they're playing basketball on their own, or they're riding a bike on their own.

And I'm like, that's what I would love to do.

Well, speaking of learning echolocation, I'm hoping Brian can take us through a few things, so we can show people what this education looks like, what these techniques look like, and hopefully, through my dumb sighted head, show people that anybody can do this.

So when we talk about clicking, there's actually two sounds.

There's the click that's made in our mouth, and there's the echo that's reflected off of everything in this room.

You want a good click to be clear, clean, and sharp.

And then you ignore it because you're really paying attention-- To what the feedback is.

Exactly.

JOE: Side note-- getting a good tongue click, it's hard.

[CLICKING] I've been practicing.

[CLICKING] Clicking is what people like Brian use, but really, you can navigate your environment with almost any sound you make.

BRIAN: And for our first demonstration, I'm going to use a shh sound.

And I'm going to put my hands sort of up in like a flat area.

And I'll make that shh sound.

And you'll hear the sound change as it comes in front of me.

[SHUSHING] Should we try it?

Sure, try it.

[SHUSHING] It's so obvious once you do it in a controlled experiment like that.

You guys just clearly understood when something was in front of you versus when something was not.

You could even hear when another person did this.

JOE: Once we had some practice with shushing, we learned how to tell different echoes apart.

Which do you think will be easier to hear at first-- the hollow bowl or the flat panel?

That hollow bowl.

I think it's going to have a pretty distinct sound.

Hollow sounds, like what comes out of the bowl, are easy to pick out because the edges work like a funnel.

It sends the sound waves back towards you.

Just listen to the difference.

[SHUSHING] BRIAN: These are things that we want to note because this hollow bowl will represent entryways.

Most doors are placed in alcoves.

And alcoves create a hollow sound very similar to a bowl.

[CLICKING] Oh, man.

It was like the whole click opened up.

BRIAN: Yeah.

And when you understand how to listen and recognize that, you now know which way to aim a guide dog or a cane into that area.

Right.

BRIAN: When I say, go, I want you to sort of click.

And I want you to recognize where you hear that hollow space on your right or on your left.

Go.

OK. [CLICKING] OK, left.

BRIAN: Correct.

Now, keep clicking.

Aim and try to reach your hand and touch it.

So you're aiming to what you're hearing.

JOE: Oh, no.

OK. OK. Boom.

OK. Wow.

BRIAN: That's amazing for the first time, though.

So that's directive reaching.

That's important.

That's part of how we teach ourselves.

Molly?

Molly's turn.

Oh, goodness.

I'm going to take my blindfold off so I can experience this.

MOLLY: So I'm intrigued to try the clicking because my instinct is so much to not click, but to listen to-- Sure.

--the natural.

JOE: Watching what Molly could do even without clicking was amazing.

She told me things about the room that I would never imagine someone who couldn't see would know about just by the sound it makes.

And I feel like there's stuff behind us.

Like, it's very heavy back there.

Whereas it's like very open in front and to the left.

Like, it's far more open at least than behind us and to the right.

Use that.

Use that to your advantage.

OK. Where Joe didn't have that level of sophistication and understanding already.

Right.

Like, your brain is already adapted.

Come back to it, but you stand there.

JOE: What?

What?

MOLLY: What?

That I just, like, grabbed it immediately?

But I'm not clicking.

I keep forgetting because I'm just passively doing this.

[CLICKING] It's to my right, but like a little in front of me.

BRIAN: OK, I want you to click to where you think-- image where it is, and then directly reach and touch it.

JOE: Oh!

Yes, I did it exactly.

BRIAN: Graduating to the next level.

Here we go.

See, right away within a matter of a couple minutes and a few exercises, you're already noticing powerful information, when something is there and when something isn't.

And I do notice, like, the time I didn't click and grab, I grabbed your hand.

But the time I did click, I punched the middle.

You were more precise.

So like it was-- it was more precise, you're right.

I am already seeing the difference between just passively trying to locate and actively doing it.

Brian describes seeing with sound waves as a kind of fuzzy geometry.

And one place you can really see that fuzzy geometry is in a corner.

BRIAN: And corners have such a unique quality because the sound triangulates inside a corner.

Molly, go ahead and try the "shh" thing first for demonstration purposes.

Like, anytime you're going to have sighted people to explain this, the shh will help everyone.

Shhh.

Oh, my god.

It's so weird.

It's like I have a full image of the half tunnel around me.

BRIAN: Oh, yeah.

It's amazing.

It totally takes the shape.

And the other interesting thing that we're going to talk about is edge detection.

We're going to compare the difference between, what does it sound like to actually sort of face a wall versus the open space of the open door.

And you'll actually hear the external edge of the doorframe.

[SHUSHING] It's right there.

It's right in front of my nose right here.

Yeah.

And you can feel it with your hand.

There it is.

When you feel that, it's almost like the sound goes mute in a way.

Now, studies have shown that, especially for novice echolocators, and I'm definitely a novice echolocator, moving the head around helps us understand the shape of the space around them.

One of the things I realized as we were practicing is how tiring this was.

My brain felt exhausted, as if I'd been studying for three hours or something.

It's a workout for your brain.

BRIAN: One of the great things that we accomplished today is we started activating everyone's perceptual system, getting the brain just curious about more information.

It's easy to imagine echolocation as just listening, but it's more than that.

The human brain wants sensory information, and it is constantly trying to construct a map of our environment, whether or not we're aware of it.

The difference is which type of input different people give their brains.

When scientists put blind echolocators into MRI machines and played recorded echoes back to them, the regions of the brain associated with vision were activated, even though they weren't getting any visual input.

And the parts of the brain that handle motion and movement were turned on during active echolocation, even if the person wasn't moving at all.

The weird part is that we don't really understand how brains rewire like this, but it's another sign of how adaptable the brain is.

So I'd be very intrigued to see how using active echolocation could benefit me to gain more freedom.

When it's very, very crowded, guide dogs can't really do their thing.

Canes can't really do their thing because it's just like hitting a person, hitting a person, hitting a thing.

So often in very, very, very crowded environments, most blind people end up going sighted guide.

Every blind person needs to be able to have access to this.

People like Brian and the rest of the Visioneers team are giving not just blind people, but all of us, a new way to experience the world.

And studies are showing us that our abilities go way beyond what we expect.

This experience changed the way I think about my own brain and about my own ideas of what it's like to be blind.

I've gone through my life thinking my perception of blindness is something missing.

This has shown me that I have been missing and tuning out this other sensory experience that is incredibly rich and can show me different things about my environment that I was just ignoring.

And that's the biggest thing I'll take away from this is it's not something leaving.

It's gaining something new.

I've also been asked the question, you know, Brian, if you could, like, see again, what would that be like?

Would you want to?

The experiences that I have learned from quote unquote, "the vision loss" has actually taught me so much more about life in a human capacity is I've had the great fortune of actually conquering one of man's greatest fears-- the fear of darkness.

The fact that we all could image acoustically really challenges that whole notion.

Many times, sighted people, oh, if you can't see the flashing lights that hypnotize, it's a loss.

Well, I say, you sighted people have not developed your brain to actually understand the world and beauty of acoustic images.

Right, so they're also missing out on something.

Yes.

Right, which is why I feel like it levels the playing field.

It does.

Brian, thank you so much for letting us experience this.

My brain's tired, but in, like, the best way possible.

Yes.

Molly, thank you so much for experiencing this with me and with us.

This was amazing.

Guys, stay curious.

And I'm going to keep practicing.