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Humans Can Learn Echolocation in Ten Weeks

And it’s not just people with impaired vision; sighted people can echolocate too

Katrina Paulson
6 min readJan 14, 2025
Photo by Pat Hayden on Unsplash

We’re living through an exceptionally transitional period of history that affects nearly every aspect of life, from cultural and political to technological and scientific. I’m particularly excited about the latter two because we’re finally transitioning from breaking things apart to seeing how they work together. Allow me to explain.

We humans tend to approach knowledge using a reductionist approach or breaking things down into the sum of their parts. The point is to understand the role each part plays as a whole. We do it with everything from machinery and algorithms to learning how to read, but we also reduce and segregate branches of knowledge, our emotions, and even our bodily senses.

Taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing have long been known as our five dominant senses. However, scientists now recognize additional senses, such as balance and proprioception, bringing the total to seven and counting. Now, we’ve reached a point where scientists are learning how our senses overlap to better understand how they work together. In the process, they’ve discovered even more abilities we possess, like echolocation.

Echolocation & Blindness

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Katrina Paulson
Katrina Paulson

Written by Katrina Paulson

I write about recent discoveries that have the power to shift our perspectives. Check it out! --> https://curiousadventure.substack.com

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