
The blind man who taught himself to see - philk
http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see/print/
======
tc
"Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is
a disaster," he writes. "Pain is part of the price of freedom."

 _Pain is part of the price of freedom._ That's a truth that could use to be
applied more widely.

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edw519
_Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is
feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity._

Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their
investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and
pitching to them?

~~~
BobbyH
Can't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that
offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a
perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would
surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my
sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything
around me within 15 feet".

If he got the K-Sonar approved as a medical device, I think he'd be able to
get paid from deep-pocketed insurance companies too.

Improving the range (and doing research on inner-ear microphone implants)
could be done in later versions (if mainstream blind customers really are
interested in playing tennis, which I am skeptical about). If v1 makes people
more independent, that's a huge deal already!

I bet he could get pretty far just by reallocating his existing $200k/year
budget to commercializing the technology, which has the potential to be
embraced by a lot more people than the blind people he is introduced to (only
10% of whom even get good at echolocation-through-clicking).

~~~
rbarooah
Part of it involves surgery - which might be tricky to do incrementally.

It also doesn't sound as though he knows much about startup methodology or has
the personality or desire to solve the bootstrapping problem. He's seems like
a domain expert but not an entrepreneur.

I guess that means a lot of blind people will have fewer opportunities.

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aplusbi
Here's a teenager who could do the same thing:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4>

The video is from when he was 14, he died from cancer at 16.

~~~
JacobAldridge
I saw Ben's story on a documentary or news program a few years ago, and it was
the first thing I thought of reading this article. I had no idea he had died -
a sad note to a series of uplifting life stories.

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modernerd
Daniel Kish was featured in Derren Brown's 'Misdirection' series. The clip
here shows him using echolocation to describe the shape of a car and ride a
bike: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcvixIRxs>

'You might think of it like being in a choir or an orchestra... The world is
like a living symphony... This car is kind of like an instrument, except that,
instead of making its own sound, it's reflecting sounds I'm making.'

Extraordinary.

~~~
moblivu
Indeed! Unfortunatly we will never be able to practice Echolocation. Imagine
if we are able to give him back vision.... What will he be able to do from
there !

~~~
StavrosK
Why won't we be able to practice echolocation? There's nothing stopping you
(apart from the fact that it's not very useful when you can see)...

~~~
moblivu
Well when you grow up without any vision, your other senses develops at a much
faster rate, especially the hearing. Because we grew up with vision, we know
what it is to see and our ears will never have the capability to develop the
same way.

~~~
Scaevolus
The article mentions that he has successfully taught echolocation to someone
that lost sight at 14 years old, so you seem to be underestimating the powers
of the human brain.

~~~
moblivu
Then it is a field that we must take advantage of. We are barely using the
full capacity of our senses; we're too lazy with our eyes. It's something we
should consider in the future, try to develop the human senses.... I'm sure
there's a little budget for that in the 3 trillion they spend on military
ventures!

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zalew
He's not the only one. Here's a documentary about a boy who uses the same
technique <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA>

I have once seen tests in some popular science tv show. They blindfolded a few
people and let them walk in front of a door (or sth like that) to check if
they'll stop before they reach it, and somehow they managed to do it. We can
use echolocation by nature, we just don't develop this skill.

~~~
PietroPs
you see Daniel Kish in the doc as well: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Px-
aPnk4ZU>

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estel
Please please please don't link to pages that open the print dialog :(

~~~
beaumartinez
It's probably the only all-in-one-page version of the article.

Although I do agree the dialog popping up at the beginning is annoying, it's
only one click (or key) to dismiss it; I prefer that to having to click on
several "next page" links.

~~~
estel
Then surely it makes sense to link to the root page which has a (single-click)
link to the print page?

~~~
thelastnode
Which then opens the print dialog, so actually two :P

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markszcz
"He’s tired of being told that the blind are best served by staying close to
home..."

Kudos to him. It's amazing how people have the ability to reprogram their
bodies in order to break their handicap.

Reminds me of a story "Blind Teen Gamer Obliterates Foes"
<http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2005/07/68333>

------
stevejohnson
I really enjoyed this article. I do take issue with a couple of sentences:

"We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in
one dimension, left-to-right.

"We hear better than we see." This is an apples-to-monkeys comparison.

~~~
Derbasti
We can hear true 3D. There are actually a couple of ways in which we can sense
the direction of sound. One is loudness, which obviously only works for left-
right. This is loudness only in the sense of sound-gets-more-silent-farther-
from-the-source.

Another is the phase difference of the sounds in both ears. Phase difference
comes from the fact that sound arriving at one ear had a longer way to travel
than sound arriving at the other ear. tells a more complete story of direction
than loudness and is very precise.

Thirdly, there is frequency response. Both our head and our ears absorb
different frequencies at different angles. Also, there are some reflections
from our shoulders and chest.

Taken all that together, normal people can detect the origin of sound sources
to about one degree of precision.

But, there is more. Close your eyes and have another person talk while turning
his head in different directions. You can clearly detect the direction he is
talking to. At the same time, you can roughly sense the size and type of the
room you are in. Also, you can do this while being in really noisy
environments (say, a car in traffic with the radio playing and the kids in the
back).

Talking about seeing vs. hearing: The response time of the ear is about 10-50
ms. It usually takes 200-500 ms to make sense of something you see. The human
ear has a frequency resolution of about one Hz (at <500 Hz), a dynamic range
of about 120 dB and a frequency range of about 10 octaves. The eye can only
detect a very small dynamic range in comparison, and about one octave of
wavelengths. But most importantly, the eye can only detect averages of three
distinct, fixed frequency ranges (red, green, blue; red and green overlap
90%). The ear has floating detection windows and uses an arbitrary amount of
different windows at any one time. That is, the ear can detect _any_ spectral
distribution with great precision, while the eye only detects three distinct
spectral windows.

So in a lot of ways, the ear is physically way more precise than the eye. Of
course, signal processing makes all the difference and the amount of signal
processing going on in our acoustical and visual brain centers is just
staggering. There is nothing in the technological world that even comes close
to that.

~~~
jacobolus
The eye ends up taking in a lot of information from every point you look at
though, whereas the ear is always listening in every direction at once.
Because of the kind of processing in the eye and brain, our three types of
cone cells actually end up capturing most of the information encoded in the
different reflectance spectra of the kinds of objects that naturally occur in
the world (most of the variation occurring in typical objects in the
wavelength range we can detect): today with synthetic materials and various
lighting sources metamerism is noticeable in special edge cases, but just
wandering around it usually doesn’t matter too much. After all, a decent
percentage of males get along just fine as dichromats, and many don’t even
realize they’re missing anything until adulthood (because even with two sensor
types there is a lot of variation to pick up).

I think it’s pretty silly to argue that hearing can pick up more detailed
information about the world than vision can: from vision, we can figure out
shape, orientation, distance, texture, gloss, material, lighting, direction
and speed of extremely tiny motion, etc., and we can do it for fine details of
everything we look at, thereby constructing a tremendously detailed model of
our environment without needing to directly touch every part of every thing.
Anyway, both hearing and vision are extremely sophisticated. The two gather
quite dramatically different kinds of information. Neither should be
underestimated.

~~~
Derbasti
Of course, this is completely true. But note that I did not talk about the
amount of information but the precision of information. Also note that every
cone cell is equivalent to one hearing cell in the cochlea, of which there are
plenty, too. (Only in the eye, they are distributed spatially while in the
cochlea, they are distributed by frequency)

But all this is really not as important as the signal processing that makes
sense of it. There are interesting connections between hearing and seeing. If
you watch TV and someone at your side turns his head to you in order to speak,
you will notice and shift your attention to him. You will think that you saw
his head movement in the corner of your eye. But truth is, many people wearing
hearing aids will not notice the same situation, for the simple reason that
you actually did not _see_ his head movement, you _heard_ it.

There are many more examples where things like this happen. What you perceive
is different from what your senses detect. All these intricate combinations of
sensual information are the really interesting part.

Another fun thing about hearing: The human ear can detect very low sound
pressure levels. Actually, it will detect a displacement of the eardrum of
about the diameter of an air molecule. In a way, this is saying that the ear
can detect the impact of individual air molecules on the ear drum (not really
true, but in the ballpark). That is freaking amazing.

------
rokhayakebe
How do you "explain" to someone who was born blind that he is "blind"?

~~~
yuvadam
Beautiful question.

You could also ask if blind people are able to perceive vision in dreams. To
which the answer, I believe, is that they simply cannot, due to the fact that
their brains have no notion of a visual image.

~~~
modernerd
'...dreaming is a gradual cognitive achievement that requires the development
of visual and spatial skills and other forms of imagistic skills as well.'[1]

Those who've never seen, or who were blinded very early, have auditory dreams.
(They dream in sounds.) Those who were blinded after the age of around seven
-- when the ability to form mental images necessary for dreaming develops --
are able to dream in pictures.

[1] <http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/kerr_2004.html>

------
JulianMorrison
This, along with sign language, are things I as a sighted, hearing person want
to learn. (Even with fully operational eyes you can't see in the dark, or in
smoke. Even with fully operational ears you can't hold a conversation beyond
shouting distance.)

------
peterbotond
my great grandfather gone blind years beofre i was born. when i was 5, he
pointed out the birds by kind in flight and distance, and built all kind of
house furniture, home repair. strangely to me, he was able to somehow 'see'
the tape measure, maybe just he had a keen sense of measures. a few years
later, his sight started coming back he said, then he passed. this is not such
a great story, just an example the human brain and personal encouragement can
go a long way. hats off to mr kish.

------
6ren
Higher frequencies, as bats use, give finer resolution. This seems impossible
for humans, but since we have cochlear implants, there's no reason they
couldn't respond to a shifted audio spectrum. Or, just have an external
hearing aid that frequency-shifts the sounds (and cancels out the original),
together with a higher-frequency sound source.

OTOH, eye implants are probably not that far off.

> Just the auditory cortex of a human brain is many times larger than the
> entire brain of a bat.

This really startled me. It seems plausible that we could do as well, with
early training etc. Plus, I imagine that some of the higher-order processing
of the occipital cortex would also be seconded.

~~~
squasher
If you're interested in reading more about pushing the limits of remapping the
human brain, check out The Brain That Changes Itself by Doidge. Fascinating.

------
danssig
>Others, like a commenter on the National Federation of the Blind’s listserv,
consider him “disgraceful” for promoting behavior such as tongue clicking that
could be seen as off-putting and abnormal.

Appalling. Forcing people to be cripple because solving it might be "off-
putting" or "abnormal" [1]. Blind people being able to do all the things the
sighted can do (and more in some cases) is worth hearing a few clicks now and
again.

[1] I say "solving" because Kish doesn't seem to be at a strict disadvantage.
He has disadvantages and he has advantages in areas we don't (e.g. finding the
way out of a car park, "seeing" around corners, etc.).

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jhaglund
I know I've only been thinking about the problem for about an hour, but seems
like you could hack together a solution involving a kinect processed to do
audio output for a lot less than $15 million. The kinect's range isn't 1000 ft
(i think more like 10, tops) but it's a "the future will inevitably upgrade"
part. Audio output would be in normal hearing ranges, no surgery required, and
could be adaptable to different users.

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mconnors
He's Daredevil!

~~~
rbarooah
For those who don't know - Daredevil is a comic book character who is blind
but has trained his other senses to compensate.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Marvel_Comics)>

Not an amazing contribution to the thread but relevant and hardly worthy of
punishing with downvotes.

~~~
jholman
_Filtering_ non-contributions with downvotes is part of how Hacker News is
supposed to work. Punishment is beside the point.

------
moblivu
Pretty amazing. It is quite difficult to understand echolocation since we are
able to see, but it is also difficult for him to understand vision since he
can't. I think that vision is the lazyiest sense we have, it's too easy and
the body have a great potencial to use our senses to the max; we're just not
using it.

------
whackedspinach
Is it possible to learn echolocation without being blind? as a kid, my doctors
were worried my deteriorating vision would leave me blind, so I learned
Braille (that never happened). I wonder if I could have learned this skill
with vision (if your auditory senses weren't compensating for loss of sight).

------
baby
What the ? How is this even possible ? Am I the only one doubting the story ?

~~~
mbateman
It's a pretty well-documented phenomenon.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation>

------
Tichy
I've read such a story about somebody else before (I think it was somebody
else - younger, and colored). So it seems the same trick has been invented
several times by blind people.

Still very cool.

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tintin
Amazing that his mind adapted so that he in fact sees (the echo as a flash of
light). I don't think this is a fake story since what we see happens in the
mind, not in our eyes.

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Groxx
No more print articles, please. I'm tired of print dialogs popping up, un-
asked-for. Use Readability if you don't like the layout.

[http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-
himself-...](http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-
see)

~~~
zck
It was probably done to get the article onto one page, not the five that the
normal article is.

~~~
Johngibb
Incidentally, I think readability attempts to get the whole article onto one
page via js.

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younata
Wow. What an incredibly uplifting story.

~~~
tscrib
Indeed! If only he got more mainstream support, could be expanded to more
people

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maeon3
Not sure why he wouldn't use this, this seems vastly superior to the system he
uses:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRgfaUJkdM&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRgfaUJkdM&feature=player_embedded#at=12)

~~~
aplusbi
I don't know about that. While that system is clearly easier to use, from what
I've heard about echolocation it provides much more detail than that system.

If you look at my other post, I linked to a video of a kid who used
echolocation. He could distinguish objects - he walked past two garbage cans
in the street, and said "Is that a car? _clicks his tongue several times_ No,
it's a garbage can."

~~~
maeon3
I used the software I linked to above (I'm not blind), you can download it to
a laptop, plug in a webcam and earphones. I could tell the difference between
a car and a garbage can with no practice at all. Can he click with his tongue
and tell if the picture on the wall is a picture a square or a circle? No,
this software can enable him to do that.

I'd like to get his opinion of this: <http://www.seeingwithsound.com/>

~~~
aplusbi
I stand corrected. It's hard to tell from the video.

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aneth
So incredible. I would love to learn to do this myself - seeing the world with
sounds must be so different. If I were a billionaire I'd pay invest that $15M
and hope I could learn.

