One last look at Perception (for now;)
Blog vol 6.8. One last look at Perception (for now;)
I have really enjoyed the book, An Immense World, so one more blog.
I wrote about the chapters on light and colour. This time I am doing a flyover, a look at the forest so to speak. The author, Dr. Yong, points out that all the Umwelts (sensory bubbles) do not work separately but in concert. To write a book with chapters, and to categorize so we understand, we separate things that actually work together and can only work together.
For example, a dog has really good night vision (and some blue/yellow colour vision) and at the same time has a very sensitive sense of smell; or an elephant can trumpet in the infrasound range and communicate over long distances, has an excellent sense of smell and a separate vomero-nasal organ for pheromones, AND has a very sensitive, tactile trunk, AND has an incredible memory to bring all this information together, whew!
One area we haven’t touched on is the sense of echolocation. Bats are the obvious example of this. There is so much that has to happen for a bat to execute the capture of a moth, for instance; it blows my mind. Figuring out background, location, movement, filtering other echoes, dealing with the Doppler effect, and doing this all at high speed is mindboggling. (Varying echo frequency at different times, having directionally sensitive receptors, approaching a target at the right angle, using very short echoes, then having a sensitive nervous system that can speedily process all this).
When it comes to superheroes, I have always been a DC guy, with Superman and Flash at the top. That said, I find Batman lame and now I know why. The coolest thing about a bat is this skill of echolocation. Batman should be able to echolocate, and this is where I say Marvel has an upper hand. Give me a superhero like Daredevil who can echolocate, cool ability. The DC writers are going to have to put that skill in for their next origin story.
Did you know that human beings can actually echolocate? It is rare, but there have been people who are totally blind, especially from a young age, who have learned this skill. One such person, Daniel Kish, has learned to produce clicks with his mouth that are sharper, crisper, and much louder than what you and I can produce. Born with eye cancer which spread to both eyes, he learnt to click early on. Of course he does not just use clicks to get around, he has a mobility cane that he uses to receive tactile information along the ground. The echo he receives back will tell him about soft or hard surfaces, not as much about borders but more about densities and textures. Unlike Daredevil who sees white concentric lines on a black background to delineate objects, Kish sees more variations in the “colour” of echoes. Really interesting.
Research has been done on people like Kish using brain scanners, which show that areas of the “visual” cortex are highly active when hearing echoes. His brain has learnt to organize the information from the echoes to help build a spatial map of his surroundings. Fascinating. Now, do not throw away your cane and just take up echoing. It is an adjunct process, which complements the tactile information of a cane, and not everyone can do it. Just like Dr. Yong is pointing out, we have many sensory bubbles that work together, with the visual bubble still being first in our world.
This is all wonderful food for thought, hopefully helping us to see how important our own sense of vision is, and helping us to see the very different worlds of creatures (and other people, too).
‘til next week,
The good doctor
