BRIAN: Most people don't expect a blind person to ride a bike, but I do.
It's almost like a sixth sense.
GLENN: When we were visiting a doctor, they
did all these exams on him and basically had a puzzled look to their face, like,
"There is no way that this individual should be doing this."
BRIAN: It's almost like a superpower.
DR. GOODALE: When I was first made aware of Brian Bushway, I checked him out on YouTube
and I must say I was a bit skeptical, but I was blown away at his abilities.
People are heavily dependent upon vision to conduct their day to day lives.
Could you imagine the world with no signs, no GPS, no screens?
I wasn't always blind.
I was 14 when I was playing hockey and my job was to keep the puck in front of the blue
line and all of a sudden, it'd shoot by me.
My coach is just, "What're you doing?!
Get the puck!
Move to the puck!
Are you blind or something?!" and that's, in fact, what was happening.
The doctors told me that my optic nerves were deteriorating.
It was just sort of this weird fluke and as a doctor turns off the lights,
the lights never came back on.
And I remember leaving the doctor's office and it was in the middle of the afternoon.
I could feel the sun, but I couldn't see the sun and I asked my mom,
"Mom, like, where's the sun?"
MARNIE: One of the most heart wrenching moments for me...as a kid, Brian always had a little change
jar and it said "car" and he'd put quarters, dimes, whatever he had in there and one day
he said to me, I'm never going to need this because I won't be able to drive a car.
I was at a loss and I really did feel very limited.
I couldn't find my way out of my room and how was I then going to figure out ways to navigate the world.
It was a completely overwhelming thought and it threw me into an identity crisis of
where do I fit in life?
What does it mean to be a whole human being?
Nobody really wants to deal with you anymore and so you really feel this tension of exclusion
and it happens because we all think, "if we can't see, we can't do anything."
This is the constant struggle that I find myself, socially, always in, is that people
are underestimating my full capacity of what I can do.
The first steps of getting outside into the world
was being introduced to the white cane.
The cane is great for information up close, but the cane is limiting to what only the cane can touch.
But there was one day when my life changed forever.
I had learned the route to my eighth grade class and I was walking by myself with my
cane and I was just walking down the center of the hallway, but I could tell that there
was a pillar and then an open space and a pillar and open space.
I swear I could see these things and I touched them to confirm what they were.
It was a pillar.
What I was doing was passively echo-locating these objects.
It's human sonar.
[BRIAN CLICKING]
Echo-location is a term that biologists use to refer to the ability that some animals
like bats and dolphins have, to use sounds that they produce themselves to create echoes
bouncing off things in the world around them and to use those echoes what it is out there.
[BRIAN CLICKING]
Echo-location is the human ability to see with sound.
DR. GOODALE: Brian can use echo-location to navigate the world.
He can use it to walk down the street without bumping into parked cars or whatever, but
he can also use it to identify objects.
For example, a bush from a tree.
So he's sensitive to the nature of the echoes that are returning from that surface
and he can also tell, quite remarkably, the size of objects.
[BRIAN CLICKING] I notice this object here and I'm thinking
sort of the size of it seems more broader at the bottom and it sort of gets taller at the top.
Yeah, we have a tree with all these sort of bushes here and you can sort of...sparse objects,
so you can sort of hear through a lot of the stuff too, but [CLICKING] collectively,
here's a sort of bushy area.
You can hear even how... [CLICKING] how the path continues up in that direction.
It was more than just hearing, I was actually imaging the world around me.
DR. GOODALE: When we tested Brian on his ability to detect changes in the position of an object,
he was absolutely astounding.
He could tell if we moved the object only a few inches, something that I never expected
someone who is echo-locating would be able to do.
He doesn't have super hearing or anything of that kind.
He was tested by a clinical audiologist, you know, someone who tests how good your hearing is.
He's actually normal for his age.
What he can do and what is quite amazing is
he can attend to these very tiny echoes that we ignore.
Echo-location changed my life forever.
My world became 3D.
I was absolutely flabbergasted to find out that, indeed, those YouTubes were right on the money.
I had never seen anything like that before.
Brian was quite amazing.
Never in my life could I have imagined that human beings could learn to see with sound,
like bats and dolphins.
Like, if human beings can see with sound, what else is possible?
Echo-location gave me a real connection to my physical environment, which then gave me
greater freedom to my social environment.
The better I was at mobility, the easier it was to make friends and to do things with people.
[BAND STARTS PLAYING
BRIAN: Everybody has something to learn from echo-location
and that is that we all are capable of so much more than we previously thought.
We're now just discovering in humanity that a person who is labeled blind can learn to
image their world acoustically, like, this keeps life kind of fresh.
We are really living in a new era of exploring the question what can blind people see.
I mean, it's sort of a temporary state because now we can actually
teach each our brains to image acoustically.
People often ask me, "Brian, do you wish you could see?"
and my response is, "I already can."