You know, it’s easy to fight crime if you have super-human powers like super strength,
or can fly, or have abilities like... working eyes. But what if you’re blind?
Can you still protect your neighborhood?
Marvel’s Daredevil, now streaming on Netflix, is a new series featuring the
heroic exploits of Matt Murdock who was blinded by some toxic chemical in an accident, and
then gained heightened sensory abilities, which he later trained with and refined. In
the new show, Murdock is like a perfect receiver able to pick up on all the information that
is normally invisible to us. Imagine him as a radio and the world is nothing but chaotic
static. When needed he tunes into very specific things like the smell of a wound -- or he
can tune into twenty “stations” at once to create a larger picture of his surroundings.
But if you wanna be just like the man without fear, you must first make sure that you’re
not always bumping into stuff. In other words, you must learn to echolocate and some humans
actually do it.
First off, how does anything see with sound? Echolocation in animals like bats or dolphins
is basically biologically-based sonar. Or, SOund Navigation And Ranging.
For example bats can pick out millimeter-wide insects in the dark of night by bouncing sound
waves off of them. Animals that echolocate do this, they make sounds and then listen
for those sounds’ echoes to determine where objects are around them in space. How quickly
the echo returns, and how loud it is, lets the animal infer where the object is and its
basic size and shape.
Is this what Daredevil is doing? Well, not technically. The basis for Matt
Murdock’s skills comes from an ability to hone in on more than just radar-like information.
Daredevil can smell and hear and feel more of the world than we can, and it’s the combinations
of all of his senses that let him fight crime. But a real-world Matt Murdock could use some
form of echolocation to pinpoint enemies in space by bouncing soundwaves off of them and
listening for the echoes that return. But here’s the thing about this Daredevil-like
ability...you have it too, you just don’t notice it.
Have you ever tried to get around your house with your eyes closed? Well then you’ve
probably had that unnerving tingle that you are about to bump into something. When scientists
studied this sensation in the 40s and 50s, blind patients referred to this as “facial
vision” because they could feel some sort of pressure on their face associated with
this feeling. What we think was going on is that these blind patients were interpreting
auditory information as in the echoes from their voice and their movements and processing
it as tactile and visual information, the pressure, and feeling that they’re about
to bump into something. This is our hint that any human might be able
to be Daredevil-like.
The first thing to realize is that you have way more than just 5 senses.
For example, close your eyes. No seriously, close your eyes for a second. Now hold your
hand in front of your face. You can kind of tell where it is just by speaking, right?
And just by feeling where it is in front of you. That’s called proprioception, and it’s
another—open your eyes—and it’s another kind of sense that is beyond the five that
we normally think of. We don’t consciously focus on the sense and it more or less operates
in the dark kind of like our rudimentary form of echolocation. To strengthen the sense like
Daredevil did, then you would have to pay more attention to these streams of data that
are coming into your senses, pick out the important ones, and focus on those.
Research has found that the blind people who have actually learned to echolocate don’t have
better hearing than you or I, they just process auditory information in a different way. For
example look at this guy, Daniel Kish. He’s blind and riding a bicycle. He also teaches
others like himself how to echolocate. When we’ve done brain scans on people like
Daniel Kish we’ve found that when they are making clicks and listening for the echoes,
areas of the brain associated with visual and spatial processing are lighting up and
not necessarily just auditory areas of the brain.
What this research tells us is that the brain is plastic enough, it can change enough that
it is able to re-route information to make different sense of the same data. It can bring
the visually impaired closer to a Marvel superhero than anyone thought.
We may not all have the ability to fly or to have heat vision, but in a very real sense
we all have the basic abilities that Daredevil has. With a little bit of re-wiring, the
human brain can do incredible things and we can all be some version of this superhero.
Why? Because Science! [click, click] [sliding down glass]
Want more science? Check out another Marvel video of mine where I explain the science of Tony
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than anyone else, head to Vessel.com/Nerdist. And as always, if you have any comments or questions
hit me up in the comments section below. Thanks!