There is a basis for the surprising claim that humans can learn a bat’s sensory skill.

Some humans who cope with blindness have learned to click sharply with their tongues and then navigate by listening to the echoes from nearby objects. That’s roughly what naturally near-sighted bats do:

A recent article at Scientific American discusses a new study of the skill published at Cerebral Cortex which aimed at teaching the skill:

The researchers trained 14 sighted and 12 blind people for between two and three hours twice a week over 10 weeks. They started by teaching participants to produce mouth clicks, then trained them on three tasks. The first two involved judging the size or orientation of objects. The third involved navigating virtual mazes, which participants moved through with the help of simulated click-plus-echo sounds tied to their positions.

Both groups improved on all the tasks. “This study adds a significant contribution to a growing body of evidence that this is a trainable, nonexotic skill that’s available to both blind and sighted people,” says Santani Teng, a psychologist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, who studies echolocation and braille.

During brain scans before and after training, participants also performed a task that involved recognizing mazes, with and without click echoes. After training, both groups showed increased auditory cortex activation in response to sound in general, as well as higher gray matter density in auditory areas.

Simon Makin, “Anyone Can Learn Echolocation in Just 10 Weeks—And It Remodels Your Brain” October 24, 2024 The paper is open access.

What this and other studies are showing is that human senses are not entirely fixed. They provide information in proportion to the extent that we pay attention to them. That’s true of the human sense of smell, for example. We tend to ignore it in favor of what we can learn from sight and hearing but, cultivated, it can tell us a lot.

You may also wish to read: Our brains don’t really rewire, neuroscientists caution Professors Tamar Makin (Cambridge) and John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins) say that when the brain adapts to losses, it uses “latent capacities,” not new ones. Makin and Krakauer caution that brain adaptation to overcome a disability is hard work. Perhaps it is driven, not by the brain alone, but by the restless mind.