You Can Master This Bat and Dolphin 'Skill' in Just 2 and a Half Months of Practice

Research shows that after training, the visual cortex learns new abilities.

Individuals who are blind from a young age can participate in traffic by bicycle and play some sports thanks to echolocation skills. Often, they will make loud clicking noises, then listen to how the sound bounces back after colliding with surrounding objects.

In-depth studies have shown that echolocation experts use the same brain area that processes images to analyze sound. According to the research teams, the visual part of the brain can be rewired to perform new tasks.

Illustration of echolocation skills - (Photo: Thomas Fuchs).

' There has been a preconceived notion that the blind brain is different, that it needs to lose a sense to reach such a level of flexibility ,' said Lore Thaler, a neuroscientist at Durham University who led the new report.

In 2021, Thaler led a research team that came up with an interesting result. The scientific report said that both blind and sighted people can learn echolocation skills after 10 weeks of training.

In a new study published in Cerebral Cortex, she and her colleagues studied how the brain changes after learning this fascinating skill. Once they learn to use echolocation to navigate, the brains of both blind and sighted people use the visual part of the brain to analyze sound.

This finding goes against popular belief, which holds that separate parts of the brain are responsible for different tasks; the five brain regions correspond to the five senses.

Under the scanner, separate parts of the brain responsible for different tasks light up - (Illustration).

In the study, the team trained 14 sighted people and 12 blind people, teaching them echolocation for 2-3 hours a week, over the course of 10 weeks. Initially, the volunteers learned to make sounds with their mouths, then performed three specialized exercises.

The first two tasks involved determining the size or orientation of an object relative to the experimenter's position. The third task required participants to navigate a virtual maze, with the help of an echolocation device.

Over time, the navigation skills of both groups of volunteers improved significantly. Specifically, the auditory cortex became more active after subjects learned the new skill , and more gray matter also accumulated in this area.

Notably, the visual cortex of both groups of volunteers lit up when using echolocation. Thaler suggests that it is possible that the visual cortex not only processes images, but also receives information from other senses to reinforce human spatial awareness.

In the near future, the team will continue this experiment with a larger sample of participants. 'This is a powerful sensory tool for blind individuals,' Ms. Thaler said enthusiastically.