Humans Navigating Like Bats, Aural Rehabilitation Take Two
Posted in Hearing on December 8, 2009
I just read a fascinating article about a team of Spanish researchers who are investigating the ability of humans to develop echolocation skills like bats and dolphins by recognizing the echoes of oral clicks. The application will be to aid navigation for vision-impaired persons. They found humans are able to learn to identify that something is in their path within the first two weeks with only two hours a day spent learning. Another two weeks they could tell the difference between trees and other obstacles.
Last time I blogged about the Auditory Rehabilitation program that we offer. This article shows how little time is needed to completely learn an auditory skill that is not typical of humans. Imagine how much easier it would be to learn to re-recognize speech sounds and develop auditory memories with just a little time each day for six weeks working on research proven skills to aid in listening.
Anyways, I thought it was a neat research article showing how plastic our brain is when it comes to learning new auditory skills. The research is Rojas, Hermosilla, Espl and Montero: Physical Analysis of Several Organic Signals for Human Echolocation: Oral Vacuum Pulses. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 2009;95 (2): 325-330.
Fondly,
Michelle