Daredevil does exist--The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See

[Ares]

http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see-20120504

 

Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.

 

The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. "You're going to leave it that far from the curb?" he asks. He's standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb.

 

The second thing Kish does, in his living room a few minutes later, is remove his prosthetic eyeballs. He does this casually, like a person taking off a smudged pair of glasses. The prosthetics are thin convex shells, made of acrylic plastic, with light brown irises. A couple of times a day they need to be cleaned. "They get gummy," he explains. Behind them is mostly scar tissue. He wipes them gently with a white cloth and places them back in.

................

Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas.

 

He knew my car was poorly parked because he produced a brief, sharp click with his tongue. The sound waves he created traveled at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second, bounced off every object around him, and returned to his ears at the same rate, though vastly decreased in volume.

 

But not silent. Kish has trained himself to hear these slight echoes and to interpret their meaning. Standing on his front stoop, he could visualize, with an extraordinary degree of precision, the two pine trees on his front lawn, the curb at the edge of his street, and finally, a bit too far from that curb, my rental car. Kish has given a name to what he does – he calls it "FlashSonar" – but it's more commonly known by its scientific term, echolocation.

Bats, of course, use echolocation. Beluga whales too. Dolphins. And Daniel Kish. He is so accomplished at echolocation that he's able to pedal his mountain bike through streets heavy with traffic and on precipitous dirt trails. He climbs trees. He camps out, by himself, deep in the wilderness. He's lived for weeks at a time in a tiny cabin a two-mile hike from the nearest road. He travels around the globe. He's a skilled cook, an avid swimmer, a fluid dance partner. Essentially, though in a way that is unfamiliar to nearly any other human being, Kish can see.

 

Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see-20120504#ixzz3aVtahQnI

 

[HarveySwick]

 

That's amazing!

 

Thanks for sharing.

[marmat]

Human mind is so amazing. This guy is so many steps ahead of the rest of us

[Point Five]

Very cool!

 

 

[koollectablz]

This guy was on TV some time ago, and while he does indeed use clicks to visualise his surroundings a lot of what that article is professing is very much hyperbole He can walk unaided and avoid buildings etc, but mountain biking, ability to measure distances to within inches etc...

 

Nah, 'fraid not.

 

They had him walking down the street and were amazed he didn't bump into anyone, but hey... You see a weird looking guy walking towards you making very loud audible clicks with his tongue a few times a second, you'd tend to move out of his way too.

 

I think it's one of those situations where what is an astounding feat in itself gets exaggerated to a very large degree and in exaggerating it we actually devalue the original achievement. Which is a pity.

 

Douglas Adams said it best... “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

[silverseeker]

That is very cool...thanks for sharing!