Echolocation

First actual new post on the blog!

One of my minor superpowers is very good directional hearing. When I was in college, I took an improv theater class. At one point, there was a game, where one person was blindfolded, and the instructor took a ball of paper and tossed it into the center of the room. The blindfolded person then had to retrieve the paper ball.

Until I watched other people, I simply didn't understand why this was a game. For me, it was not much harder than it would have been with my eyes open. Locating the paper ball by the sound it made was about as hard as looking to see where it was, then looking away and picking it up. It was a trivial task. Watching other people do it made me realize that was not true for everyone.

Coming off of this, I have also taught myself very basic echolocation. When I am in a dark environment, I will made small ticking sounds. I can use these to identify nearby large obstacles. It's not anything like the detail I would get with sight: something comes into range about a meter out, and if it's below waist height I generally don't perceive it at all. It's basically enough to mostly keep me from bumping into things in the dark. Blind people who use echolocation are much better at it than I am, but it's enough to be useful to me sometimes.

I did learn something interesting about it during the pandemic: it doesn't work at all if I'm wearing a mask. The echo from inside the mask is too disruptive to notice anything else.