Human echolocators 'see' with sound. Here's what that actually looks like.

Illustration of the acoustic pattern of mouth clicks for human echolocation created by a computer model. Human echolocators "see" their worlds through sound, and thanks to a new computer model, you can too. Using math and painstaking experiments, a group from the UK modeled how the sounds from the nuanced mouth clicks of human echolocators travel around a room. Their findings, reported in PLOS Computational Biology, could yield devices that make "smart" radar maps that reveal the physical features of objects in the environment, like their texture or hardness, based off sounds. "One motivation was basic curiosity," said Lore Thaler, a neuroscientist at Durham University. "We know very little about the mouth clicks people make when they echolocate.