Echolocation: Bats, Dolphins, and Ben Underwood, Who Is Blind

Echolocation: Bats, Dolphins, and Ben Underwood, Who Is Blind

"To society he's blind," said Ben's mother, "but that doesn't make him handicapped. He just can't see."

One morning when he was 2, Ben woke up and told his mother, "Mom, I can't see anymore, I can't see anymore." His mother knew he had an incurable retinal cancer, and put his hands on her face. She replied, "Baby, yes, you can see. . . . You can see with your hands." She told him that he could see with his hands and his nose and his ears. She had three other children and could not afford to treat his blindness as a handicap.

So Ben grew up without sight, but at age five learned to click with his tongue about every half second—to echolocate—to ride his bike, shoot hoops, play video games, and throw pillows at his sisters.

Done for popular consumption, most media accounts of Ben are hyped and do not address deeper questions about the brain's ability. Neuroscientists no longer believe the occipital cortex is useless in the blind; rather, it can activate through learned echolocation. It creates images with or without eyes.

Bats send sound signals in rapid bursts at high frequencies. Their sonar can bounce off flying mosquitoes, which the bats swoop on with open mouths. Dolphins find their meals in the same manner. It is called echolocation, using sound to identify objects and their locations. As with vision, the brain processes energy reflected off an object—only as sound rather than light. Echoes can inform Ben as to the position of objects, how big they are, their general shape, and how solid they are. Positioning determines distance and whether it is left or right, high or low, front or back. In shape, Ben tells if it is tall or short and wide or narrow. Ben may recognize a pole because it is tall and narrow. A building is tall and very broad. A pillow is soft and not dense.

By clicking, Ben avoids curbs while riding his bicycle in his Sacramento, California neighborhood. Even though he can't see the hoop, he can sink a basketball through the basket. He plays video games by distinguishing sounds. He is writing a novel, typing it at 60 words per minute on a standard keyboard. He roller blades, plays foosball and skate boards. His eyes are artificial, so they see nothing. "I can hear that wall behind you over there. I can hear right there -- the radio, and the fan," Ben told one reporter.

Ben is not the only blind person who has developed echolocation. Others are Daniel Kish, 40, of Long Beach, California, who leads other bind people on hikes in the wilderness or in mountain biking. "I have mental images that are very rich, very complex,” says Kish. He can describe the awesome beauty of a wilderness scene. James Holman (1786-1857) used the sound of a tapping cane to travel around the world.

In an earlier post, I did a piece on Graham Young, a man who is blind but somehow can see. Young can sense moving objects but doesn't know how he does it. V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, has a plausible explanation for Young's ability.

Though we have explanations for Ben's ability, not nearly enough research has been done on this phenomenon and, despite remarkable progress, the brain itself remains a largely unexplored frontier, an unknown continent. We look out into space and imagine black holes and time warps, but an entire universe also lies in the other direction.

I am left with mystery.  Sadly, this amazing boy died of another cancer after the one that took his eyes.

Mind Shadows      Martin Seligman & Authentic Happiness Against Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Rind

If only you were rich, you'd be happy. Right? Or, if only you were like movie stars Brad Pitt or Cate Blanchett, you'd be happy. Why not? Money and a life of glamor or leisure would be the ticket to happiness--so many people think. This view stems from a popular conception that pleasure is the same as happiness. For that reason, a hedonic calculus is in order, one which seeks pleasure for its own sake while shunning negative feelings. This viewpoint is misguided according to Aristotle, who saw in Eudaimonia, or the Good Life, a means to happiness that is remote from the popular perspective. A contemporary psychologist has applied his own research to Aristotle's philosophy, and has come up with a guide to happiness that is designed for modern people. If life gives you lemons, make lemon peels--so goes one approach. That which is sour can be turned into meaning, which is better than pleasure. More.

Mind Shadows Misconceptions About Happiness (Maybe You'd Really Rather Have A Candy Bar)

Hire An Expert: People Aren't Too Good At Estimating Their Own Feelings

Are you happy? Depressed? Sometimes one, sometimes the other? Do you want to be always happy? Is happiness more important than money?

Tim Wilson, University of Virginia, George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon, and Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman of Princeton have studied emotional and behavioral prediction. They have examined decision-making processes that shape people's sense of well-being.

You may be temporarily happy if you buy a new car, new house, new suit, new shoes. You may get a lift from a job promotion. But it won't last. None of it. Not according to their findings.

This is news? Well, no, it's common sense. Jon Gertner has written a a book titled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. So what did Gilbert write a book about?

He says that your imagination of a happy state is always greater than the happiness you achieve, whatever you do. Your expectation of how you feel is always less than what you experience after you remodel your kitchen or make some money on the stock market.

The same situation applies for unhappiness. You fear a divorce because the implications are just too awful to think about. Yet, should divorce happen, you discover that the setback doesn't last. Suppose somebody dies in the family. Yes, the death is crushing, but that, too, eventually is gotten over.

So the question is, What about decision-making as it shapes our sense of well being? Given what we think we choose, is the choice always for happiness? In short, how do we predict our future feelings? After all, that is what decision-making is based on. Mostly we want to have good future feelings, and avoid bad ones.

So people spend money to buy happiness. Basically, for consumer society, that is it. The economic engine would stop if people ever truly realized the old adage, Money can't buy happiness.

Research through experiments has found that people are not very good at understanding what will improve their well being. It seems that people make bad life choices because they have faulty estimations of their future emotional state. Overall, they are poor judges of future events, good or bad, which prove less intense and more transient than they predicted.

Of course, here the researchers couldn't delve into the epistemology and physiology of decision-making. They simply focused on experiments in observing and questioning people engaged in everyday tasks.

But does anybody really make a decision? Read Daniel Dennett, 15 December, Daniel Wegner, 12 December, and the 8 November article about Benjamin Libet's experiments.

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Mind Shadows      Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Black Swans

Before the discovery of Australia in the 17th Century, Black Swan was a metaphor for something that did not exist. Dragons, incubi, and succubi, were all Black Swans to the Renaissance intellectual. The term became established as a kind of principle for inductive reasoning. Throughout the known world only white swans could be found. This was sufficient empirical evidence to establish that black swans only occurred as creatures of fanciful imaginations. White Swans were predictable. They could be found everywhere, and so the world of inductive reasoning could conform to the prediction.

Then in Australia black swans were discovered. With that discovery, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was posthumously proved right in his admonition to beware fallacies of reason, specifically, "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature."

Of course, we need to believe in White Swans, else our brain frontal lobe would become a circuitry of tension, fear, and anxiety. Certain beliefs are necessary for us to go about our daily affairs and do them effectively. As William James (1842-1910) put it, we will believe; we can't escape belief. The human mind is wired so that it cannot avoid taking a position. (See his The Will To Believe.) In short, we need to believe in predictability and we will believe in it.

Karl Popper (1902-1994) punctured the balloon of science in a certain regard when he used Black Swans to point out that scientific knowledge does not advance solely by inductive reasoning. That is, observation of data does not necessarily lead to generalizations about data so that a theory is formed. Quite simply, if a single researcher finds one black swan, then he can never make a leap to a universal conclusion. All of his research remains falsifiable, that is, disprovable, and only by this means does science advance.

Along comes Nassim Nicholas Taleb with his book, Black Swan: The Impact of The Highly Improbable, in which he develops a theme. Taleb declares that we tend to bet that past events will repeat themselves. His interest is the stock market, and he is a "Quant," a trader sharp in math and interested in the quantitative analysis of markets, by which he has laid aside wealth sufficient to make himself financially independent. Finance, he says, is for Philistines.

Taleb observes that in both the market and world events, real changes have resulted from the Black Swans, the rare and unpredictable. Neither the nation nor the market was ready for September 11, 2001. The world could not have foreseen the consequence of Martin Luther's 95 theses, and Johann Gutenberg's Bible. People today little understand that together, Luther and Gutenberg radically changed history, the one revolting against papal abuses while the other rendered Scripture out of Latin and into common languages. In 1905 an obscure young clerk in a Swiss patent office had world-shattering effect when he published in Annalen der Physik a nineteen page paper on Special Relativity.

Taleb states that "History does not crawl, it jumps." He takes aim at probability based on the bell curve, with most frequent occurrences in the middle. Common associations with the curve are IQ scores. Most of the population finds itself in the middle with less frequent outliers on either end. This kind of predictability he calls "Mediocristan." Instead, he insists that our world is shaped by Black Swans, huge, sometimes violent, swings that he calls "Extremistan."

He does not phrase it this way, but he speaks to the illusion of control. We admire the self-made man whom we regard as having made it to the top by will, ambition, determination, and, most of all, his own free choices. Instead, Taleb insists that all too often what we really admire is luck. He would put it in closely reasoned language, but here it is. Life can be a crap shoot. The dice fell sixes for one guy and for another guy equally capable they came up snake eyes. Historians use intention and design to explain a man's rise to power and influence when in fact he rolled sixes several times in a row.

Taleb has an original mind and an original approach. I must say that I will revisit his book for it offers much to think about. He is not to be brushed aside.

Evolution did not wire my brain's frontal lobe to prepare for Black Swans. Some events happening in the past are likely to happen again; that's all it sees. This seems fitting because of its need for equilibrium, not anxiety and fear. Whatever the neuroscientific explanation for its need, I want happiness. Happiness does not fit into the discourse of Bacon, Popper, or Taleb, but each would agree that it is the one thing to be desired, regardless of the form it takes. Yes, an asteroid may at this very moment be plunging through black, cold space on its way to wipe out humanity, but if I can't do anything about it, why sweat it? I am wired to worry when I should; otherwise, I want things that make me happy. While acknowledging the sometime folly, I'll settle for the probability of White Swans occurring more frequently than Black. As for the Black, as bumper stickers eloquently proclaim, Shit happens.

Milan Kundera and Loren Eiseley: Consciousness and The Scientific Model

Milan Kundera and Loren Eiseley: Consciousness and The Scientific

Model

While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.” Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

Living in an age dominated by science, we have come more and more to believe in an objective, empirical reality and in the goal of reaching a complete understanding of that reality. Part of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or with the idea that we are close to understanding the big bang rests in our desire for completeness.

But we’re fooling ourselves. . . . . We are like Loren Eiseley's moth, blundering from light to light, unable to discern the great play that blazes under the opera tent. The American Scholar

The American Scholar article deals with a viewpoint familiar to this blog; I've argued here in Mind Shadows that despite Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained and other neuro-scientific faith, a wholly satisfactory model for consciousness will never happen.

Eiseley's remark reminds me of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At the end of the novel, Tomas and his wife are about to die. Their truck's brakes will fail on a mountain road. On the last

night of their lives they dance together in a dingy Soviet-era hotel. Tomas, promiscuous, has finally surrendered to her, long suffering and faithful to him. "I have no mission," he says.

They go to bed. The book ends on these sentences: "Up out of the lamp shade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below." Another parabola intersects with their decline into death, and the nocturnal butterfly does not even know it is night.