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10/20/07

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.

10/17/07


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.

10/11/07


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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