TALES FROM THE FIELD
as told to Nicole WetsmanGOOD VIBRATIONSi use echolocation
to “see” the worldDANIEL KISH, PRESIDENT OF
WORLD ACCESS FOR THE BLINDI don’t remember
learning to echo-
locate. When I was
an infant, I had cancer and
had to have my eyes re-
moved. I started clicking my
tongue simply by instinct.
Now I teach my methods to
other blind people—adults,
kids—to help them move
around unassisted and
regain independence.
When I click my tongue,
the sound waves echo
back. The longer the time
delay between the noise
emitted and the return, the
farther away an object is.
My brain operates differ-
ently from that of people
who don’t have this skill, and
I’ve had it scanned by scien-
tists who study this ability.
Their work helps us refine our
teaching methods to help
more people. It also givesthe process more validity.
A lot of what they learned
are things I would have
thought based on my own
practice. For example, re-
searchers found that the
brain’s visual cortex, which
processes incoming infor-
mation from the eyes, plays
a key role in echolocation. As
a blind person learns this skill,
that area (and any connect-
ing regions) changes. It
begins treating sound the
same way it would treat
messages from the eyes.
The noggin takes in data and
then forms it into various
types of usable information
like images or clues about
depth perception.
What we refer to as the
visual system is really more
like the imaging system. For
me, this redefines what it
means to see and be blind.WINTER 2019 • POPSCI.COMto go silent,
sometimes you
need to make
some noise
TUNED OUT
I helped develop Bose’s noise-
cancellation technology, which
works by creating sound with the
opposite waveform of what you’re trying
to block. That means we have to catalog
all sorts of clatter— from the ordinary to
the very odd—in this world.
Whenever I am out and hear a weird
noise, I record it. I have a couple of gigabites
of these on my phone. In our lab, my team
has a container lined with amplifiers and
speakers—called the phunp box—that we
use to play the tones, like the rumbles of
trains and buses. This helps
us make sure the products
we design cancel the clamor.
But unexpected events
happen. Once, a customer
told us that he was wearing
the Quiet Comfort 20s—our
first in-ear noise-canceling
headphones, which debuted
in 2013—on a train in central
Japan. As his car went into a
tunnel, he heard something
bizarre: a combination of a
click, flack, and loud squeak.
Or as he put it: “A bazooka
went off in my ear.”
I was already in Japan for
a work conference, so I rode
through the same spot. In
that location, it just so happens that there
is a very tight gap between the tunnel and
train car. That small space—less than
10 inches—might have forced air between
the headphones and ears, and changed theacoustics in a way that the cancellation
system wasn’t equipped to manage.
Our newer noise-canceling models can
handle more stress, but strange incidents
like this one might always pop up.DAN GAUGER,
DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER FOR
BOSE CORPORATION
as told to Claire Maldarelli100